EDITOR’S NOTE: 

When Disney announced yet another round of layoffs at ABC News last week, it came on the heels of a year in which almost 15,000 media jobs were lost—and capped off a quarter-century in which we’ve seen thousands of independent publications shut down or merged with larger conglomerates.

The upshot is that Americans now find ourselves trapped in an information environment more tightly controlled than ever by a handful of oligarchs.

The media has trended in this direction for decades, but the story lost all subtlety when Jeff Bezos issued the X post heard round the world. He declared that The Washington Post will focus its opinion section on “personal liberties and free markets.” That surely means more editorial attention on stifling monopolies like Amazon, right?

Mainstream media outlets have long faced dwindling audiences and, as a result, relied more and more on corporate benefactors. Now that those benefactors are competing to prove loyalty to their own benefactor in the White House, these essential institutions are stuck carrying water for the billionaire class, or else disappearing altogether. The task of rebuilding truly independent news outlets, then, falls to journalists, readers, and any concerned citizens who recognize how imperiled our free press has become—if there is to be any hope of the fourth estate holding the line against the second Trump regime.

Editorial encroachment by corporate interests dates back to the inception of the media age, when the competing newspaper empires of the ultra-wealthy William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer engaged in a sensationalist race to the bottom, publishing incendiary headlines, exaggerations, gossip, and rumors that (among other ramifications) helped provoke the Spanish-American war.

Yellow journalism, as it was called, abated thanks to the regulatory efforts of independent agencies such as the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which established the fairness doctrine requiring equal coverage of conflicting viewpoints on consequential issues (like Trump’s ongoing attempt to take over the FCC). But Ronald Reagan, in his laissez-faire frenzy, repealed that rule. Not to be outdone, Bill Clinton signed the deregulatory Telecommunications Act of 1996, which critics have deemed “essentially bought and paid for by corporate media lobbies.”

That same year, The Nation published a special issue on what we called the National Entertainment State. It detailed the growing media-industrial complex, where the corporations programming our news were increasingly programming public opinion. We represented this syndicate via a glossy centerfold diagram of an octopus with four tentacles, one for each of America’s dominant media conglomerates: Disney, General Electric, Time Warner, and Westinghouse (now CBS). Today, six tentacles control over 90 perent of our information.

Things are different now, and not for the better. While the news has represented a small cog in larger corporate structures long before this second Trump administration, we are now witnessing mass public capitulation from corporate owners in a way that feels unprecedented. Whether today’s billionaire media owners are angling for large federal contracts or anticipatorily bending the knee so their companies are not seen as “the enemy,” the chilling effect is the same: Major media publications are even more incentivized now to treat the rich and powerful with kid gloves, if not outright sycophancy.