Darkness Spreads

To many Indians, this story will sound familiar. An old, respected television news network ran afoul of its country’s right-wing government, which responded by criticising and investigating the channel. Officials declared that it was violating the law. They demanded it hand over millions of dollars. At first, the network’s owners were defiant—they declared that the government was infringing on press freedom and promised to continue reporting without fear or favour. But the channel’s leadership quietly started taking steps to mollify top officials. Executives pressured reporters to be less critical. Eventually, the owners sold off the network to oligarchs aligned with the state. Almost immediately, the network pushed out longtime staff, and its new editors reinvented it as a right-wing channel.

This is, of course, the story of NDTV. But it is also very similar to the story of CBS News in the United States. The channel angered Donald Trump with its coverage of his campaign and presidency, leading to an onslaught of threats and legal challenges. In 2025, the network was sold to a pair of Trump’s billionaire allies. It has since pivoted to a much more pro-Trump direction.

CBS is not an outlier. During Trump’s second term, his administration has assaulted US media outlets of all kinds. It has sued newspapers and television channels with reckless abandon and launched federal investigations into broadcasters. It has worked to strip away money from outlets and denied access to independent journalists. It has, in other words, almost perfectly followed the Narendra Modi government’s playbook. That does not mean US journalists are just as captured as their Indian counterparts. The United States still has a collection of large and small national outlets that aggressively report on Trump. However, in the less than two years since he returned to office, major publications and networks have started pulling punches or praising the president. Others have been hollowed out. The United States, then, is more than just following India’s path—it is speedrunning it.

No country has a perfect record on press freedom, but, for most of the last sixty years, the media atmosphere in the United States has been about as good as it gets. The first amendment to the US constitution guarantees freedom of speech and, thanks to several Supreme Court decisions, almost provides journalists with carte blanche to print and say whatever they wish. Journalists, for example, can report information that was obtained illegally as long as they did not commit crimes to get it. They can criticise the influential in extremely harsh terms—and even get facts incorrect—without facing sanctions, since defamation standards for public figures require plaintiffs to prove that the claim in question was not only harmful and false but that whoever uttered it knew that it was inaccurate. As a result, famous Americans rarely sue their critics.