Over the past six months of Donald Trump’s second presidential term, we’ve seen major media corporations bow down to the twice-impeached president in many ways. They’ve settled frivolous lawsuits for millions of dollars filed by Trump to harass his perceived political enemies; newspapers and TV networks have compromised newsroom editorial independence to placate the president; and CEOs have contributed millions of dollars to his inaugural committee and presidential library fund.
Media companies that have surrendered to Trump include Jeff Bezos, owner of Amazon and the Washington Post; Patrick Soon-Shiong owner of the L.A. Times and ABC TV; and Paramount, owner of CBS News. Consciously or not, Trump and his administration have closely followed the authoritarian playbook practiced by Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban in an attempt to dictate the terms of press coverage of his presidency.
Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Victor Pickard, professor of media policy and political economy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, where he co-directs the Media, Inequality and Change Center. Here, Pickard discusses how the politically-driven bad decisions of giant media conglomerates betray journalistic integrity, and the urgent need to envision a community-based media system that prioritizes journalism, democracy and equality over profit.
And I think it really brings into focus just how ill-equipped our entire corporate news media system is in trying to confront this authoritarian threat. And it really brings into light how ill-equipped they are to serve democracy. And I think in some ways they’re doing us a favor by bringing these structural problems into full view so that we know that it’s not just a question of trying to shame these media companies into better behavior, but we really need to start thinking in structural terms and thinking about how we can completely transform our media system. The future won’t happen tomorrow, of course, but it’s something that needs to be on our political horizon.
SCOTT HARRIS: Professor Picard, we’ve seen court settlements that many really view as out-and-out bribes. Sen. Elizabeth Warren was talking about introducing legislation to investigate corporate donations to Trump that many view clearly as a payoff for Trump’s shakedown of these media companies. You acknowledge that that might be useful, but it really doesn’t get at the bigger problem.
And so anything we can do to bring attention to this and if we are able to create new laws, policies and regulations, that’s great, but I liken it to applying a Bandaid to a festering wound. We really need to get to the structural roots of these problems and public interest protections — as important as they are — they can be a step in the right direction. We can think about earlier public interest protections like for example, the Fairness Doctrine, which I’m sure many of your listeners have at least heard of before.
But still, these kinds of regulatory interventions don’t get to the structural root of the problem, which is what I would describe as hyper-capitalism. We have a hyper-capitalistic media system that is so thoroughly commercialized, it overwhelms any other concern. And you still find individual journalists and news media producers who are trying to do a good job within the current system, and it is possible to only produce really good journalism.
But by and large, we’re just going to see this continual failure. Our media system for decades now has not lived up to our democratic requirements and it’s only getting worse. And I think we need to move our analysis away from indicting the bad CEOs, the bad corporations, the bad journalists as kind of a “bad apples” argument. And again, really look at these systemic logics that’s making it rational. Indeed, in some cases, it’s making it illegal for them to do the right thing in some cases.
And at the very least, we know that good journalism is bad for business. It’s expensive. It might anger powerful people, as we’re seeing in this case, it’s the president. So we need to design a new media system from the ground up that’s driven by democratic values, not commercial values.
What I would start out with is looking at public media systems around the world. The U.S. is literally off the chart for how little we allocate to our public media system. Per capita per year, it comes out to about a buck $1.58 at the federal level. In most democratic countries, for example, the Brits spend almost $100 per person per year for the BBC. A lot of northern European countries spend far more than that. Now, I wouldn’t just say that we just create a BBC, that would be a perfect system. But certainly a well-resourced public media system that is then radically democratized, also decentralized.
But there are different ways that a lot of democratic countries are able to buffer their media systems from these direct commercial pressures, whether they’re subsidizing smaller newspapers, for example, to create media diversity. There are many creative means of doing this, but I’d say the overarching goal is to remove the media from the commercial, from the capitalist market as much as possible.
For more information, visit his website at victorpickard.com and the Media, Inequality & Change Center. Victor Pickard’s Nation magazine article is “The Media’s Profits Trump Democracy, Once Again.”
Listen to Scott Harris’ in-depth interview with Victor Pickard (27:33) and see more articles and opinion pieces in the related links section of this page. For periodic updates on the Trump authoritarian playbook, subscribe here to our Between The Lines Radio Newsmagazine Substack newsletter to get updates to our “Hey AmeriKKKa, It’s Not Normal” compilation.
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