More than 2,300 members of the Writers Guild of America, including Spike Lee and Adam McKay, have signed an open letter decrying the actions of Donald Trump’s administration that represent “an unprecedented, authoritarian assault” on free speech.
The letter, a combined effort from the WGA East and West branches, cites the US president’s “baseless lawsuits” against news organizations that have “published stories he does not like and leveraged them into payoffs”. It specifically references Paramount’s decision to pay Trump $16m to settle a “meritless lawsuit” about a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris. The letter notes that Trump “retaliated against publications reporting factually on the White House and threatened broadcasters’ licenses”, and has repeatedly called for the cancellation of programs that criticize him.
Additionally, the letter blasts Republicans in Congress who “collaborated” with the Trump administration to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting “in order to silence PBS and NPR”. And it says the FCC, led by Trump-appointed chair Brendan Carr, “openly conditioned its approval of the Skydance-Paramount merger on assurances that CBS would make ‘significant changes’ to the purported ideological viewpoint of its journalism and entertainment programming.
“These are un-American attempts to restrict the kinds of stories and jokes that may be told, to silence criticism and dissent,” the letter reads. “We don’t have a king, we have a president. And the president doesn’t get to pick what’s on television, in movie theaters, on stage, on our bookshelves, or in the news.”
Signees include Tony Gilroy, David Simon, Mike Schur, Ilana Glazer, Lilly Wachowski, Celine Song, Justin Kuritzkes, Desus Nice, Gillian Flynn, John Waters, Liz Meriwether, Kenneth Lonergan, Alfonso Cuarón, Shawn Ryan and many other prominent names in film and television.
The letter, released on Tuesday, calls on elected representatives and industry leaders to “resist this overreach”, as well as their audiences to “fight for a free and democratic future” and “raise their voice”.
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting announced last Friday that it would shut down after 57 years in operation, following the decision by the Republican-controlled House last month to eliminate $1.1bn in CPB funding over two years, part of a $9bn reduction to public media and foreign aid programs.
The corporation, established by Congress in 1967 to ensure educational and cultural programming remained accessible to all Americans, distributed more than $500m annually to PBS, NPR and 1,500 local stations nationwide. Despite the federal grants, stations mostly relied on viewer donations, corporate sponsorships and local government funds to stay afloat.
The Trump administration has also filed a lawsuit against three CPB board members who refused to leave their positions after Trump attempted to remove them.
“This is certainly not the first time that free speech has come under assault in this country, but free speech remains our right because generation after generation of Americans have dedicated themselves to its protection,” the letter concludes. “Now and always, when writers come under attack, our collective power as a union allows us to fight back. This period in American life will not last forever, and when it’s over the world will remember who had the courage to speak out.”
