Ladder
Ladder: funding and ownership pressure, in North America
A government uses money, or its power over owners, instead of acting against reporters directly. Examples are cutting the funds of public broadcasters, forcing the sale of an outlet, steering state advertising away from some publications, and using licence reviews or merger approvals to press an outlet's owners.
The number of entries reflects the depth of this record, not the severity of a country's conduct.
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2Pressure
Using state power short of prosecution to change coverage: regulatory threats, licence reviews, funding cuts, lawsuits by officials, official "fake news" or "foreign agent" labels, advertising pressure, tax audits.
Louisiana taxed the gross receipts that businesses earned from advertising in newspapers with circulations above 20,000 copies a week, a threshold that caught the state's largest papers.
Reversed 10 February 1936 · 2 sources · Full entry
White House Counsel John Dean wrote a memo on how to use federal agencies against President Nixon's political opponents, and the resulting list of more than 200 names included journalists such as CBS News correspondent Daniel Schorr.
Reversed 27 June 1973 · 2 sources · Full entry
Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr reopened complaints alleging CBS and NBC distorted the news, demanding CBS turn over the full tape and transcript of a 60 Minutes interview and later accusing NBC's parent Comcast of misleading coverage of an immigration case.
Ongoing · 1 source · Full entry
60 Minutes executive producer Bill Owens resigned, saying corporate owner Paramount had begun supervising the program's content in new ways while it faced President Trump's lawsuit over a Harris interview and pursued a sale requiring federal approval; the program publicly said on air that it had lo…
Sustained 22 April 2025 · 1 source · Full entry
On May 1, 2025, the president of the United States, Donald Trump, signed Executive Order 14290, "Ending Taxpayer Subsidization of Biased Media."
Unknown · 3 sources · Full entry
At President Trump's request, Congress passed a rescissions package clawing back roughly $1.1 billion already appropriated to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, eliminating federal funding for NPR, PBS and their member stations.
Sustained 24 July 2025 · 2 sources · Full entry
The Federal Communications Commission approved Paramount's sale to Skydance Media after Skydance agreed to install an ombudsman to review complaints of bias at CBS News for two years and pledged to end diversity, equity and inclusion programs, over the objection of the commission's sole Democratic…
Sustained 24 July 2025 · 1 source · Full entry
On September 17, 2025, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the United States regulator of broadcasting, Brendan Carr, said broadcasters could "do this the easy way or the hard way" over remarks by the television host Jimmy Kimmel, and warned of "additional work for the FCC…
Reversed 23 September 2025 · 2 sources · Full entry
A bipartisan group of former Federal Communications Commission chairs, commissioners and the Radio Television Digital News Association petitioned a federal appeals court to force the FCC to act on a long-pending request to rescind its decades-old 'news distortion' policy after Chair Brendan Carr re…
Ongoing 28 April 2026 · 1 source · Full entry
Between February and April 2026, the government of El Salvador, headed by the president, Nayib Bukele, placed "preventative annotations" on a bank account and real estate belonging to two partners of Trípode S.A. de C.V., the parent company of the investigative news outlet El Faro, according to the…
Sustained 8 May 2026 · 3 sources · Full entry
4Silence
Removing outlets or channels from the public sphere: closures, licence withdrawals, forced sales, blocking and shutdowns, prior restraint, nationalisation.
Beginning on March 15, 2025, the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), the United States federal agency that oversees the government's international broadcasters, placed most of its staff on paid administrative leave and moved to shut down the operations of Voice of America (VOA), the United States…
Ongoing 28 March 2025 · 5 sources · Full entry
All ladders · Funding and ownership pressure: by country and year · The United States chapter