Is The Media Cooked?
Jimmy Kimmel is back - what it means in the scheme of Trump's attacks on the media.
Hey friends! I’m launching some of my deeper dives on Youtube! You can watch the video above (be sure to subscribe to my channel if you do!) or read the script below:
Is the American media cooked?
Prolly. Maybe. It’s not looking good, fam.
Hey, welcome back to my Youtube, where I talk about us politics, news, and try not to crash out. Emphasis on try.
We are living through some of the most extreme attacks on free press in US history. The question isn’t whether or not Trump will attack the media – like, are you new here?
The question is whether the media will stand up to him – and much of that is up to their corporate billionaire owners.
So lets dive in.
Since Trump began his second term, we’ve seen numerous attacks on media. The AP was kicked out of the White House Press pool for refusing to call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. CBS abruptly cancelled The Late Show with Stephen Colbert – which stirred up a ton of rumors, as CBS’s parent company was actively seeking merger approval from the Trump administration at the time. And of course, last week Kimmel was fired just days after delivering a monologue on the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assasination.
*clip of monologue*
Following this, FCC chair Brendan Carr began to threaten broadcasters who air “inappropriate” political coverage with fines and even revoking broadcast licenses. Super normal.
And the networks folded. Sinclair broadcast group even put out a statement demanding Kimmel apologize and make a personal donation to Turning Point USA, and said they’d use his timeslot to air a Charlie Kirk montage.
Again, super duper normal.
Now, in Kimmel’s case, it looks like public backlash worked. A call to boycott Disney by cancelling Hulu and Disney+ subscriptions went viral. At one point their losses were estimated at $3.8 billion. And hey, money talks. Disney dropped a statement that Kimmel will be coming back on air.
But all of this goes beyond late night talk show hosts. This past week, Trump has openly threatened to sic the FCC on networks that put out “negative” coverage of his administration.
*clip*
Meanwhile, the Pentagon has said it will revoke press access from outlets that report “unapproved” information – even shit that is unclassified. They will be requiring journalists to sign a pledge to only report information the administration has authorized for release – and how much ya wanna bet they only authorize information that makes Trump look good?
And for a lot of journalists, their careers depend on having press access. It’s what gets them first dibs on breaking news and access to officials. Its a critical resource for their work, and now its being threatened by the administration.
Now, Trump threatening the media isn’t new. The dude made “fake news” part of the American vocabulary. But until now, we’ve been able to rely on American media to stand up to him. Now… there is real reason to question if they’ll do so.
More and more of our media is being consolidated into the hands of just a few billionaires, and more of them are leaning right. Let’s look back at that Paramount Skydance merger - the cause of so much speculation when Colbert was taken off air. Paramount is owned by Larry Ellison’s son, the same Larry Ellison who’s been a close friend to Trump and has donated millions to Republicans across the country. Again and again, Trump has used his second term to throw Larry wins. His company, Oracle, is poised to take a controlling stake in Tiktok - giving him control of a platform with 150 million American users. At one point, this news boosted stock prices high enough for Larry to briefly overtake Elon Musk’s networth, becoming the wealthiest man in the world.
It’s not just Larry Ellison. Sinclair Broadcast Group, another massive player in American media, controls nearly 200 TV stations nationwide. As you probably picked up from their reaction to Kimmel, Sinclair is openly right wing and has become infamous for forcing local TV news anchors to churn out pro-Trump scripts.
American media is being consolidated into the hands of just a few corporations. Estimates are that just 5-6 companies control 90% of our media. Companies like Paramount, controlled by Larry Ellison’s son, Disney, which initially caved in the Kimmel scandal, Amazon, owned by Bezos, who’s consistently buddied up with the admin, you get the picture. Just a handful of billionaires control our news - and control the power to stand up to Trump’s media crackdown. But Trump is using his position to shift media power to his allies, and those allies, in turn, are positioned to bend the knee.
I won’t lie, the current state of American media scares me. The information we’re being fed is becoming easier and easier to manipulate. That’s why supporting independent journalism is so important – and why I’m rushing to script, film, and edit this video before the lions game this evening. No one is paying for this video – but its important, so here I am.
We’re in for a fight, for sure. But Disney reinstating Kimmel proves that we do have collective power. We cancelled our subscriptions, tanked stock prices, and they responded. The media may be controlled by a small few, but they make their money from US. And we have power with that.
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