President Trump seldom hesitates to criticize companies he thinks are violating his constitutional free speech rights or those of his supporters.
But by calling for a boycott of AT&T over unfavorable news coverage by its CNN subsidiary, the chief executive risks running afoul of the First Amendment himself, free-speech advocates say.
“It starts getting into some dangerous territory when the president wants an American business punished because they own or invested in a news organization that accurately reports on him,” said Jordan Libowitz, spokesman for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a government watchdog group. “It borders on First Amendment issues. This is not how things are done in a democracy.”
While lawmakers and attorneys have pointed out frequently that the Constitution doesn’t require businesses such as Twitter and Facebook, which Trump has accused of censoring conservative speech, to provide a platform for everyone, the president is in an entirely different category.
Since Trump holds a government post created by the Constitution, his Monday tweet to 60 million followers suggesting that if people stopped “using or subscribing to @ATT, they would be forced to make big changes at @CNN,” suggests state interference with a free press, something America’s founding document prohibits.
The tweet arrived during the first day of a heavily promoted five-day trip to Europe, in part to commemorate the 75th anniversary of D-Day, the start of the Allied effort to free France from Nazi occupation during World War II.
Hours after arriving in London, the president took to his preferred social media platform to lambast CNN, which he described as the “primary source of news available from the U.S.” and derided as “very bad for U.S.”
While hardly the first tweets in which Trump has maligned CNN, his suggested response held darker overtones for some observers.
“The president’s ill-informed proposal that consumers boycott a major U.S. corporation because of news coverage that he finds unfavorable makes plain the self-serving, insidious nature of his attacks on the media and his total disregard for the principle of press freedom,” PEN America, an organization that advocates for free expression, said in a statement. “The president is free to voice his opinion, but efforts to retaliate against news coverage he dislikes strike at the heart of our constitutional rights.”
The White House declined to comment.
CNN is part of WarnerMedia, formerly known as Time Warner, which was renamed after AT&T took ownership of the telecom giant. The acquisition was announced in October 2016, but the Justice Department sued to block the deal over antitrust issues.
Months before the lawsuit, Trump reportedly pressured Gary Cohn, then director of the National Economic Council, to urge the agency to block the $85 billion transaction. But the Trump administration ultimately lost a protracted legal battle, and after the federal appeals court in Washington ruled in favor of the merger in February, it opted not to appeal further.
“The job of the president is to advance American interests, not to use the bully pulpit against Americans who are in some ways critical of him,” Libowitz said.
Trump, however, has wielded both his platform as a presidential candidate and now as the occupant of the Oval Office to urge protests of companies whose actions he disapproves of.
In 2016, he called for a boycott of Apple over its refusal to unlock an iPhone belonging to one of the attackers in a mass shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., and in 2018, he urged Americans to stop buying Harley-Davidson motorcycles after the company said it would move some manufacturing overseas in response to his tariffs.
Such behavior with the media could have a chilling effect, particularly among outlets critical of the Trump administration, said Scott Amey, general counsel of the Project on Government Oversight, a watchdog group.
“It’s unprecedented territory for the president to be in and one that may not be in the best interest of the constitutional protections, both in freedom of speech and freedom of the press,” he said.
