Shortly after sitting for a televised interview with CBS News in January, Donald Trump conveyed a threat through his press secretary: air the interview in full, or face a lawsuit.

The warning may have been delivered offhand, but its implications are being taken seriously inside newsrooms.

A senior editor who recently joined our newsroom told me that in her prior role at a major national outlet, she was encouraged to do exactly that – not as a matter of editorial judgment, but in order to avoid accusations of “deceptive editing”. The question was no longer what made for better journalism, but what minimized legal exposure.

That shift points to something deeper: the growing concern that editorial judgment itself is being treated as a liability. The demand by the US president and his political allies that news organizations publish interviews in full, combined with efforts to weaponize consumer protection laws against so-called “deceptive editing”, is not about transparency. It’s an effort to strip journalists of editorial judgment – a core function the first amendment protects. This is more than a dispute about bias. It’s a means of dictating how the news is reported.

Editing, deciding what to include and how to present it is fundamental to journalism. It’s how journalists help audiences make sense of what matters. A requirement to publish everything in full may seem to promote transparency. But it removes a core newsroom function, reducing clarity and obscuring meaning. It shifts the press’s role from helping people understand the news to merely distributing it. Some might argue that publishers could easily post full transcripts or raw footage online in certain situations. But who would decide when that should happen and under what circumstances? Conceding to........

© The Guardian