Codex Americana
Golden Quisling of the Year - 2025
ANNUAL GOLDEN QUISLING
Winner: The American Press (Collective)
Date: December 23, 2025
Reason: Systematic institutional betrayal of the watchdog function under financial coercion, legal intimidation, and access-dependency.
Release:
Today, the Salem Fireextinguisher names The American Press as the 2025 Golden Quisling of the Year for the collective abandonment of its constitutional role as a check on executive power. Across every major outlet—from the New York Times to the Washington Post to CNN to the networks—the press has chosen accommodation over accountability, stenography over scrutiny, and financial survival over truth-telling.
This is not failure. This is collaboration.
Statement of Sins (2025):
Access as Control:
- Trump remains the most accessible president of modern times to mainstream reporters, creating reciprocal obligation that softens coverage instinctively. Reporters who receive interviews become invested in maintaining access; the system incentivizes self-censorship disguised as objectivity.
Structural Coercion:
- Parent companies of major newsrooms face legal leverage and regulatory threats. Lawsuits drain money and attention. Threats of blocked mergers and regulatory retaliation create financial stakes higher than journalistic principle. Media outlets understand: aggressive coverage = corporate pain.
- CNN chief Mark Thompson explicitly directed staff to "be forward-thinking and avoid pre-judging Trump"—institutional instruction to moderate coverage preventively.
Stenographic Neutrality:
- The press has become stenographers with amnesia. Rather than explaining what's actually happening, they report what happened—burying truth under anodyne adjectives, convoluted phrasing, and delayed ledes.
- Trump's immigration policies steeped in racism? Reported without the word "racism." Trump's serial lying? Reported as "disputed claims." Trump's descent into authoritarianism? Framed as "governance changes."
- Every article should make clear: his policies are racist. He is a serial liar. What he is doing is authoritarian. Instead, they hide the truth through language.
Institutional Silencing:
- 76 federal actions against journalists documented in 2025.
- The Pentagon denied office space to CNN, Washington Post, New York Times, NPR, and others—replaced by conservative outlets. The AP was indefinitely banned from pooled events for using "Gulf of Mexico" instead of Trump's preferred term.
- Associated Press reporters kicked from Air Force One. Journalists harassed, detained, deported, investigated, sued, assaulted.
- Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia gutted—427 million people weekly reached by USAGM broadcasters before the administration hollowed them out.
Access-Courting Normalization:
- Axios published "Behind the Curtain: Influencing Trump"—a step-by-step playbook on how CEOs and leaders can win favor with the president, packaged as neutral analysis and promoted across their outlets.
- This is not reporting. This is consulting. This is institutional quislingism.
The Coverage Gap:
- Trump declared intent to expand intelligence agencies' authority to surveil journalists. The press reported it as a proposal, not as an attack on the First Amendment.
- Trump's firing of inspector generals without congressional notice—gutting federal oversight—was described as "upheaval" and "confusion," not as an assault on accountability mechanisms.
- Trump's attempt to rename the Kennedy Center after himself while gutting its programming and firing decades-long staff: covered as vanity project, not institutional capture.
- Trump's expansion of executive orders at record speed while simultaneously dismantling FOIA infrastructure: covered as separate stories, not as a system designed to act without scrutiny.
The Financial Calculus:
- Between lawsuits, merger threats, and regulatory leverage, being at odds with this administration is now prohibitively expensive. Newsrooms know the cost. They moderate coverage accordingly.
- This is not censorship. This is capitalism. The system works because it doesn't require explicit orders—it requires only that editors understand the consequences.
The Absence of Outrage:
- When writing about outrageous things without a tone of outrage, you narcotize your readers. You become part of the problem.
- The mainstream press has chosen to narrate authoritarianism in the voice of a suburban home-improvement show.
The Betrayal:
The First Amendment does not exist to protect comfortable speech. It exists to protect speech that power wants to suppress.
The press's function is not to report what happened. It is to explain what it means. It is to be the institutional voice that says: this is not normal. this is dangerous. this is wrong.
Instead, the American press has chosen survival over duty.
They had access to the facts. They had resources. They had platforms reaching millions. They had legal standing to challenge restrictions. They chose to protect their parent companies' merger prospects, their access to presidential interviews, their regulatory standing with hostile agencies.
They chose themselves over the country.
This is not a failure of individual journalists—many are doing serious work despite institutional pressure. This is a failure of institutional leadership. This is a choice made by editors, publishers, network heads, and corporate boards to accommodate power rather than challenge it.
This is quislingism: collaboration with an occupying force against one's own people, justified by the need to survive within the system that occupies you.
Runners-Up:
SECOND PLACE: Boogie Down Liberation Front
- One-off anonymous vandalism with perfect timing (pre-DSA convention). No arrests, no follow-through, maximum agitprop value. The claim moved through activist pipelines with no investigative accountability. A ghost brand deployed once for maximum effect. Perfectly executed institutional manipulation through media conduit.
THIRD PLACE: FIFA
- Displaced National Symphony Orchestra programming at the Kennedy Center to host the 2026 World Cup draw. Cost Trump administration $5+ million, generated claimed $7.4 million in revenue (unverified breakdown). Perfect synergy: sports spectacle replaces art, autocrat gets photo op, institutional mission abandoned. The metaphor writes itself.
End of Release
Posted by Redwin Tursor
December 23, 2025
