FIRE statement on President Trump's repeated threats against the media

“Grasping at straws.”

That’s how a federal court described President Trump’s now-dismissed defamation lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal over a story about Trump allegedly signing a birthday book for Jeffrey Epstein.

The court’s decision shows the First Amendment working. But the president’s broader campaign against press freedom continues. A day after his lawsuit was dismissed, he said The New York Times should be prosecuted for including what turned out to be fabricated polls from a third party in its polling page.

These types of statements from the president have become commonplace. But we shouldn’t get used to them. It might be tempting to write them off as empty threats. But the administration has already made extraordinary attacks on press freedom, from banning disfavored outlets from the White House grounds to the FCC’s relentless pressure on networks that air unfavorable coverage. What the administration can’t seem to understand is that the answer to purportedly false or biased reporting is more speech, not government censorship.

And even if certain censorship threats seem unlikely to materialize, it’s impossible to underestimate the danger of the leader of the free world normalizing hostility to freedom of speech and freedom of the press. The president's rhetoric influences what many Americans understand to be legitimate exercises of government power. Perhaps no one person has more power to shift or expand the Overton Window — to turn deeply illiberal ideas like prosecuting the press for "fake news" into ordinary political positions by repeating them over and over. And once that happens, we're much closer to it becoming reality.