Affirming Democracy, Gathering Resistance

Ben Schwartz has an excellent piece in The Nation, “Trump’s Quest for Total Media Control.”  It lays out in concise fashion how the various strands of Trump’s attacks on media — from trying to get Jimmy Kimmel and others fired to responding to a question by Bloomberg’s Catherine Lucey with “Quiet, Piggy” — fit together into a larger scheme of total media control, a kind of state media by proxy. FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr has been a key player in all of this, as the article makes clear. And lest we dismiss the idea that Trump thinks in larger strategic, rather than instinctual and immediate, terms, Schwartz cautions: “Trump’s brain operates simultaneously at the pettiest and grandest levels of venality and scheming.”

The linchpin of the plan lies in the mergers of major media companies, with Trump cronies and supporters then placed in leadership and controlling roles. First on the list was Skydance’s purchase of Viacom and Paramount:

When the deal for Skydance to buy Viacom and Paramount went through, Trump got a $16 million extortion payday out of Viacom’s CBS News to settle his meritless suit against 60 Minutes for edits made to an interview with his 2024 opponent, Kamala Harris. Skydance also made woke-baiting pundit Bari Weiss the editor in chief of CBS News, despite a résumé that remains free of any television news (or really any) reporting.

Next up would be Skydance merging with Warner Brothers Discovery:

If Skydance acquires WBD, it will also gain control over CNN, a cable news network that Trump has long hated, dubbing it “the broken broadcasting disaster known as CNN.” The Trump White House has already met with the tech billionaire Larry Ellison, Skydance’s financial grandparent, and discussed which CNN reporters should be sent packing under Skydance’s ownership. Topping the list, not surprisingly, were two women, Erin Burnett and Briana Keilar.

The upshot of all of this is that it would give Trump hegemony over American news media. Couple that with the neutering of the Washington Post under Jeff Bezos, the dominance of local media by the Trump-sycophant Sinclair network, and the control of X and Meta by self-serving oligarchs Musk and Zuckerberg and the picture is grim. Schwartz writes:

Beyond Trump’s ongoing vendettas against the individual journalists and comedians who refuse to cower before him, it’s clear that he wants to remake the American media industry in his own image—the same way Vladimir Putin and Victor Orbán, the autocratic leaders he most admires, have controlled the media in their home countries. By consolidating media companies, Trump hopes to use a Putin-style media oligarchy to determine who gets to report the news and tell the jokes.

But perhaps the scariest part of all of this is that it is not strictly about Trump. MAGA-like and oligarchic control of these outlets will continue long after Trump is out of the picture.  

We already know how this turns out. In the glory days of broadcast and print journalism, federal law, FCC regulations, and industry norms did much to protect the integrity and professionalism of news organizations from the local to the national. Media companies were prohibited from owning print and broadcast outlets in the same media market; firewalls existed between the news and entertainment divisions of networks; the major networks were prohibited from controlling the syndication of programming. The result was a robust Fourth Estate on which the American people could count for honest, truth-seeking reporting, not “fair and balanced” hogwash.

The rise of cable TV disrupted this ecosystem, but rather than respond with appropriate adaptation of regulations to the new reality, Republican-led Congresses instead gutted all of the regulations and controls mentioned above. The result was the rise of Fox News, the Sinclair Network and more, leading to a much more right-leaning and eventually right-dominated news ecology. We are headed toward a truly frightening consolidation of that trend.

So, in terms of middle-to-long-term action, high on the list must be an effort to re-develop the conditions for professional journalism at mass scale.