Who Controls the Megaphone? – Episode 28 of Unbuffered

Christopher Mitchell (00:16)
Hey, this is Unbuffered. We’ve got a new episode today, and we’re talking about the media and consolidation. I’m Chris Mitchell and I’m with the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. And I’m here today with Matt Wood, who is vice president of policy and general counsel of free press. welcome, Matt.

Matt Wood (00:34)
Thanks, Chris. Great to be

Christopher Mitchell (00:35)
free press being an organization that looks at technology and media ownership and stuff like that, you do not report to Barry Weiss and you are freepress.net, which is very different from the trash supposed news content produced by Barry Weiss.

Matt Wood (00:51)
Correct. We were at dot net, which sounds about as ancient as it is, but we’ve been around for twenty three years and Barry Weiss’s organization has not been, but definitely got a lot more attention over the last few years. But yeah, we were fighting the Paramount Warner Brothers merger and had to say we’re not actually a division of CBS, so de definitely some room for confusion.

Christopher Mitchell (01:09)
And then we have Karl Bode, who is no stranger to the audience here. Karl’s a freelance reporter. I wrote down writer, thinker, screamer, fine print newsletter.

Karl (01:16)
Screamer.

I am quite the screamer. That’s me. Thank you for having me.

Christopher Mitchell (01:22)
It’s wonderful to have you guys both back. And also, Karl, I just wanted to, I feel like I’ve been I wanted to shout this out, but Mike has been one of the best people talking about Jonathan Haidt in the future. Mike Masnik, who runs Tech Dirt, where you also write. And I just finished an amazing book which is Restoring Childhood, which talks about the real challenge with kids and media devices, the the tools that they use. So I always wanna, whenever I see you, I remember I remembered of your work with Mike Masnik, and then that spurred that.

And I want to make sure the audience knows we’re going talk about this in the future. I’m going find some excuse to talk about kids and devices and stuff and how everyone gets it wrong. And it’s a great book if you want to get ahead of the game. but we’re talking about media consolidation and kind of thinking about the Paramount merger and then also something that I talked briefly with Berin Szoka and Gigi Sohn about, which is FCC Actions. I just want to start here. Matt, the Federal Communications Commission just basically blew away the cap on ownership.

Which previously was trying to stop a few companies from owning all of the media that we consume, I guess. what what exactly happened there?

Matt Wood (02:27)
Yeah, well I mean there are several limits at the FCC historically, and many of them have been completely eradicated, erased from the rule books or disappeared over time. The one you’re talking about is the limit on national reach of broadcast conglomerates. So we’re not talking necessarily at least about T V networks, although the big four networks do own some stations as well. They don’t reach nearly as much of the country as companies like Nexstar or Sinclair or Grey Television.

Not exactly household names and not that well known outside of the areas where they hold these licenses. But they’re huge companies and they know reaching more and more of the of the country. The most recent deal, and when they were fighting kind of in tandem with the rule change you’re talking about, was that Nexstar, the largest TV conglomerate, wanted to buy and in fact claimed that they had bought Tegna and they tried to close the deal before they’d gotten all the antitrust approvals. And so that company would reach 265 would ho r o on the license were two hundred and sixty-five local stations.

and reach more than eighty percent of the country. The national cap was actually set by Congress. It was set at thirty nine percent, which, you know, don’t even get me started, was kind of a weird place to land for a compromise, but something that happened back in two thousand four. And it says that right in the law that Congress wrote. But this FCC under Chairman Brendan Carr doesn’t have a lot of respect for anybody, including Congress or the laws or the rules that preceded them. And so they purported now to just get rid of that cap and say, Well, it’s a rule and Congress didn’t tell us we couldn’t take it away, so they’re gonna change it.

That order just came out from the F C C even though they voted on it back in the summer and so now we’ll probably finally lurch into motion in court challenges to this really audacious action by this FCC to basically say, You can own as many T V stations as you want and reach the entire country. And what I’ll say is, you know, a couple of quick things and then get off of this, but you know Yeah yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (04:12)
Well before the meet, let me say that for one second, ’cause I do think

the thing that always comes to mind on this for me is the Sinclair supercut of all of the Yeah, okay. So like that’s for

Matt Wood (04:20)
Exactly. Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (04:22)
me. Like people go back to w w how long ago was that even?

Matt Wood (04:26)
I think that was five or six years ago. It was in the first Trump administration if I recall and say twenty eighteen. So yeah, boy. Exactly. Yeah.

Karl (04:32)
Are you talking about the dead you’re talking about the dead spin video? Yeah. That

that that had more impact on people’s minds than I think any possible journalism I’d seen in the previous fifteen years combined, just so that people could

Matt Wood (04:42)
Yeah.

Karl (04:42)
visualize what that what that looked like when broadcasting is consolidated.

Christopher Mitchell (04:45)
So it was it was all

these different local anchors reading the exact same words, almost the same intonation, in different places as though it was local content. And for me that comes back and I’ll come back to you in one second, but but Karl, I have to think that Deadspin would never do that now, right? Because Dead Spin itself has also been bought

Karl (05:01)
Deads

Christopher Mitchell (05:01)
up.

Karl (05:01)
yeah, Deadspin was acquired and their journalism is now a hollow shell of what it was back then. All the people that created that stuff have moved on to other things and yeah, you couldn’t even get that video done today. because you’ve got so many

Christopher Mitchell (05:12)
So Matt.

Karl (05:12)
of these these zombie corpse news organizations that get hollowed out and the public doesn’t understand that that they’re not the same quality.

Matt Wood (05:22)
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And I think that’s the the perfect illustration of why this matters. For one thing, you know, as I said, we’ve been around for twenty three years and working on broadcast media and lots of other things too. For the longest time in DC and maybe elsewhere in the industry too, it’s been like, broadcasting, who cares? That’s sort of literally yesterday’s news. Well, lo and behold, not only do people still get most of their news about elections about from broadcasting and we see massive advertising about elections on broadcast TV.

But this president certainly cares about broadcasts and we’ve seen everything they’ve done to try and squeeze these stations, to control the narrative, to suppress dissent, to do exactly what we saw Sinclair doing there, to sort of seed the propaganda. And, you know, in some ways other companies have a national megaphone too. The broadcasters like to say, Well, why should we be singled out and only be able to reach a certain percentage of the country? And I would say, You’re not singled out, you have special advantages. You know, Sinclair can have a website just like Google can, even if Google’s is better or more

highly

trafficked. But these stations get essentially free licenses to speak over the public airwaves in a different medium and one that admittedly has changed, but that we certainly think is still important. So these companies want to have more and more access to that. And as you said, Chris, it’s not just about the national megaphone. I mean there’s nothing wrong with having a nationwide message for a media company. It’s when they try to disguise it and pass it off as local news and claim it that somehow they’re doing a local service when really it’s something that is very homogenized and top down.

And then just made to look like local coverage with this really bad veneer of the local anchors who are all reading from the same script, quite literally sometimes.

Christopher Mitchell (06:57)
So we’re gonna we’re gonna come back to this theme, but I wanted to have Karl just remind us what’s at stake with the Paramount merger here that’s been moving pretty rapidly and this show will be we’re recording this on Monday, October fifth, and it’ll go up October sixth. So it probably won’t have changed too much in that time. But Karl, what’s what’s what’s the merger including?

Karl (07:19)
so Larry Ellison, who is a right-wing oligarch billionaire and a close Trump ally, basically wanted his son to become a media mogul in Hollywood. So he gifted him not one but two major Hollywood studios, first with Paramount and CBS. And now with the a hundred and ten billion dollar acquisition of Warner Brothers. so the two of those studios are fusing, which is creating all sorts of consolidation in media and journalism. and the concerns that people have had about Larry Ellison’s impact on CBS are now gonna be funneled over to

To

CNN. Both of those organizations were already kind of leaning rightward and giving like Trumpism a lot more credit than it deserves in the press with Scott Jennings and stuff. And now I think under Larry Ellison’s ownership, you’re going to see a lot more of that kind of thing. inevitably what happens is that the debt from these massive deals results in huge amounts of layoffs. All of the costs of the debt from these deals is almost historically always borne by consumers and labor. So you’re gonna see for about six months you nothing’s gonna happen.

Going pretend that they’re creating all sorts of amazing new s synergies with this merger, and then you’re going to start seeing thousands and thousands of layoffs and corner cutting and lower quality product and more right-wing leaning oligarch-friendly news output from CNN, and it’s going to all stage into the next year. it was particularly frustrating because it looked like the states had a functional antitrust lawsuit. Twelve states had collaborated with California leading the way. but that was recently scuttled after political pressure just grew apparently too great for.

Rob Bunt in California to hold his ground in terms of challenging the lawsuit. So they basically settled and threw out a whole bunch

Matt Wood (08:55)
Basically seven three.

Karl (08:56)
of conditions that mean absolutely nothing, like a independent oversight board of CNN determined to ensure that the journalism remains quality, but the board is going to be pretty much comprised remains yeah, I know, I know. I catch I catch myself doing that all

Christopher Mitchell (09:05)
Remains. Sorry. I w there’s so many ways I wanted to jump in as what you were saying,

Matt Wood (09:06)
Sorry. I can’t take my name catch myself.

Karl (09:12)
the time, like as if CNN and CBS were were had didn’t have problems to begin with.

but the conditions do nothing. This oversight board is stocked mostly with people that were going to be appointed by Paramount. it’s gonna be mostly decorative and the layoffs th you know, the layoffs are gonna come fast and furious in the new year.

Christopher Mitchell (09:29)
I mean, I will say, like, I do feel like there’s

Matt Wood (09:30)
Like I feel like

Christopher Mitchell (09:31)
a part of me that welcomes and I think if this is an appropriate use, the enshittification I I don’t know, enshittification shouldn’t just mean the sort of the general decline of stuff, but like, I there’s like the Trotsky argument of like, well, let’s just make things worse faster so people realize how bad it is. And

Matt Wood (09:46)
worse faster so we can realize how bad it is. And

Christopher Mitchell (09:50)
th cable news is so bad. There’s there’s

Karl (09:53)
Yeah. Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (09:54)
not like a good model where it’s like, if only we could get these other ones up to this standard, you know.

Karl (09:58)
No,

and they and they have no ideas

Christopher Mitchell (09:58)
There’s a part of me that’s

Karl (10:00)
yeah, they have no ideas how to fix it, so they’re just chasing scale. They’re just chasing a possible scale and improved quarterly returns and it’s a fool’s errand and the quality just steadily erodes and the layoffs come and th they’re not building anything quality and they have no idea what they’re doing. I think in this case the only saving grace here is that the Ellisons don’t really appear all that competent half of the time. The kind of people they appoint

in positions of power not great.

Christopher Mitchell (10:21)
Right. Well the the only other

thing I wanted I wanted to note is that like and Matt, maybe you can help I didn’t I didn’t warn either one of you about this because I just remembered I want to do this, but like can we just remember how things have changed just over the past few years? I mean, so TikTok is like one of the major sources of media that a lot of people consume at this point. And Trump gave it to a friend of his. he engineered that starting with his first term and then finishing it up here.

where what other major we’ve seen CBS sixty minutes now has gone

Matt Wood (10:50)
C B S now has gone.

Christopher Mitchell (10:52)
from being somewhat independently minded to being again controlled by people who are trying to impress Trump. what what else have we seen switch hands significantly?

Matt Wood (11:03)
Well, I mean, I think to this point, you know, not even just people, but the same person. I mean, it’s Larry Ellison who has the Oracle Empire, which is where his money came from, who is a driving force, if not th the sole owner in the US of that TikTok breakup and we actually fought that. Not because we had any love for TikTok the company or for, you know, potential information being ceded by other governments, but because having the US government wrest that away and say, We don’t want people in this country to hear from those overseas seems like a really terrible precedent for us also.

But yeah, I the Ellison family’s rise here has been pretty remarkable to become, you know, yet another huge media conglomerate. If you see the the picture they made that they’re trying to, you know, advertise how great they are, but it’s like Skydance and all the different Warner Brothers properties and Paramount properties on one

sheet, if you will, all the logos, and it’s just frightening to see how much reach they have and how much control they have. So, you know, what’s happened is continued consolidation, we’ve been seeing this trend for the last thirty, forty, even fifty years, if you want to go back. and you know, I want to be careful here. I a a huge media mogul is free to have whatever politics they want. So I’m not saying that Larry Ellison isn’t free to slant CNN coverage in a certain way just like anybody else would be free to slant it in a certain way.

Should we be slanting the news at all? Like that’s a good journalistic ethics question, but you know, having a political viewpoint is certainly available to these people who have all these properties. And yet the problem we have is we’re supposed to have antitrust laws. You know, broadcasting’s even more special. We’ve had broadcast ownership limits like the one I was talking about at the top. But even on the movie studio side or the streaming side or the cable news side, it wasn’t a slam dunk antitrust case in every single market.

But massive consolidation in the cable T V industry and that is still a big ticket item despite the fact that so many people have cut the cord over the last several years. And, you know, consolidation, especially on the movie studio side too. So as Karl was saying, you know, Rob Monta and eleven other attorneys general had a very good antitrust case against this deal. Not dependent on the politics, but dependent on just the sheer economic concentration and that

unfortunately seemed to evaporate when there was political pressure applied, not just directly to Bonta, but to lots of other California politicians too.

Christopher Mitchell (13:14)
Right, I wanna come back to that. Karl, what are other examples of where we’ve seen this consolidation?

Karl (13:19)
Well, we’ve seen it with this very same company. We saw A T T

executives and telecom decided that they were going to try and dominate the entirety of media, so they went out and bought DirecTV and Warner Brothers and it turned into just an incredible disaster. I think they lost upward of forty thousand jobs to that entire thing. something that you’ll notice isn’t mentioned in the whole media coverage of this recent merger. You’ll notice the AT&T just in 2017 made an entire mess of this exact company. All their promises were meaningless. It resulted in just a a monolithic mess of a company that had no idea what it was doing.

And run by people who don’t care about art or creatives or labor. we just went through that and then we just decided to repeat it a second time here with this new merger. So I mean this history is so clear on this stuff. There’s fifty years of evidence about how these deals just result in massive amounts of debt and just so many layoffs. And, you know, when AT&T was dealing with Warner Brothers, they they shuttered so many good creative projects. They wouldn’t even air Sem Sesame Street at one point. They pulled that off the air, they closed D C Comics Vertico imprint, which was a really promising

You know, creative comic book imprint. so these guys, these are guys that just do not care about creative talent or creating good art or even building a sustainable thing. They care about growth for growth’s sake, they care about scale, they care about information warfare and influence in journalism that reflects their financial interests. and so this is the next two years is just gonna be a a big hot mess and a lot of people pointing fingers like in that Spider-Man meme, wondering where everything went wrong.

Christopher Mitchell (14:50)
I think you’re missing I think you’re missing

the the actual conspiracy here, Karl, which is that these people care greatly about art and they recognize that art only comes when the artists are starving. And if you fire them all, they will be inspired to create still greater pieces of art.

Karl (15:01)
Right. Right.

That must be it. Yeah, they just want to create mass suffering and struggling for all artists and journalists, so I’m sure that must be

Matt Wood (15:11)
You’re making them very noble. I mean, it’s not even just AT&T

though, although AT&T has a track record here of broken promises and other mergers too. They’ve always excelled at promising to do things they were already gonna do anyway, and dressing that up as some kind of public benefit. But of course, before that we had AOL buying Time Warner. And then, you know, even older than all of us on this podcast, Time Warner itself was a consolidation between Time magazine and Warner Brothers Studios. So I like to say that Warner Warner Brothers has now had more marriages than even Larry Ellison has had.

and none of them have really lasted, or at least not much more than a couple of years. so yeah, it’s just they they take on the debt, they goost the stock price temporarily, although I think their bondholders are basically getting junk ratings on the new debt they’re raising now. And so even the the like short term financial impact may be negative and yet billionaires are gonna billionaire and don’t really care about who gets hurt along the way.

Christopher Mitchell (16:01)
I mean, to me that what what matters about this is not necessarily that these people are craven individuals who are now incentivized to try to please Trump. a president who is is deeply concerning and out of step with American values, I would say. I’m I remember when in the nineties people said CNN was a Clinton news network, right? That was like I think the the the Fox new not well, the pre Fox, the the right wing talk radio.

And you could c you could I mean you could say that they were far left, you could say that they were far right on some things. What drives me crazy about is that they hire people on the basis of who looks good and will will upset the audience, not on the basis of who can inform anyone or inform the public. And I’m just I reflect, I don’t know. I I’m a big fan of the bull work. Probably neither one of you are. I really I f like a fair amount of their work. And the focus groups that they do, I’m always like screaming.

Matt Wood (16:55)
Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (16:56)
And and one of the ones, JVL was just in his newsletters just talking about a woman who was talking about she wasn’t sure who to vote for and she was frustrated because the police department in her town in Michigan had been defunded and done something else. And you know, he went to look it up, and of course it hadn’t been. It was just like it was just she doesn’t even know what was going on. And for me, that’s what drives me crazy is that this media system

The incentives have nothing to do with informing people. And the more consolidated is, the more these morons who are in charge, who literally aren’t good at anything, the brunchlords, as Karl Cause calls them, and we talked about that in previous show. You know, their their impact now it hits 35%, 40%, 75% over time, more and more of the American audience, just everyone. That’s the danger to me. And that’s why I think people should care. I mean, we’re not on here just because we’re like, there should be more distributed media. I just feel like this is a real impact.

Right? I mean like freaking genocides are carried out in in in horrible wars because of media coverage. It’s the only thing that motivates this many people to pick up arms against their neighbors is is is like slanted media coverage. It’s really dangerous. Did I go off the deep end? I mean I just feel like both of you are like, whoa, I didn’t see us going there. I

Matt Wood (18:08)
Yeah, and I mean you know they’re calling

Christopher Mitchell (18:12)
didn’t either. But like I just I go back frequently to that. So am I crazy?

Matt Wood (18:16)
No,

no, no, it’s your show. You can go to whatever end you want. I I would say though that, you know, auth consolidation is as you’re describing, greatly aids authoritarianism and especially this brand we’re getting now of wanting to silence dissent. So it doesn’t have to be necessarily political coverage slanted in one direction. It’s about having fewer choke points to control. So, you know, Donald Trump gets upset at Jimmy Kimmel, and not only does the FCC chair, who used to preach a lot about free speech, but not so much anymore, not only does he take

direct actions against ABC and its parent company Disney time and time again. he also puts that message out there pretty loud and clear dog whistle, maybe not even a dog whistle, a loud whistle, and these giant broadcast conglomerates we were talking about earlier, not necessarily household names, but you know, Sinclair and Nexstar, they drop Jimmy Kimmel from their local ABC affiliates, and that has much more reach than just the few stations that ABC itself owns. So we see them working in tandem, whether they want to or not, right? They know which side of the

bread is buttered for them and they know that if they want to get their deals through, because all these companies are chasing short term financial hits and consolidation, then they have to capitulate to Trump and, you know, so that’s why to me it doesn’t even matter well, I shouldn’t say that. It matters what their politics are, but that’s not even necessarily the driving factor. The driving factor is the profit motivation and then how much they’re willing to compromise their journalistic ethics or even their own editorial independence in order to get that next deal through.

Karl (19:41)
Yeah,

that’s the thing, is it it it results Sure.

Christopher Mitchell (19:42)
There’s two things there. Sorry, Karl, could I can I reframe

this really just really briefly? There’s interesting, right? Cause I feel like Matt, one could have scale in the like the BBC, right? In theory, the BBC has as much scale as it is possible to have, right? Like every home basically in Britain has it, more or less or less, right? And yet they’re not owned by someone that’s trying to figure out how to like get a defense contract from the federal government from this from the state or something like that, right?

And so there’s like scale and there’s also like these cross ownership ideas. I just wanted to tease that tease those apart. Those might not be totally they wouldn’t have to be overlapping necessarily, but they are here. Go ahead, Karl.

Karl (20:16)
What fascinates me is this accumulative impact that results in this kind of pseudo journalism, kind of this infotainment journalism that looks and smells a little bit like journalism, but it hasn’t it it’s not interested in actually informing anybody. I mean even even politics and propaganda aside. What you wind up getting is a lot of this CEO I I affectionately call it CEO set of thing journalism where there’s just Sam Altman today said this stupid thing. We’re

not gonna fact check it. We’re not gonna call a historian to see if what he said was true, we’re not gonna include any historical context down the page to

you know, inf actually inform the reader on this subject. So I think even politics aside, you just you just get bad quality pseudo journalism that is actively just befuddling peop not not actively just misleading people, but useless, pointless. It’s designed to look like a useful thing, but it’s just empty garbage.

Matt Wood (21:01)
And you were talking earlier, Chris, about, you know, it’s already pretty bad, how much worse can it get, or maybe we should be rooting for it to get worse. But, you know, I I like to refer to or possibly botch the the Churchill quote, if that’s if I’m even getting in the right place, but you it’s the worst system except for all the others. So I think local T V news is some of the worst local news we could have, except there aren’t many others anymore, and newspapers have have deteriorated even more. And so, you know, I wouldn’t I don’t think there’s a lot there to save, but yet we’ve worked a lot on saving it. So you’re talking about the B B C like

Free press, we would love to be building more public models and nonprofit and non-commercial models, whether that’s with government funding or in nonprofits or other cooperative ways to do it. But you know, local TV news is still what a lot of people turn to. It’s still more trusted than a lot of sources. And so when it gets worse, I think we do suffer. Having said that, you know, it’s not just the if it bleeds, it leads, and the sort of very harmful coverage they’ve done, but as exactly as Karl’s saying, when it’s just utter fluff, I remember seeing

Must have been at least fifteen years ago, you know. The local Fox affiliate is covering the American Idol auditions being held by guess which network? Fox, right? So I mean sure, people might be interested, but it’s not exactly journalism that’s changing anybody’s life, and yet that’s the kind of stuff that we see recycled when these companies get bigger and bigger, and not only broader, but more and more vertical and they control every layer of the the media stack, if that’s a fair way to think about it.

Christopher Mitchell (22:21)
Right. If you

if you if you look at when journalism succeeds really well, I think, and I hate that term journalism, when when reporting and and and informing people goes well, I think it’s done in part, I mean, often by local people that have a specific modus, but it’s motive, but it’s by people that have a pride in it, right? And like

The people that make the decisions on the coverage that is getting out on CBS now, they don’t care whether or not they’re getting something right. They don’t care if they’re putting if they’re they’re finding the story that’s going to change people’s lives. They’re trying to figure out how they can get to their next job, which may not even be in the news, right? I mean, it just it seems they’re trying to figure out like what they can do with resources that are determined solely by people that are trying to figure out if they can get another merger in, what they can do with the stock price. And

To me, this is like a a a a part of the problem is that you don’t actually have organizations that are focused on the news. They’re controlled by entities that have divergent interests. And the news is just a way that they get their their their product out, basically. Or, you know, it’s like it’s like a byproduct of what they’re trying to do.

Matt Wood (23:32)
Yeah, I mean that was the bargain in the fifties and earlier, right? It’s like cross-subsidization from the classified ads in the newspaper or you know, and I don’t want to overstate the golden age either, right? Like there were lots of problems with news coverage in the fifties and sixties too. But yeah, I think we’ve definitely lost something of that of the notion that, you know, either we’re cross-subsidizing something that’s noble or it has to be integr it has to have integrity in order to draw advertising dollars, like as we’ve seen

the multiplication of number of channels online. That’s been a great thing in a lot of ways and taken a w out a lot of the barriers and gatekeepers, but, you know, it’s also led to this proliferation of just utter slop that people will turn to and they’re not they don’t care if it’s true, right? It it gets eyeballs and the people putting it on are like that’s our main goal, as you said, is to keep people’s attention, not necessarily to inform them or provide accurate information.

Christopher Mitchell (24:21)
Yeah, that’s that’s I think a key that people need to remember is that when it comes to visual media in particular, it’s this goal of trying to get you to to come back and to stay tuned. It’s not about whether or not it’s it’s correct, whether or not it’s nourishing for the soul or anything like that.

Karl (24:37)
It’s a lot of trolling now, right? I mean you see it with the Washington Post editorial comment section and the New York Times editorial section. It’s a lot of trolling and Barry Weiss’s free press. They’re tr they’re just trolling.

Whatever gets people agitated and upset will be amplified by people. I’m gonna outrage reshare this garbage. And it creates kind of a self fulfilling, self amplified machine where just nonsense is perpetuated. And you if you’re like a policy reporter like me trying to talk about some main mundane FCC robocall decision trying to get people to hear it, you’re just it’s you can’t compete. It’s impossible.

Christopher Mitchell (25:09)
Which is weird

’cause people are actually interested in that. I think people wanna know what they can do to have fewer robocalls, right? Like

Karl (25:15)
You would think. Yeah. I mean, yeah. But po but actual policy, actual reporting, actual context, and you really saw it again during the press coverage of this whole recent Paramount merger, is that all the coverage was really superficial, was kind of trolly, was kind of shallow. None of it talked about historical precedent. None of it talked about the fifty other deals before this one that were terrible. it was a lot of CEO said a thing. Paramount CEO says he’ll leave California if anybody makes

Matt Wood (25:39)
Exactly.

Karl (25:40)
him follow antitrust law was like the headline you saw for months and months and months, and then

Christopher Mitchell (25:44)
Well in

that case, so I wanted I was wondering if you would use

Matt Wood (25:44)
I would like to use it

Christopher Mitchell (25:46)
that, Karl. The the board actually o voted to give him authorization to leave, right? And so maybe I think your beef is no one really checked how well if if that was feasible. Like

Matt Wood (25:55)
Easily.

Christopher Mitchell (25:55)
could they do that? Would they just be chopping their

face off? Like

Karl (25:57)
Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (25:58)
what

Karl (25:58)
He

might have left. It would have been really painful for him, I think, to screw Hollywood like that. He wouldn’t had a good time with it. He might have left anyway. You know what I mean? It’s there’s just it’s it’s it doesn’t it does at the at the end it kind of doesn’t even matter if his threat was real or not. Antitrust law is antitrust law. You either enforce it or you don’t.

Matt Wood (26:14)
Yeah.

Karl (26:15)
and there’s really nothing stopping him from leaving California now anyway, ’cause that’s kind of the trend in Hollywood generally is overseas production in in the first place. So there’s nothing and and you know these conditions are worthless on this deal. There’s nothing really holding his feet to the fire.

big promise was that he would release thirty, I think tent pole big Hollywood films a year, but you know, a lot of that is completely outside of his control. Market realities and, you know, competition and broadcast and film and Hollywood are gonna dictate most of that.

Christopher Mitchell (26:42)
I saw almost

Matt Wood (26:42)
Some

Christopher Mitchell (26:42)
every Marvel movie in the studios and I’m almost done like with Marvel. So I

Matt Wood (26:42)
things that we need to have the next one should be.

Christopher Mitchell (26:46)
mean like that’s how far they’ve gone

Karl (26:47)
Ha ha ha.

Christopher Mitchell (26:48)
with this. Like I gave up on Star Wars, I gave up on Marvel. Like I don’t

Karl (26:51)
No. But that’s

Matt Wood (26:51)
If only they’d

known you were out, Chris, they might have given up on the deal. No, I mean, yeah, and

Karl (26:52)
kind of an but that

Christopher Mitchell (26:54)
Ha ha.

Matt Wood (26:55)
e again, like promising things that they’re gonna do anyway. You know, d there’s different accounting different predictions you can do with this, but the independent companies as two companies rather than one were on track to do thirty four next year. So their promises, we’ll do thirty. You know,

Karl (27:08)
Yeah.

Matt Wood (27:08)
pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. You know, it it’s actually they’re promising less.

Karl (27:10)
Yeah. And that’s where like a real journalist that’s

where a real journalist would come in and say, you know, point to that fact. But I was reading a lot of the trademangs like Deadline and Variety and they just don’t they don’t mention context, they don’t mention facts. It’s just completely repeat what the what the extraction class interests are and pretend pretend that that’s journalism. And that’s that’s enshittification of your media and enshittification of your local news

and national news.

Christopher Mitchell (27:32)
Well, I do I do wanna hit

on something where I think I have a divergent or at least I have a very strong feeling about something where I think you two don’t, which is on the foreign ownership piece. And and I’ll note that like I feel like if the Norwegian sovereign fund was putting tons of money into Hollywood, we might not care as much. but if it’s Chinese funds or if it’s funds from Saudi Arabia, the Qatar, the any of the Emirates, I’m I’m deeply concerned.

in part because these are societies that have significant amounts of repression and in a in a history, I think, of trying to of push the world in the direction that they would like, which is not an open society with free debate, which is where I feel like we should be going. And historically, I have, I’ll just admit, the weakest part of my argument is I’ve felt more comfortable with a

I’m just gonna say person rather than getting

Matt Wood (28:28)
Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (28:28)
dragged, like like the guy who runs Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, you know, in charge of things. Cause I like to imagine he shares some of the values of like openness and and freedom of speech. And I yet I’m

Karl (28:39)
Man.

Christopher Mitchell (28:40)
just I’m owning up to the fact that the argument is weak there, but like I’m deeply concerned about having foreign states that have that many resources starting to set US culture. Like that’s deeply concerning to me.

Matt Wood (28:50)
Yeah, I mean so I wouldn’t say that we haven’t cared it. Free press is one of the only organizations really that filed in the FCC proceeding. And this wasn’t really about Paramount acquiring Warner Brothers, but the fact that Paramount was taking on more foreign ownership interests in order to get more money to make the sale. So it’s kind of a bank shot already. You know, I guess I would say, yeah, especially as you rightly

point out the boomerang that Mark Zuckerberg or you Rupert Murdoch had to become a US citizen to become owner of the Fox stations thirty years ago plus now. Yeah. I I wouldn’t say that that’s been a great thing for America or for the world. So, you know, I get why people have this sense, especially when it comes to broadcast stations, of that being more of an infrastructure, not just a media source, and therefore having some kind of different national security apparatus concerns. But you know, I would just I would focus on the oligarchical

and even tyrannical nature of the people with ownership stakes and I wouldn’t necessarily distinguish between the Saudi government, the Chinese government, or Donald Trump. You know, there’s lots of room for propaganda and unfortunately. they’re all out there and we don’t need to pick and say this one’s better than that one because they’re from here. I think, you know, oftentimes that’s not true and you know, maybe the local despot is just as bad as the one that’s far away, but that doesn’t mean that billionaires and literal rulers of countries that are authoritarian or repressive in all sorts of ways should be the ones

Christopher Mitchell (30:17)
I I feel like it’s it’s pretty concerning what we see. And I feel like this is partially in as a result of the consolidation, which is and I I you know, I I come back to the the NBA often and the whole you can’t criticize China and the Uyghurs. i I just to me it is deeply concerning and I don’t think you have that level of of impact without having the the consolidation, right? If you have a

lot of people who generally have pro capitalist, monopoly capitalist views, right? Like they’re they’re just like they’re literally in it for themselves.

Matt Wood (30:56)
Like leading for those.

Christopher Mitchell (30:58)
But you have a lot of them, you end up with better results than a few of them being able to set the terms for everyone, I think, Karl. Is that is that right or am I just imagining that?

Karl (31:08)
I I like Gigi Sohn’s approach where diversity ownership is an important restriction where you actually look to like, okay, we should just at least have a diversity of types of ownerships. In the same way a newsroom shouldn’t just have like a bunch of brunch lord trust fund kids who got an internship through dad. You get a specific type of journalism through that way. You know what I mean? So like a little bit of diversity in ownership of the media conglomerates is at least useful. And I know that’s a that’s a big reach now given how much we’re destroying media consolidation limits. I th I don’t think Gigi was ever ever

Able to get traction with their idea. But I at least like

Matt Wood (31:39)
Yeah.

Karl (31:40)
that. I think what what kills me with this stuff is the hypocrisy, watching Brennan Carr spend the last five years going on Fox News complaining about TikTok because the potential was that Chinese could influence TikTok, right? And then he gets into power, and their solution is basically to offload that platform to a bunch of Trump’s billionaire buddies who have the same exact moral problems, if not worse. TikTok was at least trying to behave to remain in the United States. You know, the new TikTok under ownership of

Larry Ellison is they’ve successfully gutted a lot of our

Matt Wood (32:09)
So

Karl (32:10)
regulatory oversight, so they know they probably see less oversight than China was seeing. So it’s all I think what kills me is the hypocrisy of like the scaremongering about foreign ownership with one hand by our own corrupt autocrats. It’s a it’s a real thorny mess. I don’t know if that answered your question.

Matt Wood (32:25)
Yeah. I mean I think Yeah

but your NBA example’s a great one, Chris, and I’ll keep expanding on it. A lot of right wing politicians, Josh Hawley comes to mind, will criticize the NBA and say they won’t criticize China. And suddenly people like Josh Hawley, and I mean this is a good thing, I suppose, are concerned about ethnic and religious minorities being put into detention camps and being repressed on the basis of their religion. Well, let’s look at home, right? And so that’s my point earlier. I’m not here saying China’s worse than the US or better than the US. I’m saying there’s plenty of

giant countries in the world right now doing horrible things to segments of their population. And the problem is not for me that some countries should be allowed to do that and some shouldn’t. It’s that nobody should be doing that. And journalism’s job should be to report on that, not to be you know, it’s not the journalists’ fault they’re being bought out and put out of work or, you know, bought out and put into the service of the propaganda rather than being able to report on these kinds of atrocities that are being committed by far too many hands right now, regardless of what nation those people are from or committing them.

Christopher Mitchell (33:25)
Yes, I think that’s right. The the question in my mind is is what do we do next then? And you know, Karl, do we punish Rob Bonta in California for for

Karl (33:33)
No, he’s

Christopher Mitchell (33:35)
just saying that that this is intolerable and then agreeing to a set of conditions that are intolerable? I mean like

Karl (33:42)
No, I think I

think Matt I think Matt can speak to this well ’cause his group has done a really a lot of really excellent work on rebuilding local journalism. You know, through like their civic information consortium, stuff like that he can talk about. there’s real Aside from just enforcing antitrust law, which which kills me because I watched the Trump administration pretend that they were the antitrust administration in two thousand twenty four ish, you know, the election season. and and you saw how that

Matt Wood (34:06)
Yeah.

Karl (34:07)
worked out. But, you know, there there’s a lot of very tactical, concrete steps you can take to rebuilding

local media and I think Free Press Matt’s group is doing a great job in that.

Christopher Mitchell (34:16)
So Matt, are

we managing the decline or are you building something something new and refreshing?

Matt Wood (34:21)
Well, I mean so

I wrote a piece that ran a couple of weeks ago now, the Night First Amendment Institute talking about you know, people activists are tired of playing defense and obviously not just on the media and technology, but everywhere. And yet if we don’t do that and try to stop the slide, there’s not any oxygen left. There’s not any space left for new things to grow. So I think we do need to fight against mergers and the corporate media getting worse and you know, without opining on if it gets worse faster, do we somehow get to a better place sooner?

Like

I think a lot of people get hurt when it gets worse because these so called mainstream, whatever the right word would be these days, outlets do sway so much of our political outcomes and, you know, the way people’s lives are impacted day by day by these policies. But yeah, exactly as Karl said, you know, we want to do that and not rely on corporate media to somehow chasten itself and get better, but to have space for other models to grow. So, you know, again, we we fought to prevent the defunding of PBS and N PR and

They were not doing a perfect job, but again, you know, this administration has wanted to take out any possible kind of opposition to itself. so we need national public media funded by congressional public tax dollars. We need local media, the public broadcast system to be better at that, you know, more truly local rather than being driven top down by NPR, for example.

And then you know other models too, the civic information being produced by non commercial and community outlets that have some space to breathe and also some dollars to grow. and so that’s what we’re about is trying to find new ways to fund it while keeping it free from government interference, right? Which is no easy trick. But that’s the real key is

Christopher Mitchell (35:54)
I mean, does that mean more of

my neighbors spending fifty dollars a month or fifty dollars yeah, fifty dollars a month on something or fifty dollars a year on a subscription? What I mean, what does it really

Matt Wood (36:03)
I mean

Christopher Mitchell (36:04)
take do you think to sustain it in in modern the modern economy?

Matt Wood (36:07)
I think we see that already, right, with places like Substack, which i itself can be problematic, but you know, more and more journalists going the route that musicians have had to go and saying, Pay me, I’m doing good work.

That gets to be hard on people’s pocketbooks and you know, not even people who can’t afford any of those subscriptions, but even people who can afford some of them. So I think that’s part of the answer is people voting with their feet and voting with their wallets. But, you know, I’m also very much dedicated to an organization that’s dedicated to finding ways to pool that money and to have public funding, whether it’s governmental or, you know, foundation or some other kind of non-commercial route, just so it’s not solely dependent on market forces popularity. I mean that’s what we saw with the with the this.

Solution of CPB is which stations are doing fine in the wake of that. The ones in big cities with more affluent listener bases, generally whiter, generally more educated, you know, not the people who are necessarily hurting either from the impacts of the policies that they’re facing or from having not enough choices in their local information ecology. It’s rural stations, it’s stations that are serving less affluent populations. They’re the ones who need the public funding and where, you know, non-commercial is supposed to mean.

Not driven by who can make the most popular appeal, but who is actually providing the public good that maybe the market would never fund adequately.

Christopher Mitchell (37:27)
Can we can we go over something that I’m just it’s stuck in my head? And it’s it goes back to the election. It’s the Springfield, Ohio. the president, his, his team, vice president knowingly lied over and over again. They’re eating the pets, they’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats, right? I feel like the media covered that fairly well in that.

Anyone who read more than 10 words on it should have, I think, came across a statement like, they’re not eating the pets. I mean, I saw that reported in many places. And yet it was effective. And how does a how does a healthy media ecosystem deal with this environment where that’s the case, I wonder. Karl,

Matt Wood (38:08)
system deal with this environment.

Christopher Mitchell (38:13)
looks like you have a thought.

Karl (38:14)
You don’t put lies in the headline. If you look at like the data of what people actually read, some ridiculous amount of people never make it past the headline. And then when you get past those people, some equally absurd amount of people never make it past about the third paragraph. But if you’ll read most of our mainstream news, you’ll see them put the lie in the headline. Trump said this lie. Sam Altman said this lie. Elon Musk said this lie. And then you’d get into the article itself, the meat of it, and you have to go down to the eighteenth paragraph, assuming they mentioned it

At all that that’s not true. And that’s especially true in political journalism. The lie is put in the paragraph and the sub the subheadline and the headline and the subheadline. And then they don’t bother to correct, or they correct it on the third or fourth paragraph. And by the time you got there, you’ve lost the war. You’ve already amplified a lie and you have lost. You’ve seeded propaganda into the electorate, and you’re really so I mean just foundationally basic journalistic practices. Don’t put lies in headlines, don’t you know, be aware of what you’re amplifying. Let’s get rid of CEO set of things.

thing and Trump said this thing journalism, which is a you know a byproduct of the ad engagement chasing metrics. so that that that would be my first argument. It’s just go back to basics, you know.

Matt Wood (39:23)
Yeah. And don’t cover it at all, right? I mean, we saw that with the

Karl (39:26)
Yeah, or don’t cover. Right. Right.

Christopher Mitchell (39:27)
So that’s what

Matt Wood (39:28)
the network’s relationship to Trump’s election, you know, fraud speech or whatever he wanted to call it, which was itself fraud and lies. You know, Fox, for example, in that case, having themselves lost a court case or settled a court case, I should say. We’re like, No, no, no, we don’t want to touch this, right? Then this got us in trouble last time and yet, you know, that seems remarkable, like a choice to not cover what the president’s saying, and you that’s yet

completely within journalist right and especially when it’s a lie. So I would say not only don’t put it in the headline, but you don’t have to show up at all if it’s not actually newsworthy.

Christopher Mitchell (39:58)
You

know, it’s interesting, right? ‘Cause like I have a have a very negative reaction to that, Matt. And yet the press did

Matt Wood (40:04)
You mean you want you want

the press to be there to witness the lie, or is that the kind of sense? Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (40:07)
Yeah, and I just I feel like if someone says

something that ludicrous, it’s like people should I mean and and

Matt Wood (40:12)
Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (40:12)
but I mean at the same time the press does this all the time, right? I mean, like President Trump said that Biden’s government led an effort to assassinate him. And

Matt Wood (40:22)
Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (40:23)
if the press took that seriously, there would have been no coverage of anything else as they tried to uncover that. Because like that would have been one of the greatest attempted crimes in the history of America. Like

Matt Wood (40:32)
Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (40:33)
You know, and so so like you’re right in that like this i they are constantly choosing not to elevate some things and then other things, I guess they feel like they are elevating because they’re like it’s a CNN and C B S argument from twenty sixteen of this makes us money to cover this thing, right?

Matt Wood (40:49)
Well there’s definitely that, but yeah, I mean I feel your pain and yet I think we have to grow past it because there’s a particular academic strain that’s like, No, no, no, we have to show the bad thing and everybody will see that it’s wrong and unfortunately for the reasons Karl’s saying so well and other reasons. A lot of people don’t see that it’s wrong, especially when it reinforces their existing preferences and biases. So, you know

I I’ve said it many times lately, like hypocrisy, or I should say calling out hypocrisy, doesn’t win us a lot of arguments in this town anymore here in DC. Because there’s a sense of if if only people knew, and unfortunately people do know, or they don’t care because it’s triggering something for them that’s like reinforcing a a preference, a privilege, a bias that they already have. So pointing to it only to rebut it.

is often what’s a called, right, the Strisand effect, right? Like don’t look at this flashing red light. Well, guess what? By that time they’ve already looked, then you might not be able to educate them otherwise or to peel them away from that story anymore.

Karl (41:45)
And because their ad ad ad engagement incentives are all twisted and influencing how they frame that story, they’re not actually able to challenge it when they do choose to cover it. So you get you just get an amplification of propaganda or disinformation and you don’t get real journalism.

Christopher Mitchell (41:58)
And that’s where I do feel like coming back to what you were talking about, Matt, regarding the the system that does work. I’ve always been concerned that I don’t think people want good news. Like I don’t I don’t want to spend hours of my day reading the newspaper. That’s well or like the five newspapers or whatever. You know, like I I was talking with some folks about we ha we’ve gone through this in the in the eighteen hundreds, late seventeen hundreds, right? Like the new newspapers, the pamphlets,

President Jefferson is a hermaphrodite, right? Like, I mean, like they accused him, made all kinds of accusations that were wild that seem pretty much like what we’re going through today. And and there was all this coverage. And then if I spring forward, I was talking with you about this, Karl, right? It was like, you know, people were have the attention span to sit down and listen to

Matt Wood (42:47)
Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (42:48)
two hour speeches, three hour speeches, five-hour debates

Matt Wood (42:51)
Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (42:52)
on issues. And we don’t have that today. And I don’t know.

How one builds a system. But it’s for me, it does come back to the things you touched on, Matt, which is I think philanthropy, government dollars, maybe some level of sponsorships, you know, like

Matt Wood (42:57)
But it’s for me, it does come back to the thing you touched on, which is I think plan to be government dollars, maybe some levels of ships, yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (43:06)
to some extent, although you start having some challenges there. But I don’t see subscriber revenue

Matt Wood (43:10)
right.

Christopher Mitchell (43:11)
being the driving thing, although perhaps for particularly magnetic people, but I don’t know like that my city council meetings are

Matt Wood (43:17)
City Council maybe.

Christopher Mitchell (43:17)
gonna be covered by that one industrious person who here is named Jane McClure.

Matt Wood (43:21)
changer like

Christopher Mitchell (43:22)
And like she does a great job, but it’s a city of three hundred thousand people. Like she can only do so much.

Matt Wood (43:22)
share my job. It’s a city of three

hundred thousand people. Yeah. Yeah, and I I don’t want to be pessimistic but realistic. I mean I think that y you said before the system that does work well, the non commercial media. I mean I think it works better. You know, nothing is perfect and you know I spent the last what is it now, I have to do the math seventeen years working on these issues. I think it’s just part of the larger story, right? Like, you know

that media coverage is what allows for bad governance and for bad people to get into power or voters to make bad choices. But, you know, it’s it’s not just about how do we get people to have an infinite attention span in an information soaked world so that they can catch all the bad things. To me it’s a much larger question of how do we invest in true progress so that we don’t have as many fires to put out. So, you know, I I see it very much as like, you know, Democrats now in the election want to talk about affordability, but we could talk about just livability, being able to survive

You know, and so once people have the means they need to survive, maybe we won’t have to be quite so on guard for all the corruption on every side, but that might sound l sound like kind of a pipe dream. I just think that there’s kinda no fixing the media in a vacuum if we’re not thinking about larger societal issues too.

Christopher Mitchell (44:30)
And guess for me, that’s how I just want to end is that I do think this is more important than people think it. On the regular, I hear people saying, you know, whether that’s someone like Ted Cruz saying, well, the media that they listen to, not all the media, and and I told the public the election was stolen. And now the public thinks the election was stolen. So we have to act on it because the public thinks this thing. And at the same time, I just feel like there’s too few of a question. Like, why do people believe crazy things?

and a lot of times it comes down to the media. And I I just feel like when it comes to policymakers, the kind of groups that Matt, like, that are often the big nonprofits in the United States that like set a lot of policy on the more the more left side, people don’t take it as seriously as I would want, considering there are few things that can get a person to pick up an edged weapon and use it against their neighbors, but the media is clearly one of those things. We don’t just don’t take it that seriously.

Karl (45:28)
I think a big part of it is we don’t really have great media literacy standards. This this belief that if you just put out some good journalism that people are gonna know how to find it. They’re just gonna have innately know how to find good journalism and do it. it doesn’t really work that way in practice because the good journalism is so drowned out by an ocean of propaganda and disinformation and clickbait stuff. But you look to like Finland, who has been having to deal with propaganda coming over the border from Russia. They start teaching kids how to identify unreliable narrators at the age of three or four. they start teaching children that

a

very young age how to identify reliable authors, reliable characters, you know, to identify disinformation. And I think that’s not absent from this is I don’t think we have great media literacy in this country and I think it’s gotten a little bit worse in the social media era.

Matt Wood (46:14)
Yeah. And I mean, yeah, we were talking about not only is it are we better off if it gets worse faster, and I I tend not to think that way, but I certainly see the appeal of it. But also the notion of like pointing to the bad thing that’s in social media in order to debunk it. And I don’t know a lot about this theory either from the people who have expounded it or the research that’s been done on it, but I think it it’s called in the right wing echo chamber world, trading up the chain, where, you know, you get the local T V news that still has a certain kind of

heft to it in a certain veneer and they say, Well, people are saying I mean that’s how Trump himself talks all the time, right? A lot of people are saying. No so no source cited, no need for it to be real. But it it’s creating this like echo chamber where you basically are, yeah, seeding the information chain with utter disinformation. Yeah.

Karl (46:59)
Yeah, you see it in pillars. Yeah, you see it you have

Washingt you have the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post over here saying it, you have Larry Ellison’s TikTok repeating it, you have Fox News and then Sinclair local broadcasting and they pick their points and they just repeat them with a just a brutal repetition to the point where it’s just everywhere, whether you like it or not.

Matt Wood (47:16)
And once it gets to the top

of that food chain, then it goes back into the conspira ahaha, look, it’s on Fox News. So we were right all along, and really it’s just nothing but a circle.

Karl (47:20)
Yeah. Look where

Christopher Mitchell (47:25)
Right. And that that’s what it comes down to. For those of you who are fans of Letterkenny, and Shorzy, which I am a deep, deep admirer of, they say, you gotta set the tone, boys. And that’s what media does. It sets the tone. so Karl and Matt, I wanna thank you for coming on, talking a bit about consolidation and and then why this is so important, a little bit of what we can do about it. Really appreciate your time today and the work that you both do on it.

Karl (47:49)
Thank you. Appreciate

Matt Wood (47:49)
Thanks so much, Chris.

Karl (47:50)
it.

Jordan Pittman (47:51)
Thanks for listening to this episode of the Unbuffered Podcast. We have transcripts for this and other episodes available at ILSR.org/podcast. While you’re there, check out our other podcasts from ILSR, including Building Local Power, Local Energy Rules, and the Composting for Community Podcasts. Email us at [email protected] with your ideas for the show. Follow us on Bluesky. Our handle is @communitynets.

You can catch the latest research from all of our initiatives by subscribing to our monthly newsletter at ILSR.org While you’re there, please take a moment to donate. Your support in any amount helps keep us going. Unbuffered is produced

by Christopher Mitchell with editing provided by me, Jordan Pittman. Until next time, thanks for listening.

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