Donald Trump Is VERY EXCITED About All Of Our Shitty Right Wing Broadcasters Merging Into One Bigger, Even Shittier Company

from the autocrat-state-television dept

Trump 1.0 took a hatchet to media ownership limits. Those limits, built on the back of decades of bipartisan collaboration, prohibited local broadcasters and media from growing too large, trampling smaller (and more diversely-owned) competitors underfoot. The result of their destruction has been a rise in local news deserts, a surge in right wing propaganda outlets pretending to be “local news,” less diverse media ownership, and (if you hadn’t noticed) a painfully disinformed electorate.

Trump 2.0 has been significantly worse.

Trump’s FCC has finished demolishing whatever was left of already saggy media ownership limits, and are eyeing eliminating rules that would prevent the big four (Fox, ABC, CBS, NBC) from merging (a major reason why these networks have been such feckless authoritarian appeasers).

They’re also working hard to let all of our local right wing broadcast companies merge into one, even larger, shittier company, something Donald Trump is very excited about!

More specifically Nexstar (a very Republican friendly company that also owns The Hill), is asking the FCC for permission to acquire Tegna in a $6.2 billion deal that is illegal under current rules (you might recall that Nexstar-owned The Hill recently fired a journalist whose reporting angered Trump).

The deal would give Nexstar ownership of 265 stations in 44 states and the District of Columbia and 132 of the country’s 210 television Designated Market Areas (or DMAs). Nexstar appears to have beaten out rival bids by Sinclair, which has also long-been criticized as Republican propaganda posing as local news. It wouldn’t be surprising if Nexstar and Sinclair are the next to merge.

Keep in mind, this is an industry that was already terrible agitprop, as this now seven-year-old Deadspin video helped everyone realize:

You might be inclined to say: “but Karl, local TV broadcasters are irrelevant. Who cares if they consolidate a dying industry.” But the consolidation won’t stop here. The goal isn’t just the consolidation of local broadcasters, it’s the consolidation of national and local media giants, telecoms, tech companies, and social media companies. All under the thumb of terrible unethical people.

Trump’s rise to power couldn’t have been made possible without the Republican domination of media. For the better part of a generation Republicans have dominated AM radio, local broadcast TV, and cable news, and have since done a remarkable job hoovering up what’s left of both major media companies (CBS, FOX) and modern social media empires (TikTok, Twitter). The impact is everywhere you look.

Over on Elon Musk’s right wing propaganda platform, Brendan Carr was quick to praise President’s Trump bold support for more media consolidation. And, as he has done previously, he openly lied and trying to pretend that local broadcast consolidation is something that aids competition:

I’ve covered Brendan Carr professionally since he joined the FCC in 2012. This is a man who has coddled media and telecom giants (and their anti-competitive behavior) at literally every opportunity. One of his only functions in government has been to rubber stamp shitty mergers. Here, he’s pretending to “protect competition” with a cute little antisemitic dog whistle about the folks in “Hollywood and New York.”

Amusingly, Carr and Trump’s push to allow all manner of problematic consolidation among these terrible local broadcasters has been so abrupt, it’s actually causing some infighting between them and other right wing propaganda companies like Newsmax.

There’s a reason the Trump administration is destroying media consolidation limits, murdering public media, harassing media companies, threatening late night comedians (or having them fired), and ushering forth all this mindless and dangerous consolidation. There’s a reason Larry Ellison and Elon Musk are buying all the key social media platforms and fiddling with the algorithms.

They very openly (and so far semi-successfully) are trying to build a state media apparatus akin to what they have in Orban’s Hungary and Putin’s Russia. Our corporate press is already so broken and captured it’s incapable of communicating that to anybody. It simply wouldn’t be in their best financial interests for existing media conglomerates to be honest about this sort of thing.

One plus side, nobody involved in any of this — from CBS’s News boss Bari Weiss to Sinclair Broadcasting — appear to have any competent idea of what they’re doing. They’re not good at journalism (because they’re trying to destroy it), but they’re generally not good at ratings-grabbing propaganda. As a result it’s entirely possible they destroy U.S. media before their dream of state media comes to fruition.

Still, it might be nice if Democrats could stop waiting for “the left’s Joe Rogan” and finally start embracing some meaningful media reforms for the modern era, whether that’s the restoration of media consolidation limits, the creation of media ownership diversity requirements, an evolution in school media literacy training, support for public media, or creative new funding models for real journalism.

Because the trajectory we are on in terms of right wing domination of media heads to some very fucking grim places, and it’s not like any of that has been subtle.

Filed Under: agitprop, brendan carr, broadcast television, competition, consolidation, disinformation, doj, donald trump, fcc, journalism, local news, media, propaganda

Companies: nexstar, tegna