How our media became so vulnerable to Trump — and what we can do about it

Jimmy Kimmel returned to the airwaves just two weeks and two days ago (although in Trump time, it seems far longer).

Disney’s decision to allow Kimmel back on was a victory for freedom of the press and a setback for Trump’s authoritarianism.

Nonetheless, today’s media ecosystem is far more vulnerable to authoritarianism than it was decades ago.

Today I want to explore three structural changes in our political economy that have made it so, and suggest what must be done to strengthen media independence.

1. Media concentration has facilitated censorship

After Paramount’s CBS settled Trump’s frivolous $16 million lawsuit against them and canceled Stephen Colbert, much to Trump’s delight, the FCC swiftly approved Paramount’s merger with Skydance.

The result: a newly consolidated media giant now run by David Ellison — son of Larry Ellison, the world’s third-richest man and a major Trump donor.

Now, Ellison has announced Paramount’s acquisition of The Free Press and installed its anti-“woke” founder, Bari Weiss, as editor-in-chief of CBS News.

This is the same billionaire-led conglomerate that wants to absorb Warner Bros. Discovery — an even bigger step toward the concentration of the power to shape public opinion.

The proposed merger would hand control of CNN, CBS News, HBO, MTV, Comedy Central, BET, HGTV, TNT, and more to a single mega-corporation — with Trump’s allies at the helm.

When the media is under the control of a handful of people, it’s far easier for an authoritarian in the White House to intimidate that handful — and force them to do his bidding — than when the media is less concentrated.

In 1983, the U.S. media was dominated by 50 companies. Today, that number has shrunk to just six giant media conglomerates.

2. Ultra-wealthy individuals are now controlling major media. These are people likely to be biased against the public’s right to know.

The second trend has been a shift in control over those media corporations to a relative handful of ultra-wealthy moguls.

As noted, the Ellison family is rapidly taking over a large swath of media.

Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, bought X (then Twitter) for $42 billion. He then turned it into a right-wing cesspool.

Jeff Bezos, the second richest, owns Amazon and The Washington Post.

Rupert Murdoch, another billionaire, owns Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Post.

Why are the ultra-rich buying up so much of the media? Vanity may play a part, but there’s a more pragmatic — some might say sinister — reason.

As vast wealth concentrates in the hands of a few, this small group of the ultra-wealthy may rationally fear that majorities of voters could confiscate their wealth through, for example, a wealth tax or the elimination of the “stepped-up basis at death” rule, which would tax all capital gains.

If you’re a billionaire, in other words, you may view democracy as a potential threat to your net worth.

Control over a significant share of the dwindling number of media outlets enables you to effectively hedge against democracy by subtly (or not so subtly) suppressing criticism of you and other plutocrats.

Seen in this light, Jeff Bezos’s decree that The Washington Post’s opinion section support “personal liberties and free markets” isn’t just a means of ingratiating himself with Trump. It also reduces the risk that movers and shakers in the nation’s capital might be seduced into raising taxes on people like Bezos.

3. The shift from stakeholder to shareholder capitalism.

Behind these maneuvers lies a third underlying shift — from the stakeholder capitalism of the first three decades after World War II to the shareholder capitalism that began in the 1980s — along with the rise, starting in the 1990s, of CEO pay packages consisting of large amounts of shares of stock and options to purchase additional shares.

Paramount (CBS) surrendered to Trump, and Disney (ABC) initially did so, because they determined that fighting him would have cost those firms’ CEOs and shareholders far more.

Disney then discovered — when its customers threatened to boycott all Disney products and services — that the actual cost of surrender was far higher than it had counted on. Hence, its decision to reinstate Kimmel.

I’m old enough to remember when CBS News would never have surrendered to a demagogic president. But that was when CBS News — the home of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite — was independent of the rest of CBS, and when the top management of CBS had independent responsibilities to the American public.

The New York Times, by contrast, decided to fight Trump from the moment he initiated a lawsuit against it. That may be because the Times is owned and controlled by the Ochs-Sulzberger family through a trust that holds a majority of special, high-voting shares in the company. The Times is not dedicated to maximizing shareholder value; it’s dedicated to the public’s right to know.

***

Trump and his stooges are engaged in blatant political censorship that runs afoul of the First Amendment.

But the three underlying trends I’ve just outlined — the consolidation of media into a handful of outlets, the increasing control of the media by the ultra-rich, and the growing primacy of shareholder interests — have made it far easier for Trump and his lackeys to do their dirty work.

When and if We the People are ever back in charge, not only do we have to protect freedom of speech from demagoguery, but we must also reverse these three underlying trends that have made it far too easy for a demagogue to undermine such freedom.

This will require:

1. conditioning media ownership on a proven commitment to the public’s right to know,
2. using antitrust laws to prevent or break up media monopolies and giant media conglomerates, and
3. raising taxes on the ultra-wealthy so they have less power to undermine our democracy.

Easier said than done, obviously, but key prerequisites for restoring American democracy.

***

Here’s CBS News’s Edward R. Murrow in 1954, criticizing Senator Joe McCarthy — and criticizing America for allowing McCarthy’s witch hunt. Would today’s CBS News have allowed Murrow to say this on the air?

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

• Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/
• Robert Reich's new memoir,Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org.