Show notes
Georgetown professor Amy O'Hara discusses the deletions and modifications of massive amounts of data from US federal government websites on orders from President Trump since his second inauguration, 2025-01-20, and how those actions threaten rule of law and broadly shared economic growth for the long term. O'Hara is President of the Association of Public Data Users (APDU), which facilitates collaboration between producers, users, and disseminators of public statistical data to promote responsible and rigorous collection, creation, distribution, preservation, and analysis of federal statistical data. She is interviewed by Radio Active Magazine regular Spencer Graves.
Thousands of US federal government web pages and datasets were deleted. Some have since been restored, many with alterations. The changes primarily affected content related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, gender identity, public health, environment, and social programs.
Major affected agencies included the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which saw over 3,000 pages altered or removed, and the Census Bureau, which removed about 3,000 pages of research materials. While some content was later restored, the modifications represented significant changes to federal government data accessibility and sparked legal challenges from healthcare advocacy groups.
During his first term as president of the United States, 2017–2021, Donald Trump and his administration repeatedly politicized science by pressuring or overriding health and science agencies to change their reporting and recommendations to conform to his policies and public comments.
Censorship like this facilitates image management but make it exceedingly difficult and often impossible to evaluate the actual impact of changes. Leaders may claim they tried to fix a problem. If problem persist, leaders routinely claim that their efforts would have been effective without the sabotage of their designated enemies. Fixing the problems then requires the defeat of said enemies.
To what extent has the massive consolidation of ownership of the media over the past 100 to 150 years contributed to giving President Trump the political support needed to make the dramatic and sweeping changes mentioned above?
Background
One major contributor to the dominant position of the US in the international political economy today may have been the US Postal Service Act of 1792. Under that act, newspapers were delivered up to 100 miles for a penny when first class postage was between 6 and 25 cents. Alexis de Tocqueville, who visited the relatively young United States of America in 1831, wrote, "There is scarcely a hamlet that does not have its own newspaper."1 McChesney and Nichols estimated that these newspaper subsidies were roughly 0.21 percent of national income (Gross Domestic Project, GDP) in 1841.2
At that time, the US probably led the world by far in the number of independent newspaper publishers per capita or per million population. This encouraged literacy and political corruption. Corruption was also limited by the inability of a small number of publishers to dominate political discourse.
That began to change in the 1850s and 1860s with the introduction of high speed rotary presses, which increased the capital required to start a newspaper.3
In 1887 William Randolph Hearst took over management of his father's San Francisco Examiner. His success there gave him an appetite for building a newspaper chain. His 1895 purchase of the New York Morning Journal gave him a second newspaper. By the mid-1920s, he owned 28 newspapers. Consolidation of ownership of the media became easier with the introduction of broadcasting and even easier with the Internet.4 This consolidation seems to be increasing political polarization and violence wor...
Thousands of US federal government web pages and datasets were deleted. Some have since been restored, many with alterations. The changes primarily affected content related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, gender identity, public health, environment, and social programs.
Major affected agencies included the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which saw over 3,000 pages altered or removed, and the Census Bureau, which removed about 3,000 pages of research materials. While some content was later restored, the modifications represented significant changes to federal government data accessibility and sparked legal challenges from healthcare advocacy groups.
During his first term as president of the United States, 2017–2021, Donald Trump and his administration repeatedly politicized science by pressuring or overriding health and science agencies to change their reporting and recommendations to conform to his policies and public comments.
Censorship like this facilitates image management but make it exceedingly difficult and often impossible to evaluate the actual impact of changes. Leaders may claim they tried to fix a problem. If problem persist, leaders routinely claim that their efforts would have been effective without the sabotage of their designated enemies. Fixing the problems then requires the defeat of said enemies.
To what extent has the massive consolidation of ownership of the media over the past 100 to 150 years contributed to giving President Trump the political support needed to make the dramatic and sweeping changes mentioned above?
Background
One major contributor to the dominant position of the US in the international political economy today may have been the US Postal Service Act of 1792. Under that act, newspapers were delivered up to 100 miles for a penny when first class postage was between 6 and 25 cents. Alexis de Tocqueville, who visited the relatively young United States of America in 1831, wrote, "There is scarcely a hamlet that does not have its own newspaper."1 McChesney and Nichols estimated that these newspaper subsidies were roughly 0.21 percent of national income (Gross Domestic Project, GDP) in 1841.2
At that time, the US probably led the world by far in the number of independent newspaper publishers per capita or per million population. This encouraged literacy and political corruption. Corruption was also limited by the inability of a small number of publishers to dominate political discourse.
That began to change in the 1850s and 1860s with the introduction of high speed rotary presses, which increased the capital required to start a newspaper.3
In 1887 William Randolph Hearst took over management of his father's San Francisco Examiner. His success there gave him an appetite for building a newspaper chain. His 1895 purchase of the New York Morning Journal gave him a second newspaper. By the mid-1920s, he owned 28 newspapers. Consolidation of ownership of the media became easier with the introduction of broadcasting and even easier with the Internet.4 This consolidation seems to be increasing political polarization and violence wor...