Journalists are used to being attacked and insulted by Donald Trump, but most were probably still caught off guard by the launch of a White House webpage on Friday, devoted to identifying the Trump administration’s “Media Offender of the Week”.
Under the slogan “Misleading. Biased. Exposed” it is an official government page that names and shames media outlets that supposedly portrayed Trump misleadingly, complete with drop-down lists of journalists.
Yet, while Trump is often seen as a unique US President, with his rhetorical style and his disdain for US democracy, when it comes to attacks on journalism, he is a follower, not a leader.
In creating an official site to name and shame journalists, Trump is aping Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Mexico’s president from 2018 to 2024. In 2021, as part of Obrador’s hours-long, livestreamed daily press conferences, his press spokesperson, Ana Elizabeth García Vilchis, would expose journalists deemed to have covered the government in a misleading fashion.
According to Obrador, the purpose was not to slander anyone but to “consolidate democracy”, make citizens less susceptible to manipulation and ensure “the truth always prevails”.
Trump’s efforts follow his decade-long assault on the press, covering everything from political rallies to Truth Social posts and the White House briefing room.
Donald Trump speaks to the press aboard Air Force One while travelling to South Korea on 29 October, 2025 (Photo: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP)Is it a bad thing for a government to fact-check the media? Perhaps not, but there are notable problems with it. First, governments are often not reliable truth-tellers because of their own interests, and second, using official government communications to condemn journalists raises the risk of violence against them.
This is even more of a problem if regimes show a demonstrable disregard for facts and overt authoritarian tendencies. A government fact-checker risks becoming a vehicle to rebut criticism of the leader rather than to make citizens better informed.
Ethiopia’s government set up its own fact-checker in 2020, at the start of the Tigray civil war, and mainly used it to debunk criticism of prime minister Abiy Ahmed and to issue pro-war propaganda. The White House website used to be for informing citizens about what the US government was doing – not for taking down a president’s critics.
When it comes to potential violence, in December 2022, Obrador spoke about news anchor Ciro Gomez Leyva, suggesting that by listening to Leyva “you can even get a tumour in your brain”. The following day, Leyva survived an assassination attempt, saved by bulletproof glass as gunmen shot at his car.
Other Mexican journalists have been physically attacked after being named in press conferences.
Trump has demonstrated a similar indifference to violence against journalists, notably pardoning 12 people convicted of violence against journalists during the 6 January Capitol riots.
At the same time, Trump’s threat to sue the BBC still hangs in the air, but his motives are misunderstood. Trump’s concern is not that he has been edited misleadingly. Like Obrador and India’s Narendra Modi, Trump rejects the idea that he should face editorial scrutiny at all.
Supporters of Donald Trump hold signs at a rally in October 2020 (Photo: Ben Hasty/MediaNews Group/Getty)These leaders dismiss the democratic ideal of the press as a “Fourth Estate” – one that holds power to account and mediates what they say. Who needs the press when they can talk to the people directly? Trump can do this via Truth Social, Obrador could do this via his livestreams, and Modi via his radio programme Mann Ki Baat.
Technology has given these leaders a direct channel to the masses, and they use these channels like televangelists who see their ‘truth’ as beyond question.
Lamar Smith, a Republic congressman from Texas, said in 2016, shortly after Trump began his first term in office, that it is “better to get your news directly from the President… In fact, it might be the only way to get the unvarnished truth”.
The new White House webpage is not an innocent government fact-checking site to hold the news media to account. It is what leaders do when they want to silence their critics so that their narratives dominate.
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“When governments control access to information and are able to define the narrative and dictate what we know, we lose more than our freedoms,” Hong Kong pro-democracy activist Nathan Law wrote in his 2021 book, Freedom.
If we consent to this – and many in the world currently do – we give leaders enormous power to promote whatever version of reality they want. It is tempting to agree, for leaders that we like, but if we do, we are granting those leaders the power to dictate reality.
Dr Thomas Colley’s book, Dictating Reality: The Global Battle to Control the News, co-authored with Martin Moore, is out now.
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