Media Monarchy: The Tycoons Who Want to Own What’s True

By Rob C.

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TL;DR: We used to have a shared reality forged by diverse, regulated news media required to act in the public interest. Thanks to deregulation, that reality is now owned by a handful of self-interested billionaires. From the massive Warner Bros./Discovery merger to propaganda outlets like FOX and the swallowing of local stations by giants like Sinclair and Nextstar, what’s “true” is no longer information—it’s just a marketable political agenda. Our democracy is officially running on empty, fueled by the junk food news these tycoons want us to eat.

Let’s be honest about the most fundamental thing driving our current national insanity: all we really know about our government, our country, or the world is what we are taught. Your personal experience only goes so far—you can’t personally audit the Pentagon, fact-check a war in Ukraine, or confirm the latest job numbers. We are profoundly dependent on objective sources to inform us, and for decades, those sources were at least theoretically obligated to inform the public, not just the stockholders.

When the country had three or four major news channels and hundreds of independent newspapers, we largely shared a common reality. Why? Because the media was regulated, required by law to “act in the public interest,” and subject to rules like the Fairness Doctrine, which mandated that broadcasters cover controversial issues in a fair and balanced manner.

The Great Deregulation and the Death of Consensus

Then came the beautiful, market-driven idea of deregulation. The Telecommunications Act of 1996, in particular, was a legislative sledgehammer that cracked open the media landscape and allowed the propaganda machine to flood the zone. We traded “the public interest” for “maximum profit.”

This shift gave us the rise of explicitly partisan outlets like FOX News, a cable network that perfected the art of manufacturing reality for a conservative audience. FOX proved that there was enormous profit in telling people exactly what they wanted to hear, regardless of the facts. Once the profit motive replaced the public interest mandate, the race to the bottom began, and our shared reality was the first casualty.

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The Billionaire Boys’ Club Takes Local News Hostage

The most insidious part of this consolidation isn’t just the national cable wars; it’s what’s happening in your local living room.

Companies like Nextstar and Sinclair Broadcasting have quietly swallowed up hundreds of local news stations—the very platforms people tend to trust the most. Sinclair, in particular, has repeatedly used its massive platform to promote its own conservative political agenda. Remember the chilling video where local anchors across the country—from Seattle to South Carolina—were forced to read the exact same, scripted corporate monologue decrying “fake news”? It was a perfect, terrifying demonstration of monolithic political control disguised as local journalism. They are turning your trusted local news anchor into a talking head for a billionaire’s political agenda.

And the trend continues: look at the massive, controversial deal over Warner Bros./Discovery. When giants merge, it means fewer voices, fewer stories, fewer perspectives, and fewer people deciding what gets made—and what gets memory-holed. It’s the billionaire boys’ club looking to own not just content, but the cultural narrative itself.

The Legal Requirement to Be Sane

We had a legal mechanism for sanity, once upon a time. In the landmark 1969 case Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC, the Supreme Court upheld the power of the government to regulate broadcasters in the public interest. The Court recognized that because the airwaves are a scarce public resource, the rights of the viewers and listeners to a fair and open media must take precedence over the rights of the corporate owners.

As Justice Byron White wrote for the Court:

“It is the right of the viewers and listeners, not the right of the broadcasters, which is paramount.”

That is the statement that matters. That is the philosophy we abandoned.

When the media was regulated, we had the information necessary to hold our politicians accountable. Now, it’s a closed-loop system of self-serving corporate giants, a handful of politically motivated billionaires, and a media landscape that is rapidly becoming a dumpster fire for democracy. Unless we demand that the government regulate media not for profit, but for the public interest, our shared reality—and the republic itself—is going to burn.

— Robert Cain, author of Democracy for Sale: How Corporate Greed Is Corrupting Democracy and Endangering the Planet.