Copyright newrepublic
Under the Trump administration, the concentration of the media business has accelerated. And the administration has made it abundantly clear that the pathway to further consolidation involves pleasing (and funneling money to) the regime and its ruler. The news cycle related to Jimmy Kimmel’s exclusion and subsequent reinstatement has come and gone, but the real story endures. It was always fundamentally about securing regulatory approval for the CBS merger as a stepping stone to the CBS-Warner merger, which will leave us with a media behemoth under the thumb of Trumpy billionaire Larry Ellison, and his son, David. Consider that Trump cleared the way for the Ellisons to merge their Skydance Media company with Paramount in order to gain control of CBS News. Thanks to this preferential treatment, the Ellisons’ new media giant is now in the running to purchase Warner Bros. Discovery, which includes the crown jewel of the media marketplace: CNN. Other companies adapt swiftly to the new cronyistic landscape. Comcast, which previously drew scrutiny from the Trump administration for its own efforts to purchase Warner Bros. Discovery, recently donated up to $10 million to fund Trump’s White House “renovation.” It appears that these major media executives feel little need to satisfy any mission to genuinely inform the public. They want profits. And at least since the dawn of yellow journalism in the late nineteenth century, hate-based rage-bait has been seen as generally more profitable than information. The idea that such outlets are news organizations is increasingly quaint. Fox News blazed the trail when it reconceived the product that cable news produces: Instead of the straight story, information became fodder for entertainment, persuasion, and grievance. Under the direction of Roger Ailes, the outlet applied all the tricks of demagoguery to expand and consolidate its reach, including a hand-in-glove coordination with the GOP. This explains part—but only part—of the right-wing tilt in the media system.
