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- [00:01]
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Freedom of the press and the First Amendment is under Attack by the Trump administration. He's using the Federal Communications Commission headed by Brendan Carr, who he handpicked out of Project 2025 in the Heritage Foundation. He wrote a whole chapter about how to use the FCC if the Trump administration ever got into power to go after those media companies that are supposed to be in the First Amendment and the freedom of the press business, but because they're also a business, some of them multi billion dollar businesses, they're worried about their licenses, they're worried about their ability to make money. So many of them are bending the knee to Donald Trump, meaning they're not going to do their job as designed by our founding fathers and our framers to hold the politicians accountable. And by going after them and opening up bogus investigations into media companies and denying them real estate and space in the White House to cover this White House, Donald Trump is putting a chilling effect on the First Amendment and freedom of the press. There's a reason why in a recent ranking, the United States freedom of the press scale is down to number 50 in the world. We're supposed to be the leaders of the free world and our press is under attack. I'm Michael Popak, this is the Midas Touch Network and Legal af. We report fairly, we report with analysis and commentary like no other, especially at the intersection of law and politics. And we won't be silenced, but we will call out what is happening to mainstream media. Brendan Carr is a bootlicker and a sycophant of Donald Trump, and he has been for a long time. He's an apologist for the administration. He had been on the FCC since 2012. And finally, when Donald Trump came back into power, power, boom, they made him the chairperson. And right on cue, he's opened up investigations against pbs, against National Public Radio, Public Broadcasting System, cbs, CBS News, a radio station in San Francisco, and everything else. And those that know Brendan Carr the best, who anonymously commented to media, said that he is having a good old time. He's. He's whooping it up, opening up these investigations that he was having, quote, unquote, the time of his life. You know what, speaking of life and life support, First Amendment, freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and look how Donald Trump is doing it, right? He's not cooking the frog all at once. He's doing it slowly. He's turning up that heat and that pot. First, he denied all major news organizations that had been there for years, New York Times, the National Public Radio, their turf, their offices within the cramped quarters of the White House so they can do proper and fair reporting in real time. He said, no, you're gone. We're gonna put in Breitbart, which is just a reverberation chamber embedded with the Trump administration at the highest levels of MAGA and QAnon. Breitbart got their way in there. And Fox News and the New York Post, which I read for the sports section, but really no other reason, a Murdoch organ. And because they figured out, well, wait a minute, we got rid of all other points of view, except right, right wing. We better put in HuffPo. HuffPo was like, we didn't even ask for office space. So they put HuffPo in. So they cleaned house there. Then, as we know we've been following here, they took the Associated Press, which represents thousands of news organizations who get their news from Associated Press, billions of readers and watchers. They banished them from the key places where Donald Trump makes news, the White House Oval Office and Air Force One. And we know when Donald Trump gets tired around 11 in the morning after a couple of rounds of golf, you know, he starts spouting off crazy crap. And that's where reporters need to be in those places. They had their credentials removed. It's up for a fight with a temporary restraining order in a. In a D.C. court that's not all they've done. They've also opened up these investigations and they're standing in the way of corporate transactions involving these media companies. This was always the problem when big media was bought by big companies who are public companies. They just became another asset, another line on the balance sheet they don't care about. It's not like when the Graham family owned the Washington Post. You know, when Amazon effectively acquired the Amazon, you know, the Washington Post, like it was something like Whole Foods. It became a commodity like Whole Foods. They don't care about the free. Jeff Bezos doesn't care about the freedom of the press. He doesn't care about the First Amendment. He cares about the bottom line. You know, there's a reason the New York Times remains independent because it's owned by one family, the Ox Scholzberger family, and has since the 1800s. If you want to watch properly functioning First Amendment, freedom of the press, watch the New York Times. Yeah, but they have licenses, you know, they have a radio station. They have things that are beholden. And Brendan Carr has already said he's going to stand in the way of cbs, owned by the Paramount Company, owned by the Redstone family, doing a merger with Skydance unless they capitulate.
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And then at the same time, in this kind of corrupt bargain, you got Donald Trump with his own lawsuits personally against CBS News for more than the value of Paramount, the parent company. Cuz they don't like a couple of editing moves made by 60 Minutes in their interview with Kamala Harris. And then he goes after Ann Selzer, a leading pollster who's now basically been put out of business by Donald Trump who retired because she said that Kamala Harris was gonna win Iowa. We know that didn't happen. Didn't affect Donald Trump, didn't impact Donald Trump. He won the election last I looked, much to most of our chagrin. But he sued an Selzer, you know, and this is what he did as a private citizen. But here it's even worse. Before he was suing the Pulitzer Prize board, the Nobel Prize board and all these other things. I didn't get that award. And this guy got the award. And they awarded something to the New York Times that they shouldn't have about a report about my taxes and whatever. Now he's the president and he's using our federal agencies to go after these companies to take away our First Amendment rights, our freedom of the speech, our right to obtain knowledge and information without fear or favor. He's taking that away. And he's using those same agencies to try to extract in an extortionist way money out of these companies to line his personal bank account. All these settlements that you've heard about, Meta, Facebook, all that money, Trump library or to Trump. $40 million. Jeff Bezos, Amazon for the life story of Melania Trump. As if anybody's interested. $40 million paying three or four times more than anybody else would pay. That goes to the Trump family directly. This payment that he's suing over about Kamala Harris, that that's going to go to Trump if there's a payment or to someplace that Trump directs, some charity that Trump directs. We've never seen a criminal president, we've never seen a criminal president act criminally before, where he's directing our taxpayer dollars and our agencies that are supposed to work for us under an oath of office to the Constitution being used to feather his nest. First Amendment freedom of the press is under attack. And then I haven't even talked about the chilling effect of all this. That's a term of art in the area of First Amendment law that means self censorship. You, I don't want to thumbs up that. Sorry, folks, I got to turn off that, that, that, that, that component there. Self censorship where I don't say something, I don't do the next hot take. I stay away from a certain topic because I'm worried about the Trump administration coming after me and Brendan Carr sick and his dogs on me. That's going on as well. And that's very difficult to measure. The story not written, the news analysis and commentary not made, the hot take not uploaded. It's very hard to measure. That's where these outside organizations look at our freedom of the press and they go, that's a name only. That's lip service. And it's gotten worse under Donald Trump. And this is again, the thousand page playbook for Project 2025 is being implemented through people and policies every hour, every day. The Trump administration, almost every one of the more than 50 executive orders that he's passed come out of somewhere in those thousand pages. Brendan Carr, we showed it up here, wrote an entire chapter about how to use the FCC if Trump, you ever get back into office, of course he avoided the part about, about using it to suppress First Amendment speech. Courts are going to have to step in here once again. That's why we need news organizations. Not to capitulate, not to sign checks for the Trump Organization, not to embolden them to take on the next media organization. Don't call it the Gulf of Trump or the Gulf of America. Right? Be independent in your journalism, your analysis and your commentary. Be rigorous, be searing. That's what we do here in the Midas Touch Network and Legal af. And I think that's why you're here and that's why you made Midas touch the number one in the world. YouTube and podcast with legal AF right behind it. Number 30 coming up, coming up the rear there. But I'm talking about, I'm joking, but that, you know, we invented this in our garage five years ago. We're like the garage band that's now playing sold out stadiums. That's all on you. We're humbled by it and we are, and we are proud of it and what you're helping us build here. Because this is your network. So until my next reporting, I'm Michael Popak. In collaboration with the Midas Touch Network, we just launched the Legal AF YouTube channel. Help us build this pro democracy channel where I'll be curating the top stories the intersection of law and Politics. Go to YouTube now and free subscribe @legalafmtn. That's @legalafmtn.
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