The Fourth Estate is under threat.

In just a few weeks, the national media will be confronting a U.S. president-elect, Donald Trump, with an extraordinarily aggressive posture toward their institution.

The Fourth Estate is under threat.

In just a few weeks, the national media will be confronting a U.S. president-elect, Donald Trump, with an extraordinarily aggressive posture toward their institution.

During his first term, Trump unleashed his fury on what he called a “rigged media.” Now, Trump has raised the temperature even higher. During the past four years, he has threatened retribution against reporters and filed a legal suit against Disney, accusing one of the corporation’s companies, ABC News, of defamation. Trump also recently sued the Des Moines Register for publishing a poll right before the election that wrongly suggested that Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, was winning there.

What has become most disturbing in recent weeks has to do with news institutions that appear to be trying to avoid rather than challenge Trump’s wrath. Jeff Bezos’s decision before the election to prevent a Washington Post endorsement for Harris was a signal to some observers that owners with multiple business interests would be making preemptive concessions. Disney settled with Trump for $15 million before the case could go to court. While the details behind the decision remain unknown, they do point to an overall mood of trepidation.

This is becoming an important crossroads in the relationship between the U.S. presidency and the press. Over the next four years, the autonomy of the press—and the vitality of the First Amendment—will face a stress test unlike almost anything seen before.

Will owners, editors, and reporters stand their ground, or will they—in the parlance of wrestling—tap out without much of a fight?

We have seen this struggle play out before. During the early 1970s, another president, Richard Nixon, brought his institutional muscle down to bear on the press. In his case, the outcome became a vital moment that ensured, for decades, that news coverage of elected officials remained vigilant and free.

Like Trump and many other presidents, Nixon didn’t think much of the reporters who covered him. For Nixon, members of the media didn’t appreciate what he was trying to do for the country, and he felt that they didn’t respect him as a person.

Much of the criticism toward public opinion emanating from his administration in its first term came from Vice President Spiro Agnew, who—before being forced to resign in 1973 as a result of his own scandal—dismissed the press corps as a “tiny and closed fraternity of privileged men, elected by no one,” who did not “represent the views of America.” The “big-city liberal media,” Agnew said, was “intellectually dishonest.”

Whereas Agnew’s rhetoric was blistering, Nixon’s actions were downright dangerous. Nixon maintained an “enemies list” that he sent to White House counsel John Dean, comprised of the names of those that Nixon wanted to be targeted by the executive branch. The list included many figures, including journalists such as CBS’s Daniel Schorr and Mary McGrory of the Washington Star. The White House had reporters’ phones tapped, and the IRS looked into the tax returns of New York Times reporter Seymour Hersh. G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt, who later organized the Watergate burglaries, even talked about assassinating the muckraker Jack Anderson, who........

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