The Media Is Essential Democratic Infrastructure
‘The press matters because it is vital to the project of self-government.’
Earlier this month, the Roosevelt Institute published a comprehensive report called The Political Economy of the US Media System: Excavating the Roots of the Present Crisis. Bilal Baydoun and Shahrzad Shams of Roosevelt co-wrote this powerful study with Penn Professor Victor Pickard — who is also Free Press’ board chair. The 52-page report explores how “decades of market-first policymaking has systematically eroded the media’s democratic function, leaving the press structurally vulnerable at precisely the moment when independent journalism matters most.”
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Pressing Issues reached out via email to Baydoun and Shams to discuss the report’s findings. Here is an edited version of what they shared with us.
Pressing Issues: How has the idea of the “public interest” been twisted when it comes to the media in the United States?
Bilal Baydoun and Shahrzad Shams: Why does having a free press matter in the context of democracy? It’s not because news output boosts quarterly GDP growth or enriches a small group of billionaire owners. The press matters because it is vital to the project of self-government. It informs citizens and holds powerful actors accountable when they threaten that project. To most people, it’s obvious that the real value of journalism accrues from its benefits to the polity more than the economy.
Yet decades of market-first thinking have relegated this core civic role to the margins, and policymakers have instead treated our media system as a primarily commercial enterprise. There was a time when media policy was motivated by public-interest principles — such as viewpoint diversity, educational programming and localism — despite falling short of fully realizing them.
Neoliberalism is a term often used to describe the almost totalizing belief in resolving public problems through private markets, and media policy fell victim to this way of thinking. Citizens became consumers — and with that, “public interest” became synonymous with commercial interest. What was profitable was thought to be best. But the civic benefits of mass media mergers, ownership deregulation and public-media austerity predictably never trickled down.
PI: The report explains how unfettered media consolidation and mergers are decimating local news. Is there any antidote for local news — and if so, what is that, and why should we see more of it?
BB & SS: Consider the havoc wrought by private-equity groups and hedge funds on local newspapers, some of the most vital institutions in communities across the country. Their actions repeat a similar script: Acquire struggling outlets at low prices, implement massive staff cuts, sell off real estate and other assets, raise prices for remaining content and extract maximum cash flow until the publications either close or become financially unsustainable. It’s the worst form of economic extraction that also starves local democracies of much-needed journalism. In one six-year period, for example, the New York-based hedge fund Alden Global Capital cut staff at unionized papers by 75 percent.
These corporations push a short-term profit model that is fundamentally at odds with journalism’s democratic role, and perhaps the most important antidote is to decommercialize large swathes of our media system and build a thriving public-media system to serve as a counterbalance to financialized news. Journalism as a publicly accountable enterprise can only be viable through public investment, and some estimate that rebuilding the local news-and-information ecosystem could cost as much as $3 billion per year.
Philanthropic investment into nonprofit and reader-funded journalism has helped. But only public investment can meet the scale of the crisis. The U.S. has historically invested far less than peer nations on public media, and this year the Trump administration effectively shut down the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. If and when progressives have the opportunity to push a broader democracy-reform agenda, public media must be prioritized.
PI: You describe the new U.S. media ecosystem as “vital democratic infrastructure” and also explore the history of resistance to that vision. Why do you think a vital democratic infrastructure matters, and what are the best examples of this infrastructure to consider?
BB & SS: It would be impossible to imagine interstate commerce without the infrastructure of federal highways. Likewise, it’s impossible to imagine the free exchange of ideas and information that democracy requires without the press. This goes beyond news, which is only one component of communities’ informational needs. Consumer alerts, emergency weather communications, coverage of local meetings where decisions are made, information on voting — all of these require mediating institutions capable of freely and equitably disseminating information.
Of course, in 2025, the information ecosystem revolves around the internet and the big platforms that dominate its terrain. These are the utilities of contemporary life, and policymakers must ensure their operation is compatible with democracy. We would argue that giving four or five mega-billionaires extremely outsized influence over the flow of information online — especially through algorithms designed to engineer addiction and maximize engagement — is not compatible with democracy.
PI: As we enter 2026, how should we be thinking about the First Amendment?
BB & SS: We should never take our First Amendment for granted. But the notion of corporate speech continues to encroach on the original spirit and letter of the First Amendment. Especially under Chief Justice John Roberts’ leadership, the Supreme Court has redefined the First Amendment, making it function more as a vehicle for advancing deregulatory, corporate causes, rather than empowering the public to freely speak and have access to a range of viewpoints.
Relatedly, over the course of decades, the Press Clause of the First Amendment has increasingly been rendered obsolete, with the Supreme Court folding questions of press freedom into the Speech Clause. Thus, any activities that may have once been protected by the Press Clause are instead assessed through the court’s free-speech doctrine, which grants the right to speak one’s mind.
This might seem like a formalistic distinction that only a law professor would care about, but it has real implications in a legal regime of corporate personhood. It suggests that just as the government may (theoretically) not silence an individual speaking on a public street, it similarly can’t impose any constraints (possibly including even common-sense and content-neutral ownership rules) on powerful commercial media entities, because doing so would constitute an infringement on their speech.
The First Amendment should be thought of more broadly than prevailing jurisprudence allows. It has been understood before as not just protecting against encroachments on speech, but also granting a right to free, accessible and accurate information, so that citizens are equipped to make informed decisions necessary for democratic self-governance. This wider understanding of the First Amendment has roots in our country’s history; we should be reviving this more expansive and democratic view of the First Amendment.
PI: How can people who value high-quality journalism and civic information fight back? What does reform actually look like moving forward?
BB & SS: We must take this fight into the policy arena. Too often our media debates are about the editorial decisions of individual newsrooms, or the messaging of certain political actors — like who is the Joe Rogan of the left? We can often lose sight of the fact that our media system operates in a specific policy context that is shaped by extremely powerful actors.
The government approves media mergers, funds (or these days, defunds) public media, and writes the rules that determine which commercial practices are incentivized over others. As our civic lives increasingly include our digital lives, the architecture of the internet matters too. Reform looks like first un-invisibilizing the often overlooked domain of media policy, and then fighting for fairer and less consolidated media markets, more public investment in media and a regulatory paradigm for the internet that doesn’t treat data solely as a commodity to be harvested from our ever-eroding attention spans.
And in a world where millions of people will be accessing information through AI services, we need to move quickly to ensure new technologies are serving our needs rather than the other way around.
Teamwork
Jacobin featured a piece this week by Pressing Issues Co-Editor Craig Aaron that exposes the “merger madness” surrounding the dueling bids by Netflix and Paramount to take over Warner Bros. Discovery. “It’s too early to predict a winner in this heavyweight rumble,” Craig writes, “but we already know who the losers will be: artists, filmmakers, workers, writers, and the rest of us in the audience. In this bout, there are no heroes, only heels.”
Craig Aaron
Speaking of predictions, NiemanLab invited Pressing Issues Co-Editor Julio Ricardo Varela to share his thoughts about 2026 in the journalism space. Julio’s prediction focused on the need to amplify community-centered journalism because, as he notes, the “corporate media model” just treats audiences as consumers, and “audiences are sick of being treated as consumers.”
Julio Ricardo Varela
The kicker
“The next chapter of democracy reform must treat our media system as a core infrastructure that makes democracy possible, and thus demands protection from both state control and commercial capture.” — The Political Economy of the US Media System: Excavating the Roots of the Present Crisis
