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 practice even on a limited basis could quickly become the expectation.

Here in the US, the first amendment protects not just the right to publish, but the right to decide what and how to publish. The US supreme court has long warned against government intrusion into editorial decision-making.

Fifty years ago, in Nebraska Press Association v Stuart, the court cautioned against “the unhappy experiences of other nations where government has been allowed to meddle in the internal editorial affairs of newspapers”, and expressed “intense skepti[cism]” toward efforts that would allow government to “insinuate itself into the editorial rooms of this Nation’s press”.

That concern is re-emerging in the wake of attempts to exploit consumer protection laws to challenge how news organizations edit their reporting. Trump has already sued CBS, the Des Moines Register and most recently the BBC under state deceptive trade practice statutes – laws that were designed to regulate conduct in “trade or commerce”, not the editorial decisions of news outlets engaged in noncommercial speech.

These lawsuits are an effort to redefine routine editorial decisions as acts of consumer fraud, through legal theories that do not fit the circumstances in which they are being applied. Even though the cases are meritless, they impose serious costs, compelling news outlets to respond, defend or, in some cases, like CBS, settle for unrelated business reasons.

Those capitulations can then be cited as evidence of wrongdoing, confirming the distorted narrative the claims seek to advance. And the tactic is not limited to consumer fraud claims. Trump Media & Technology Group recently abandoned a multi-year libel case it had pursued against the Guardian, an example of how litigation, even when unsuccessful, is being used to burden news publishers.

For 250 years, American presidents have routinely criticized their press coverage. But they largely observed a boundary – they did not attempt to dictate how news organizations edited and presented their reporting. Even in confrontational settings – such as Barack Obama’s interviews with Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly – presidents accepted that news organizations retained control over how those exchanges were edited and presented. The current insistence on full publication, combined with threats to sue over how interviews are edited, is a sharp departure from that tradition.

Globally, efforts to control not just what is reported but how it is presented are not new. In parts of the world where the press is more restricted, shaping the format of news coverage has long been an effective tool.

In China, speeches are often aired in full, with news outlets functioning more as distributors than as filters. In Russia, state-aligned outlets regularly run extended, unedited remarks by government officials, undermining the role of independent editorial framing.

And in Turkey, the combination of legal and institutional pressure has weakened the role of independent editorial oversight. These approaches all share the same principle. They presume that the function of the media is to transmit, not interpret. Controlling how news is delivered may seem more subtle than censorship but it can be just as powerful.

And it has real world consequences. Airing interviews in full produces longer, less impactful reporting. Audiences asked to sit through unabridged, C-Span-like exchanges will often tune out, leaving them less informed, not more. Sadly, we’ve already experienced what happens when political rants are aired uninterrupted, allowing lies and propaganda to be delivered without context or factchecking.

At the same time, as newsrooms internalize this pressure, they allow legal risk rather than editorial judgment to shape their decisions. The result is an excess of content and a loss of meaning. A press that cannot edit does not become more transparent; it becomes less useful.

The shift by text-based news organizations into audio formats like podcasts – where editing is not incidental but essential – makes these deliberations unavoidable. Next month, as the Guardian’s US newsroom prepares to launch its first news podcast, we will be facing these questions head on.

In those moments, my role as newsroom lawyer is to ensure that threats of litigation don’t force our editorial hand. That responsibility – to make decisions that help our audiences better understand the news – feels especially critical right now. The fact that editors are even considering revising longstanding practices shows how quickly norms can shift and how corrosive the pressures on publishers have become.

As World Press Freedom Day approaches this Sunday, we should certainly be alarmed by the increasing threats our press is facing, including the revocation of broadcast licenses, the arrests of journalists and the very real physical dangers – even in settings once assumed to be secure. But we should also be mindful of the more subtle incursions like those deceptively framed as demands for “transparency” and “fairness”. Because a press that cannot edit – cannot select and present information using its own judgment – is not truly free.

• Kai Falkenberg is general counsel of the Guardian US