Last week, FCC Chair Brendan Carr sent letters to NPR’s chief executive Katherine Maher and PBS CEO Paula Kerger, warning that NPR and PBS underwriting messages may violate federal law that prohibits educational stations from airing commercials. Carr also suggested that the Trump administration may go after the public funding of PBS and NPR member stations entirely.

"For my own part, I do not see a reason why Congress should continue sending taxpayer dollars to NPR and PBS given the changes in the media marketplace since the passage of the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967," he wrote.

This has to be seen as the opening salvo in what is likely to be a Trump war against press freedoms generally.

For starters, the claim that underwriting messages are really commercials in disguise is a red herring. Ever since the Communications Act of 1982, the law has been quite precise on what constitutes permissible underwriting and what constitutes a commercial.

There is a great deal of case law on what is allowed and what isn’t. Every once in a while, one of the more aggressive big-city public radio stations crosses the line and accepts product promotion in an underwriting credit, and gets a warning or a fine. But the last such fine was in 2008. The FCC under both Republicans and Democrats has been quite consistent in applying these standards

If the Trump administration wanted to take the next step, it could simply abolish the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. This would be damaging but not fatal, since over time public radio and TV stations have cultivated their listeners to provide more and more of their funding. Currently, the typical NPR member station gets only about 5 to 10 percent of its income from underwriting and about 10 percent from CPB.

Most of their funding comes from listeners. And a full-scale political assault on public broadcasting would likely lead to more support fom listeners. But NPR itself, with less direct listener support, gets about a third of its budget from corporate underwriters.

Killing CPB would be relatively more damaging to smaller stations in less densely populated rural states, where there are relatively fewer listeners or viewers to draw upon. Smaller stations are more reliant on CPB. Ironically, many of these are in red states, where the local public station is often the only source of in-depth news. On the other hand, destroying fair news coverage may be the whole point.

If the Trumpers wanted to go further, they could try to deny license renewal to public stations. That would be more difficult, since FCC broadcast licenses are for eight years.

THIS OPENING SALVO AGAINST PUBLIC BROADCASTING needs to be seen in the larger context of an escalating war against the free press. Unlike some larger commercial media, NPR has done an admirable job of covering Trump’s attempted coup, and not pulling their punches. So far, Trump has focused on larger media, and has succeeded in intimidating many of the major dailies into self-censorship.

Jeff Bezos, owner of The Washington Post, has other business interests and has been shameless about sucking up to Trump. The New York Times has pursued a pathetic "objectivity," in the face of incipient fascism. The L.A. Times has been abjectly pro-Trump. And the commercial TV networks, all with other business interests to protect, have tried various forms of appeasement.

For instance, Paramount, the owner of CBS, has merger talks pending with Skydance that would enrch the largest stockholder, Shari Redstone. Paramount has been in settlement talks on Trump’s lawsuit against CBS, and has leaned on 60 Minutes to accede to Trump’s request for raw interview footage of their interview with Kamala Harris and give Trump an apology. MSNBC journalists have critized their parent, NBC, for delaying the airing of a documentary about the effects of Trump’s policies on migrant families separated at the southern U.S. border until after the election.

As Trump escalates this war, one easy strategy would be to have Elon Musk’s billions flood the media zone with endless libel suits. Even if he lost nearly all of them, they would cost the press a fortune in legal fees.

Trump and Musk have been too busy trying to shut down or usurp governnent departments to turn their full forces on the free press. But that will come.

It did not take Hitler long to take full control of the German press, all of which soon became Nazi mouthpieces or simply got closed down. Even Musk can’t do that. Our press is better protected by the First Amendment, and by small independent publications like the Prospect that punch above our weight.

The press would be even better defended if the larger commercial media remembered their sacred mission in a democracy, set aside their conflicts of interest, and ceased their self-defeating appeasement.