The GOP’s plan is called Project 2025 – the new GOP platform -- and it says that even mainstream media outlets are left-wing, anti-American, and biased against conservatives and ordinary Americans. It proposes to change our federal policies and laws in order to limit public journalism and media channels, limit our basic freedom of speech, and censor subjects and access to the Internet -- since technology providers are also deemed elite cultural enemies.

Project 2025 also calls for increasing funding for Christian conservative media outlets while suggesting steps to limit mainstream White House press access. These attacks are part of Project 2025’s embrace of autocracy, in which demonizing the media and silencing critics are early steps to limit press criticism of a GOP president’s agenda and assert control over the public message.

Project 2025 states:

• Media are part of the problem, not the solution: “As in the late 1970s, Americans today experience the failures of political and cultural elites in countless ways: in the job market and in the grocery store checkout lines, on the streets and in our schools, in the media and within our institutions.” (pg. 3).

• The media as contemptuous of everyday, patriotic Americans -- an enemy of “We the people” Project 2025 states: “Progressive elites speak in lofty terms of openness, progress, expertise, cooperation, and globalization. But too often, these terms are just rhetorical Trojan horses concealing their true intention – stripping `we the people’ of our constitutional authority over our country’s future.” (pg. 10).

• The media are anti-conservative, and actively try to put obstacles in the way of conservative leaders: “Most Presidents have had some difficulty obtaining congressional approval of their appointees, but this has worsened recently. After the 2016 election, President Trump faced special hostility from the opposition party and the media in getting his appointees confirmed or even considered by the Senate.” (pg. 81).

• The media are anti-American: “…[W]e need to have people working for USAGM [U.S. Agency for Global Media] who actually believe in America, rather than allowing the agencies to function as anti-American, tax-payer funded entities that parrot our adversaries’ propaganda and talking points…. Currently, the USAGM […] is not fulfilling its mission…These shortfalls are either oriented toward, or directly contribute to, the agency’s media organizations joining the mainstream media’s anti-U.S chorus and denigrating the American story – all in the name of so-called journalistic independence. Indeed, content during the Trump administration was rife with typical mainstream media talking points assailing the President and his staff.” (pg. 245).

• Public media outlets should receive no taxpayer funding because they are anti-American, states the GOP: “Public funding of domestic broadcasts is a mistake…public broadcasting became a liberal forum for public affairs and journalism.” (pg. 245).

• The government should limit access to FM channels for noncommercial public broadcasters and make them to pay license fees: “The president should instruct the FCC to exclude PBS and NPR stations, urges Project 2025: “Stripping public finding would, of course, mean that NPR, PBS, Pacifica Radio, and the other leftist broadcasters would be shorn of the presumption that they act in the public interest…. federal defunding would strip them of their status as noncommercial education (NCE) stations and thus access to FCC’s “left of the dial” lower-end frequency channels that allow for long-distance FM broadcasting. It would force them to pay regulatory fees for NCE television broadcast station licenses for which they are now exempt as NCEs.” (pg. 245).

• “VOA (Voice of America) has lost its formerly good reputation by broadcasting ‘flagrantly political content.’ The USAGM should report to the president and be overseen by the National Security Council,” while the NSC should oversee the VOA or the Office of Global Public Affairs at the Department of State. (pg. 245)

• Mainstream media outlets are not independent but rather are beholden to particular advertisers, and have an unacknowledged conflict of interest/bias due to big pharma money. In 1997, the FDA allowed direct-to-consumer marketing of medications: “Following the 1997 changes, pharma became the largest advertiser for all major media organizations. This buys considerable influence in the newsroom – whether media companies acknowledge this or not – and distorts independent reporting on public health issues.” (pg 460).

• Government agencies pander to media attention: The Department of Justice “has become a Cabinet-level department whose leadership appears to care more about how they are perceived in the next Politico or Washington Post article, or their stature with any number of radical leftist organizations, than they do about justice and advancing the interests of the American people.” (pg. 546).

THAT’S NOT ALL…

One big goal of Project 2025 is to replace 50,000 federal employees with Christian conservative loyalists. GOP loyalists would be in control of communications at all government departments.

It's dangerous for any democracy to limit and censor the range of press opinions. Democracies flourish under true freedom of the press – a Constitutional right threatened by GOP Project 2025.