Media Mission Accomplished?
The coverage of yet another senseless war will make it even harder to access factual information
The United States woke up on Feb. 28 to news that President Trump had ordered strikes on Iran without congressional authorization, launching another illegal, deadly and expanding war in the Middle East.
With nearly two-thirds of people in the United States opposed to airstrikes on Iran, inquiring minds will turn to news sources and the internet to understand what’s happening and why. And with the growing threats of massive media consolidation and biased AI, it will only grow more challenging for people to access truthful, unbiased information in this scary and chaotic moment.
Indeed, Trump and his allies have made it no secret that their strategy is to consolidate the media into the hands of right-wing oligarchs and to — as Steve Bannon would say — “flood the zone with shit.” The goal is to make it difficult for people to discern fact from fiction. These figures modeled their takeover of our media system after what autocrat Viktor Orbán did when he destroyed independent journalism in Hungary.
It’s straight out of the authoritarian playbook.
Media mergers tread on free speech
The strategy is well underway, starting with mergers ranging from Nexstar’s acquisition of Tegna to Paramount Skydance’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. The former would combine the first- and third-largest owners of local-TV stations, consolidating greater control over the public airwaves to Nexstar founder and Trump ally Perry Sook.
Nexstar was the first broadcaster to pull Jimmy Kimmel’s show when Trump’s FCC chairman urged broadcasters to censor him. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Chairman Brendan Carr said. Carr is ready to approve this merger through any day now, even though it violates both FCC policy and federal law.
Paramount Skydance’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery is an even graver threat to democracy. Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison and his billionaire-financier daddy, Larry, are tight with Trump and have promised favorable media coverage in exchange for regulatory favors.
You may remember the parade of corrupt fuckery that surrounded Skydance’s takeover of Paramount in 2025. Paramount paid the president $16 million to settle a frivolous lawsuit against CBS, and then fired late-night host Stephen Colbert when he accurately characterized the payout as a “big fat bribe.” Esteemed 60 Minutes executive producer Bill Owens resigned, citing the “loss of journalistic independence due to increased, unprecedented supervision by parent company Paramount” as it sought the Trump administration’s approval of the merger.
Once Ellison took over, he installed a former Trump ambassador as a so-called “bias monitor” at CBS. Ellison also appointed the conservative Bari Weiss as the editor-in-chief of CBS News, where she delayed the broadcast of two 60 Minutes investigations into Trump-administration actions and appointed the Trump-friendly Tony Dokoupil as the anchor of the CBS Evening News.
Indeed, Ellison has meddled so deeply in the editorial process at the network that legendary CBS News producer Mary Walsh, upon exiting, stated “We’ve been told to aim our reporting at a particular part of the political spectrum. Honestly, I don’t know how to do that.”
McKinley Franklin
Who can stop the Paramount Skydance-WBD deal?
Now Paramount Skydance wants to purchase yet another media behemoth, which would further concentrate the Ellisons’ control over the marketplace of ideas. On Feb. 26, Netflix backed out of its bid for Warner Bros. and the Ellisons prevailed after upping their bid and exerting political pressure in Washington.
With this deal, the Ellisons would control dozens of huge media outlets, including CBS, CNN, Discovery, HBO and Nickelodeon, plus a major share of TikTok (which the Larry Ellison-owned Oracle controls as part of a Trump-friendly ownership consortium).
Every media merger leads to job losses, less opportunity for content creators and journalists, and fewer choices and higher prices for consumers. This one is no different in that regard. But the Paramount Skydance-Warner Bros. Discovery deal comes with additional downsides. The Ellisons have already promised the president that they will make “sweeping changes” at CNN, a frequent target of Trump’s ire. We know what that means: They’ll fire journalists, kill important stories and replace the news with pro-MAGA propaganda.
The Trump administration has signaled that it will rubber stamp this merger even though it appears to violate antitrust laws. California Attorney General Rob Bonta said “this is not a done deal.” That’s good news, as state attorneys general should investigate and intervene here. State AGs have the ability to sue to block this merger on antitrust grounds. We need to put all regulators on notice that we’re watching and that we’ll be holding them accountable. (Sign Free Press’ petition calling on state AGs to block this deal now.)
Missing in action
As active participants in our information environments, we have a duty to oppose media capitulation and consolidation in the face of government corruption. This is especially important as our information environments become even more prone to false information.
Many observers are already making the connections between media consolidation and warmongering. At The Contrarian, Jennifer Rubin warned of the “danger in allowing a few MAGA billionaires to control our news” — and ousting reputable journalists for MAGA mouthpieces.
The Poynter Institute raised concerns about what the Ellison takeover would mean for one of the few major newsrooms capable of covering “huge stories like Iran.”
“Few news organizations still possess the global infrastructure to support half a dozen or more reporters monitoring the situation on the ground in neighboring countries,” wrote Natalie Korach of Status. “Years of budget cuts have thinned the ranks of foreign correspondents in the region across the industry.”
This is also a consequence of media consolidation and billionaire control. The Washington Post’s gutting of its foreign bureaus is just the latest example, but most coverage — especially on TV — long ago replaced correspondents on the ground with shouting heads in the studio.
Free Press was founded back in 2003, in part, to address the lack of diverse perspectives and critical coverage surrounding the Iraq War. At the time we condemned the corporate media’s failure to challenge the George W. Bush administration’s claims about Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction.
As we enter yet another war where too many innocent lives have already been lost, we’re no closer to having a media system that holds the powerful to account. But holding the line on further media consolidation is a critical step toward building one.
Teamwork
I spoke with Ian Masters over the weekend about how media consolidation undermines our access to viewpoint diversity and truth.
Free Press Board Chair and University of Pennsylvania Professor Victor Pickard discussed “The Century-Long Capture of U.S. Media” with WNYC’s On the Media podcast.
And my colleague Joseph Torres took part in an event on the 30th anniversary of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 at Howard University. The conversation explored structural challenges to media ownership and free expression as well as the ongoing mission to close the digital divide. “We have not dealt with the history of segregation in our media policy,” he said. “It is built on segregation.”
The kicker
“If we accept that nothing is true, we find ourselves among aspiring and real dictators who have good stories and media monopolies. But even if lying works in politics, truths about the world do not cease to be.” —Timothy Snyder
About the author
Jessica J. González is an attorney and co-CEO of Free Press and Free Press Action, where she leads efforts to transform the media system so it can support a just and multiracial democracy. Follow her on Bluesky.
