How the corporate media has failed us all
Writing in 1799, Vice President Thomas Jefferson defended his nation’s strong press freedoms with evangelical fervor. “To preserve the freedom of the human mind and freedom of the press, every spirit should be ready to devote itself to martyrdom,” Jefferson wrote. “For as long as we may think as we will and speak as we think, the condition of man will proceed in improvement.”
How disappointed our Founding Fathers would be in the craven, fearful way America’s corporate media has surrendered to Donald Trump in the months since his election. How disappointed we should be, too. First ABC News made the baffling decision to settle a $15 million defamation lawsuit Trump filed against the network, outraging the company’s employees. Then Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg settled another baseless Trump lawsuit, this time handing the president a cool $25 million.
The latest domino fell on Thursday evening when Paramount, the parent company of CBS News, indicated it would settle yet another Trump defamation suit. That decision comes despite legal experts dismissing Trump’s suit as baseless and intended solely to intimidate. It’s working.
Corporate news outlets are abandoning the American people at the very moment we most need a free, fearless, and independent media. Most of those once venerable institutions are giving up without so much as a fight. What a loss for democracy.
A $15 million settlement may be a rounding error against ABC News parent company Disney’s $91 billion annual revenue, but Trump now has powerful new resources to wage his war on the media from inside the federal government.
Chief among Trump’s new batch of enforcers is Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr. On Jan. 22, just two days after Trump was inaugurated, Carr threatened investigations into ABC News, CBS News, and NBC News for their perceived unfair coverage of Trump’s 2024 campaign.
Those investigations stem from three complaints filed by the right-wing legal advocacy organization the Center for American Rights, which has been open about its goal of having the news networks’ broadcast licenses revoked. Those complaints also serve as a roadmap for Trump’s prospective FBI Director Kash Patel, who has repeatedly pledged to “come after” media outlets who hurt the president’s feelings.
A less consolidated, more nimble news media might have joined together in coalition to push back against Trump’s authoritarian attacks on press freedom. Instead, today’s billionaire executives view their news properties as just one piece of a much broader corporate quilt.
Some, including new Los Angeles Times owner and avowed MAGA booster Patrick Soon-Shiong, even regard their own newsrooms with open contempt. As Trump is discovering, there’s no reason to threaten outlets that are only too eager to sew their own mouths shut.
Amazon tycoon Jeff Bezos’ transformation of the Washington Post into a Trump-curious newspaper may be the most high-profile step in the media’s subjugation, but Soon-Shiong’s tenure at the LA Times is what Americans should expect going forward.
Last year Soon-Shiong sparked controversy after gutting his paper’s editorial team and replacing key voices with polarizing, Trump-aligned pundits like Scott Jennings. He also publicly spiked the paper’s planned presidential endorsement of Kamala Harris, driving a round of senior staff resignations. The decisions were intended to send a clear message to Mar-a-Lago: Go easy on us, you have friends here.
The media’s cascading surrender is yet another bitter symbol of America’s institutional decay. News outlets are no longer operations where management inhabits the same office building as their journalists. Their owners are now many layers of corporate bureaucracy separated from the journalism they produce. That makes it easier than ever for media outlets’ mega-rich owners to strangle and pillage news operations in a way that simply did not happen when those outlets were run by journalists.
The fact that media outlets have always served as a safeguard of our democracy doesn’t matter to the Disney Corporation. They see their acquisition of ABC News as a loss-leading enterprise. It’s just a means to more effectively serve you ads for Whirlpool dishwashers—the official appliance brand of Walt Disney World™. That they sometimes break news is a bonus.
Venture capital firms like Alden Global Capital have been hollowing out the media industry for decades by buying independent outlets and stripping their assets. Veteran journalists face unceremonious layoffs, replaced by either inexperienced young journalists, artificial intelligence or, for more than half of the country, by nothing at all.
The result is a media industry so hollow and starved of institutional knowledge that it can no longer carry out its fundamental accountability role. Trump simply came along and delivered the killing blow.
Media industry veterans seem to understand their industry is trapped in a death spiral. CNN’s Jim Acosta implied as much when he abruptly quit the network last week, a decision driven by CNN’s desire to muzzle one of their network’s most pointed Trump questioners. Trump greeted the news with glee.
“Jim is a major loser,” the president posted on Truth Social. “[He] will fail no matter where he ends up.” That may sound like bravado, but it’s actually Trump breathing a sigh of relief over CNN’s decision to censor itself.
Like the dozens of veteran reporters who have resigned from the Washington Post after Bezos’ MAGA pivot, Acosta understands that real journalism is impossible if your bosses have more in common with Trump than they do with their own reporters. Acosta and the journalists who have fought their own corporate structures to hold Trump accountable recognize when the deck has been impossibly stacked against them. After all, investigating corruption is their job.
Is there a way forward for the media’s role as the watchdog of power? It’s tough to say. That return to legitimacy won’t come in the consolidated and Trump-loyalist corporate media landscape we have now.
To continue serving the people, more journalists will need to follow the lead of Acosta at CNN and the Washington Post’s fleeing editors. The corporate media failed us. It’s up to the nation’s exiled journalists and underserved news consumers to reject that corruption and begin the long, difficult process of returning journalism to its core mission of holding power accountable. Because an America without a free and combative press is no America at all.
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