“Buy it or wreck it!”: What films can teach us about the fight for press freedom in America

For those who believe in democratic ideals, the attacks on democracy in 2025 were deeply disturbing, especially the attempts to chill and capture the free press. As in the first term, the Trump administration has continued to call news critical of them “fake news” and frame the press, as authoritarians have often done, as the “enemy of the people.” To be sure, both mendacious frames are symptoms of democratic backsliding, but Trump 2.0 has shown a ruthless appetite for abusing the power of the executive branch to discipline dissenting news organizations.

Nowhere have the effects of the action against press freedom been more dramatic than the fate of CBS News and the Washington Post under the ownership of Trump-friendly oligarchs. In both cases, a combination of state power and ownership control was used to bring these iconic news organizations to heel. They are cautionary tales: such is the fate of the free press under competitive authoritarian regimes.

The American people, according to the polls, disapprove of the way Trump has been consolidating power. Most polls have his disapproval ratings just under 60%. Americans seem to feel that the anti-democratic actions they are witnessing daily in the media and in their neighborhoods are wrong.

How do American audiences know and feel this? For one, we have an education system that still teaches students about America’s constitutional system. So, people seem to know that checks and balances are important in a democracy. But beyond what we learn as K-12 students, much of our collective feelings about democracy are gleaned from popular culture. Most of the time, films and television narratives place institutions like the free press, the jury system and democratic institutions on the side of the good guys. Heroes battle villains who represent different forces trying to thwart rule by the people, of the people, and for the people. Unless you are “the kind of guy who roots for the bad guy in movies,” like Jimmy the Gent in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas, you are likely to leave such films rooting for democratic institutions and against the forces or villains threatening them.

For over a century, Americans have learned about the importance of the free press from Hollywood films. Some—like All the President’s Men (1976), The Insider (1999), Spotlight (2015) and The Post (2017)—are historical dramas based on the struggles of actual journalists who heroically served the public interest. In each, the heroic journalists triumph over the foes of a free press, overcoming obstacles in their way to expose the truth.

Other movies about the press, like Network (1976), Absence of Malice (1981), Broadcast News (1987), and The Paper (1994), use fictional characters to teach viewers about the forces trying to block the free press from doing its job. The heroes in these stories discover the truth and work to right the wrongs in the system—and we watch and learn from them.

There are two great films about the role of the democratic free press—one fiction and one historical nonfiction—that can help us make sense of the Trump regime’s attacks on democracy: Good Night, and Good Luck (2005) and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939).

Good Night, and Good Luck follows the struggle of CBS News anchor Edward R Murrow and his producer, Fred Friendly, who found themselves on the wrong side of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare. Like reporters today, the See It Now news team was threatened by unethical government representatives with a disdain for the press and a willingness to use the FCC, threats of litigation and all levers of state power at their disposal to blacklist and silence their enemies.

George Clooney, who wrote and directed the film along with playing Friendly, reprised an updated version on Broadway last year that was live-streamed on CNN because of the striking tactical similarities between Trumpism and McCarthyism when it comes to attacking the free press. That the film uses Murrow’s famous “Lights and Wires in a Box” speech to frame the risks of news being captured by commercial interests is reason enough to recommend Good Night, and Good Luck as a news literacy “must-see.” Yet aside from McCarthy, whose actual TV rebuttal to Murrow’s reporting is included in the film, the foes of press freedom are mostly abstract.

Fictional films can personify these abstractions much more effectively, and Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is great to think with about the anti-democratic chill we are experiencing right now.

To be sure, all of Capra’s films champion democratic community and get us to root for it. Having immigrated from Sicily, Capra fell in love with American democracy and the way it allowed everyday people to flourish. These commitments are especially visible in his populist trilogy, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Mr. Smith (1939), and Meet John Doe (1941), all of which place journalists at the center of the drama. In Deeds and Doe, the journalist protagonists must develop and grow for the foes of democracy to be vanquished. From their struggles, we learn about the ways the news system can be corrupted even as we learn its vital social importance for a functioning democracy.

In Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Jimmy Stewart plays a populist scout leader, Jefferson Smith, who publishes a newspaper called Boys’ Stuff. Smith’s journalist father, Clayton, was shot in the back for exposing a corrupt mining syndicate when Jeff was just a kid. Clayton’s memory and sense of democratic virtue guide Jeff after he is appointed to the Senate by a corrupt governor who takes his orders from an anti-democratic oligarch, Jim Taylor. Played by Edward Arnold, who also played an oligarch villain trying to use faux media populism and paramilitary goons to seize political power in Meet John Doe, Taylor has already bought up most of the state’s newspapers to control them and the journalists he sees as problems. Jeff, however, views the press as vital for democracy. Senator Paine, who once fought lost causes with Clayton Smith before making a devil’s bargain with Taylor in exchange for a Senate seat, says it plainly: “Why, you’ve got printer’s ink in your veins, Jeff.”

When Smith arrives at the nation’s capital, he is naïve about realpolitik, graft and corruption. After he learns about the graft scheme Taylor had buried in the deficiency bill, Taylor’s political machine goes to work to protect its special interests. Senator Paine tries to convince Jeff that corruption has always been a part of governance. He pleads with Jeff to get over his ideals about American exceptionalism and stay silent about the corruption, saying, “Don't say a word. Great powers are behind it, and they'll destroy you.”

Taylor tries a different tack, offering Smith the bargain he once offered Paine, the support of his political machine and media power, if he lets the big, beautiful deficiency bill pass without scrutiny:

“If I felt you had the welfare of the state at heart like I do, I’d say you were a man to watch. Now what do you like? If you like politics there’s no reason you can’t go back to the Senate and stay as long as you want to. If you’re smart!”

Smith cannot be seduced, bullied or bribed, so Taylor decides to “smash” him and the democratic virtue he represents. If Jeff is the democratic individual fighting to make good on the egalitarian promise of democracy, Taylor represents the elite organized power of concentrated wealth. And with the media power Taylor commands, it’s not a fair fight.

When Smith stands up to provide a democratic check on oligarch corruption, Taylor’s loyalists smear him with lies. Armed with the advice of his savvy assistant, Clarissa Saunders, Smith stages a filibuster on the Senate floor to “get the world out to the people in my state.” But for the people to rise up when they hear the truth, the free press needs to be able to fulfill its democratic role.

Capra was not naïve about power. He knew that oligarchs like Taylor would use every means at their disposal to aid their schemes. And during Smith’s filibuster, Capra teaches us a lot about how oligarchic power can impact the freedom of the press.

Paine warns Taylor, “if he can raise public opinion against us, if any part of this sticks…”. Taylor brushes him off, boasting, “I’ll make public opinion out there within five hours. I’ve done it all my life. I’ll blacken this punk so…. You leave public opinion to me.”

As Jeff continues to win over the other senators and the Senate gallery with his increasingly soaring oratory about democratic virtue, Taylor’s actions show how media can be captured and the range of information controlled. He lines up all the newspapers and radio stations he and his friends own and feeds them invective and disinformation designed to frame Smith. On the phone with one of his party fixers, he orders:

“I want to keep anything Smith says - or any pro-Smith stuff coming out of Washington- out of all of our newspapers. Do you understand? And out of all the other newspapers in the state. And those broken-down opposition papers, that cockeyed crusading bunch that don’t want to play ball with us…I want you to tie up for 24 hours. Stall their deliveries, push them off the street, I don’t care what you do. And you, defend the machine. Hit this guy….

And Hendricks, get the Hoi Palloi excited. Have them send wires and letters or anything you like...and buy up every minute of every two-bot radio station in the state and keep them spouting against Smith. I don’t care what it costs, pay out.”

In the montage, we witness oligarch multi-media power in action. Taylor’s orders for dealing with dissenting news organizations are explicit: “Buy it or wreck it!” Capra was appalled by what was going on in his native Italy with Mussolini and in Germany with Hitler in the late 1930s. In Mr. Smith, he dramatizes how foes of democracy control the media by showing Taylor’s machine using any lever of power at their disposal to capture and control the news.

What Capra shows us in Mr. Smith bears a striking resemblance to what transpired in 2025. When the newsroom at the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post tried to live up to the words on the masthead -“Democracy dies in darkness” - and shine a light on the Trump administration, the regime started turning the screws to quash critical reporting. To stay in the good graces of Trump’s political machine, Bezos started to wreck the paper, changing executive editors and pushing out Pulitzer Prize winners like Ann Telnaes for her Trump-critical cartoons rather than supporting her First Amendment rights.

Editors who pushed back were shown the door, and about a third of the journalists were let go. Bezos transformed the editorial page into a something that most days looks like a neoconservative think tank reunion . It didn’t matter that he alienated his readership, and the paper lost a third of its subscribers. It wasn’t about money for the fourth-richest man in the world; it was about capturing a news organization and aligning it with the regime to aid and protect his other business interests— Amazon, AWS, Prime, Blue Origin—that might have business before the FCC, the FTC or the DoD. The Washington Post is no longer owned by a champion of press freedom, like Meryl Streep as Katherine Graham in Steven Spielberg’s The Post (2017). Now, it is owned by a regime aligned oligarch with monopoly on his mind.

Similarly, when CBS’s 60 Minutes gave Trump bad press, he called them fake news, frivolously sued the network and then helped another regime-friendly oligarch buy and wreck another American journalistic institution. This time, it was Larry Ellison, the sixth-richest man in the world, whom Trump’s FCC allowed to gobble up CBS despite the obvious threat posed by media concentration to the freedom of the press.

Once captured, Ellison installed Bari Weiss, a pro-Trump polemicist with no experience running a newsroom, to head the news division. She proceeded to wreck what Ellison bought, killing stories that exposed the regime’s corruption and causing many of its talented reporters to leave. Audience trust in CBS News has plummeted, and so have the ratings: down 7% from the time when Weiss was installed and 14% since this time last year.

Like with Bezos and the Washington Post, these losses matter less to Ellison than the political power conferred by oligarch media capture. Any news org that won’t play ball is met with the same Jim Taylor response: “Buy it or wreck it.”

Now, Trump is signaling that he would like the Ellisons to further concentrate their regime-aligned media power—as he did by allowing Ellison’s Oracle to buy TikTok and control the algorithm that dictates what users see—by once again ignoring anti-trust law and FCC ownership limits and granting them permission to execute a hostile takeover of Warner Brothers Discovery, which would allow them to capture and control another legacy news source, CNN.

Thinking with Capra helps us understand that this kind of media consolidation is to be expected from those who see democratic governance as a check on their power. We might call these powerful elites, to quote Jefferson Smith’s namesake, an “artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents.” In the film, Capra certainly seems to agree with Jefferson’s idea that “the artificial aristocracy is a mischievous ingredient in government, and provision should be made to prevent its ascendency.” Democracy should provide a check against oligarchs like Taylor, and Mr. Smith leaves us feeling that the cause is worthy. He warns us that resisting the oligarch capture of the Fourth Estate will be hard. Mr. Smith collapses on the floor of the Senate right before Senator Paine confesses his part in Taylor’s graft scheme. But we end the film inspired to fight the good fight.

So, as we gird ourselves for three more years of brazen attacks on press freedom by the Trump regime and the oligarchs who have utilized Jim Taylor’s “steamroller methods” to wrestle sovereignty away from the people, it’s worth heeding Saunders’ words as she rallies Jeff to keep fighting: “Your friend Mr. Lincoln had his Taylors and Paines. So did every other man who tried to lift his thought up off the ground…You remember what you said about Mr. Lincoln, that he was sitting there waiting for someone to come along? You were right, he was waiting for a man who could tear into the Taylors and Paines and root ‘em out into the open. I think he was waiting for you, Jeff.”

Capra shows us that as long as decent individuals use whatever free news channels remain to shine light on corruption and fight for the kind of democratic community Capra’s films inspire us to want – a society guided by plain, ordinary, everyday kindness and a - a little lookin' out for the other fella – democracy still has a chance.

And remember what Saunders said, “they aren't all Taylors and Paines in Washington. Their kind just throw big shadows, that's all.” –MJ