Most people still think of “the media” as something out there — a collection of journalists and editors trying, however imperfectly, to tell us what’s true.
That world is ending. Fast.
But the picture is more complicated — and more important — than a simple story of corporate capture. Because while the dominant information system is consolidating into fewer and fewer hands, the landscape outside it has fractured into two very different directions. One of those directions leads toward deeper darkness. The other points, however faintly, toward something else.
Let’s walk through what has been happening — accelerating week by week — and then pull back together to see the full picture, including the parts that almost nobody in the corporate press will tell you.
The Ellisons and CNN:
In late February 2026, Warner Bros. Discovery — which owns CNN, HBO, HBO Max, TNT, TBS, Discovery, Animal Planet, Food Network, HGTV, and roughly two dozen other cable channels — agreed to a $111 billion takeover by Paramount Skydance, run by David Ellison, son of Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison. The deal is expected to close later this year, pending regulatory review.
For months, Netflix was the frontrunner. Then Trump publicly declared it was “imperative that CNN be sold,” making clear he favored the Ellison bid. Netflix dropped out, saying the deal was no longer “financially attractive.”
Convenient timing.
The Wall Street Journal reported that David Ellison had already privately told Trump administration officials he would make “sweeping changes” to CNN if his takeover succeeded. CNN staffers described the newsroom mood as “shaken” and “depressing.”
A senior CBS News employee offered CNN a preview: “It can — and will — always get worse. It is hell over here.”
What the Ellisons have already done at CBS:
After taking over Paramount last year, they installed Bari Weiss — an opinion journalist who had never worked in TV news — as editor-in-chief of CBS News. She delayed a 60 Minutes segment critical of the Trump administration; the correspondent on that piece publicly called it a “political” decision. The longtime executive producer of 60 Minutes, Bill Owens, resigned rather than continue under those conditions, telling staff in a memo that he “would not be allowed to run the show as I have always run it.” Anderson Cooper left 60 Minutes — where he had worked for nearly two decades alongside his CNN role — amid the same climate of Weiss-era editorial pressure; he remains at CNN. Weiss is now expected to have a major role reshaping CNN as well.
The broader picture:
This is not an isolated transaction. It’s one piece of a systematic takeover of the Western corporate information environment.
Elon Musk bought Twitter — now X — and turned it into a MAGA amplification machine he explicitly credited with helping elect Trump. Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. He killed the paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris, fired hundreds of journalists, and decreed that its opinion section would henceforth focus on “personal liberties and free markets.” His opinion editor resigned rather than comply. Musk responded with one word on X: “Bravo.” Mark Zuckerberg — who controls Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, the primary information environment for roughly half the American population — eliminated fact-checking, appointed Trump allies to key positions, and attended the inauguration seated directly behind the president. Larry Ellison’s Oracle now controls a major stake in TikTok’s US operations, including its algorithm.
And then there’s a company most people have never heard of, which has been doing quietly for decades what the Ellisons are now doing loudly.
Sinclair Broadcasting.
You probably don’t recognize the name. That’s by design. Sinclair owns roughly 185 local TV stations across the United States — but they appear on your screen under familiar network names: your local ABC affiliate, your local CBS, your local Fox. Your trusted anchor, who’s been telling you about school board meetings and highway pileups for twenty years.
Behind that familiar face, Sinclair’s corporate headquarters produces mandatory “must-run” segments that every one of its stations is required to broadcast, word for word, as if they were local news. One anchor described the experience as feeling “like a POW recording a message.”
The most notorious example: Sinclair had dozens of anchors across the country simultaneously read a scripted warning — in their own trusted local voices — about “members of the media using their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control exactly what people think.” Verbatim Trump talking points, delivered as local news, in markets where 76% of Americans say they trust local news more than almost any other source — including family and friends.
Sinclair’s CEO reportedly met with Trump and told him directly: “We are here to deliver your message.” The company cut a deal with Jared Kushner in 2016 for favorable coverage in exchange for access. It has since donated to Project Veritas, Turning Point USA, and Moms for Liberty.
This is the operation nobody talks about when they talk about right-wing media — bigger in its local reach than Fox News, far more trusted, and almost invisible.
And then — March 2026 — it got worse.
The FCC approved a $6.2 billion merger between Nexstar Media Group and Tegna, the two largest local TV station owners in the country. The combined company will now reach over 70 percent of American households through local newscasts — the most trusted form of news in the country — across roughly 260 stations.
There’s a law against this. The FCC’s own rule bars any single broadcaster from reaching more than 39 percent of the national audience.
The FCC waived it. Not changed it. Not taken it to Congress. Just… waived it. In a closed-door process. Without a full Commission vote. Legal experts say the agency has no authority to do this without congressional action.
The CEO of Nexstar publicly thanked President Trump by name.
The FCC’s sole Democratic commissioner said the decision was made “with no open process, no full Commission vote, and no transparency for the consumers and communities who will bear the consequences.”
Eight state attorneys general filed emergency motions to block it. Governor Newsom called it “an outrage and disgrace” and compared the FCC chairman’s behavior to what you’d expect in Hungary and Turkey.
This is what regulatory capture looks like when the mask comes all the way off.
Outside the corporate press: two very different exits.
Some people saw this coming. Tens of millions of Americans have already walked away from corporate mainstream media — or been walked away from it as it priced itself behind paywalls, shed local newsrooms, and drowned in algorithms. In 2015, roughly 4% of Americans said social media was their main news source. By 2025, that figure had reached 34% — and for the first time in history, social media overtook television as America’s primary news platform.
That flight from the corporate press has split into two very different directions, and the difference matters enormously.
One direction is the right-wing alternative media ecosystem — and it is massive. A 2025 Media Matters analysis found that right-leaning online shows have five times the following of progressive ones. Sixty-five right-wing online shows had followings above one million; only twenty-one progressive shows reached comparable scale. Right-wing YouTube channels have accumulated 65 billion views; the entire progressive online media ecosystem combined has roughly 56 million followers. Joe Rogan alone reaches one in five Americans in a given week. Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens, Ben Shapiro — each reaching 12 to 14 percent of the population. And 72% of online shows that brand themselves as “non-political” turn out, on analysis, to be right-leaning — seeping into sports, comedy, and lifestyle content, mainstreaming authoritarian politics as entertainment.
This ecosystem didn’t happen organically. It was built — systematically, over decades — with conservative billionaire money, free from the advertiser constraints that police corporate media. It operates, like the corporate media it claims to oppose, in service of power — just a rawer, more overtly authoritarian concentration of it.
The other direction is smaller, harder to find, and doing something genuinely different.
It includes international outlets that cover the United States from the outside — Al Jazeera, Middle East Eye, The Cradle, TRT World — outlets that bring perspectives on American power that American outlets structurally cannot. It includes investigative publications operating without corporate ownership: The Intercept, ProPublica, The Lever, CounterPunch, Truthout, Common Dreams, Jacobin, Mondoweiss, In These Times. It includes individual journalists and writers who have moved to reader-supported platforms: Heather Cox Richardson, Robert Reich, Matt Stoller, Timothy Snyder, Judd Legum, Sarah Kendzior. It includes voices from communities that the corporate press renders invisible: Indian Country Today, Electronic Intifada, Palestine Chronicle, Peoples Dispatch.
These outlets exist. They do real work. And their combined reach is, at present, a fraction of what Rogan delivers alone on a Tuesday afternoon.
That gap is not accidental. It is structural — the same structure Chomsky and Herman named in 1988, now operating at a new scale and speed.
But here’s what we need to hold onto, because it matters most:
Everything described here — Sinclair, Nexstar-Tegna, the Ellisons, Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, the right-wing alternative media machine — is a shift in degree, not in kind.
The corporate Western mainstream media has always served the powerful.
Not because of crude orders from the top, but because of something more fundamental: structure.
Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman laid this out in Manufacturing Consent in 1988, and the analysis has only grown more accurate. The core insight: corporate media are large profit-based operations that sell a product — readers and audiences — to other businesses: advertisers. The owners are corporations. The sources are governments and other corporations. The result is a system of induced conformity to the needs of power, operating not through overt censorship but through ownership, advertising dependence, and the internalized values of journalists who want to keep their careers.
This is not fringe analysis. It’s a structural description of how editorial decisions actually get made — not by a phone call from a billionaire, but by a thousand smaller pressures: which sources get called “credible,” which voices get treated as “extreme,” which wars get mourned and which get labeled necessary, which economic arrangements are “common sense” and which are “radical.”
Think about the New York Times — perhaps the most influential “liberal” media institution in the world. It led the drumbeat toward the Iraq War. Its Gaza coverage has been the subject of mass protest, with hundreds of writers publicly accusing it of failing basic journalistic integrity in its coverage of Palestinian deaths. One analysis found the Ochs-Sulzberger family — which has owned the Times since 1896 — now commands 5.5 billion US news site visits annually. Seven families or corporate entities control more than half of all American news traffic.
The Guardian in the UK — which many progressives rely on — publishes sponsored content from Goldman Sachs. It does brave journalism within a framework that has built-in limits on how far that bravery extends when it threatens the fundamental structures of Western capital and empire.
What the rest of the world sees:
Here’s the perspective that almost never gets airtime inside the Western corporate press.
When people across the Global South — across the Arab world, Latin America, Africa, Southeast Asia — look at what’s happening to the Western information environment right now, they don’t see a crisis. They see a revelation.
They see countries that have spent a century controlling the information environments of other nations — funding “free press” organizations that promoted imperial interests, using intelligence services to place stories in foreign newspapers, threatening governments that nationalized their media — now watching those same techniques applied at home.
Al Jazeera’s coverage of US media consolidation frames it directly alongside what has already happened in Hungary and Russia: the same playbook of corporate consolidation, regulatory weaponization, and the slow capture of the information space by forces aligned with political power. What Al Jazeera notes that most Western outlets won’t say: the FCC’s moves to threaten broadcast licenses over content the administration dislikes is precisely the kind of regulatory intimidation the US State Department has condemned in other countries for decades.
For people in Gaza, Yemen, Iraq, Libya — for people who watched the Times and CNN and the BBC describe their deaths in language carefully calibrated to protect Western governments and their allies — the idea that these outlets represent a “free press” now under threat has always carried a bitter irony. In both 2024 and 2025, the Israeli military was responsible for two-thirds of all press killings worldwide. That fact appeared nowhere near the top of the Western media agenda.
This is not because Western journalists are evil. It’s because the structure of corporate media — its ownership, advertising relationships, sourcing dependencies, and career incentives — systematically filters out the stories that most threaten the interests of those who own and fund it.
So what are we actually watching?
We are watching the mask come off.
What’s new is not that corporate Western media serves power. What’s new is the shamelessness — the speed — the open boasting about it. Ellison telling Trump officials he’ll reshape CNN before he even owns it. Sinclair anchors forced to read identical propaganda scripts coast to coast. The FCC waiving its own 39% ownership cap — without a vote, behind closed doors — to hand 70% of American local newscasts to a single company whose CEO thanked the president by name. ABC settling a defamation lawsuit with the president, and then suspending Jimmy Kimmel indefinitely — within hours of an FCC threat — before reinstating him only after public backlash forced their hand. The inauguration photograph of Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, and Pichai seated directly behind the President of the United States, arranged like a board of directors.
Ben Bagdikian documented 50 corporations controlling American media in 1983. That number has shrunk with every passing year. Today it is effectively six or seven entities — and contracting further by the month.
The Global South named this a long time ago. They called it information imperialism. The manufacturing of consent for arrangements that benefit the few at the expense of the many — in which war becomes necessary, austerity becomes inevitable, empire becomes natural, and the people being crushed by all of it are kept just confused enough not to act.
That was always the function.
What’s happening now is that function becoming nakedly visible — to us, at last, in our own country.
The question is what we do with that visibility.
The answer is not to turn off and tune out. Disengagement is not neutrality — it is a gift to those who are consolidating control.
The answer is not to disappear into the right-wing alternative ecosystem, which offers the feeling of rebellion while delivering us more efficiently to the same concentrations of power, just with less pretense of objectivity.
The answer — partial, imperfect, insufficient, and necessary — is to find and support the outlets doing honest work outside the corporate frame. To read Al Jazeera alongside our local news. To support The Intercept, or Truthout, or ProPublica, or whatever investigative outlet speaks to where we live and what we care about. To follow the journalists who left the system rather than comply. To share what we find, in a media environment deliberately designed to bury it.
None of this fixes the structural problem. Only organized political power does that.
But it changes what we see. And what we see determines what we believe is possible.
Some of us have been watching this for a long time, and are choosing to keep looking clearly — and to keep saying what we see.
A curated list of independent, international, and movement media — offering a much wider table than the one the corporate press sets — is available at rogueresist.org/alternative-news-sources.
Sources: FAIR, Manufacturing Consent (Chomsky/Herman), Al Jazeera, NPR, NBC News, CNN, Daily Beast, Variety, Poynter, PBS NewsHour, Axios, Common Dreams, Truthout, Democracy Now!, Techdirt, Committee to Protect Journalists, Deadline, ACLU, Hollywood Reporter, Lawfare, Media Matters, Pew Research Center, Reuters Institute 2025 Digital News Report, Nieman Lab, Jacobin — updated March 30, 2026.
~ John Fridinger
Spring, 2026
Talent, OR
This article was very informative and seemed research based. I was glad to get names of news sources which i can trust. Thank you. It’s been hard for me to stay plugged in, as i don’t know what to believe these days. This article will help me dig my head out of the sand (from fear of reality) and stay abreast better. Again, thank you.