Norm in TNR:

So I am not surprised now to see that broadcasters—in an era when there has been much more concentration of ownership, when the technology has made the business models more fraught—have shown no commitment to anything resembling the public interest or to the fundamentals of a free society. We are no longer in a world where broadcast pioneers like Capital Cities/ABC’s Tom Murphy and local community owners who believed in acting in the public interest have any role. Courage in the face of governmental criticism and governmental power is barely present. Consolidation into behemoths with interests beyond the airwaves and the digital platform now rule. Whether it is Disney or Paramount, Universal or Nexstar, it is all about the bottom line, and the fear of retribution by a thuggish regime means that every value beyond the money goes out the window.

This started early on in the Trump presidency, when Disney-ABC forked over $16 million after Trump said he would sue over a George Stephanopoulos comment that he had been convicted by a jury in a civil case of rape—something the judge in the case said was true even if it did not meet the narrow, technical nature of the term in New York law. The Trump suit would have been thrown out of court—but ABC in effect paid protection money. Paramount soon followed with another capitulation over a laughable case attacking the edit of a Kamala Harris interview on CBS News’s 60 Minutes, ahead of the effort to get approval for the sale of its parent company, Paramount, to David Ellison.

Then came the Jimmy Kimmel episode, with the pending takeover by local-station behemoth Nexstar of local-station behemoth Tegna to create a super-behemoth dominance of local television, with approval needed by the Federal Communications Commission. A commission whose chair, Brendan Carr, wrote the chapter on telecommunications for radical right-wing Project 2025, and has been a leading capo in the crime family administration, using his position to threaten these companies with mayhem unless they capitulate and pay protection money, or kowtow to demands to launder coverage. No other FCC chair ever has misused the power of the office in this way. And he is likely to push to remove or deeply dilute the limit on station ownership, now at 39 percent, along with the ban on owning more than two stations in any marketplace.

The media world was vastly different when our Advisory Committee was created. High-definition television was just beginning; a 24-inch HDTV cost up to $10,000. When we asked consulting firms that focused on media trends whether and when the new technology would break through to the mass public, they predicted that it would take decades to reach reasonable prices, say $2,000 for an HDTV set. Of course, they were way wrong—you can now buy a 70-inch smart TV with ultrahigh definition for a few hundred dollars, a 24-inch one for 70 bucks at Best Buy. And of course there was no idea back then that we would have smartphones or social media.

But there is another way the media world is different. Five companies—five—now control 90 percent of the marketplace. Disney, Comcast, Warner Brothers Discovery, Paramount, and Fox are the media Godzillas, and if Ellison and Paramount get their way and purchase WBD, it will be four. Add to that the fact that right-wing billionaires dominate social media, from X to Meta and now TikTok, and other billionaires with wide business interests that are affected directly by federal government action own The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, among others of our key newspapers, and we are in an extraordinarily dangerous place. And add further the evisceration via government cuts of public media like NPR and PBS, hitting rural areas especially hard.

As the internet became ever-present and universal, as digital and other technology moved rapidly in the communications sphere, the place and vibrancy—and bottom line—of the most venerable sources of news and information eroded and then collapsed. The New York Times leadership was smart enough to diversify, finding other business avenues, from puzzles to consumer information, to supplement the revenues from the newspaper, and finding other ways to promote the content of the paper. When Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post, it was applauded by fans of democracy and the public interest; the old business model for it and most legacy media, especially print media, had disappeared, and sustaining flagship entities like the Post, and later the L.A. Times, required benign philanthropists for whom annual losses in the tens or hundreds of millions were trivial prices to pay for the good they were preserving and enhancing. That Bezos would move from philanthropy to concern about the Post’s bottom line seemed implausible; that he would erase the “Democracy Dies in Darkness” motto to protect his interests in Blue Horizon and Amazon from damage done by Trump’s henchmen has been jarring.

Of course, some of this dynamic has been deliberately manipulated by those malign actors like Elon Musk, using small—by their standard—portions of their vast wealth to buy, transform, and shape key new communications avenues and tools. And it now describes Trump’s illegal actions involving TikTok, violating the law and engineering a takeover by Peter Thiel and other allies of his authoritarianism. Some of these entities have a history of turning a blind eye to manipulation of elections from Russia, China, and other foreign actors. We can expect more of that. The combination of malign actors manipulating platforms like X and Facebook and taking over TikTok, alongside billionaires and huge corporate conglomerates who will do anything to avoid authoritarian retribution, has left us with a desolate media landscape.