The Media’s Profits Trump Democracy, Once Again | The Nation

What’s to be done? Senator Elizabeth Warren is calling for a bribery investigation and promises to introduce legislation that will “rein in corruption through presidential library donations.” Senator Ron Wyden vowed that he’d be “first in line calling for federal charges” once Democrats retake power. More immediately, Wyden is encouraging state prosecutors to “make the corporate execs who sold out our democracy answer in court.”

These worthwhile initiatives notwithstanding, we need even more ambitious reforms. Corporate media institutions are a key part of the pathologies afflicting our society today. This latest attack on the press and its foreseeable surrender is exhibit A for why an oligarchic profit-driven media system is bad for democracy. These kinds of press failures are typically narrated as the misdeeds of unscrupulous individuals. But they’re the result of structural features that can’t be understood simply as a “bad apples” allegory.

In other words, Paramount’s capitulation to Trump points to a systemic problem in need of a systemic fix. Meaningful public-interest protections would be a step in the right direction, but instead of putting regulatory Band-Aids on festering wounds, we should work toward building a new media system based on a different logic altogether. While caving to Trump’s extortion is inexcusable, the incentive structures—including legal obligations—currently in place encourage media owners to ignore democratic duties to society. Profit imperatives—to shareholders, investors, advertisers, and themselves—drive media owners to treat news and information as commodities, not essential public services, and audiences as consumers rather than as engaged citizens.

We must unveil and confront these logics to understand the toxic synergies between a hyper-capitalistic, concentrated media system and fascistic tendencies under an autocratic regime. Seeing unmitigated commercialism as the core root of the problem shifts our strategic frame from trying to shame media owners into better behavior to mandating that our news media must serve democracy for us all, not the profits of a privileged few.

As I’ve argued before, a revitalized public media system must remain fixed on our long-term political horizon. Such a system must be public in more than name only: It must actually be owned and controlled by the communities that media outlets serve. Such a decentralized, federally guaranteed but locally governed, infrastructure could better withstand the types of government capture that are increasingly pronounced in our commercial media. While this would look different from our current public media system, it could potentially use that infrastructure as its initial building blocks.

For the immediate future, we must do all that we can to push back against the further Trumpification of our media. This includes supporting nonprofit and independent media in any way possible, especially given the ongoing collapse of local journalism. But for the longer term, we must set our sights on structural media reform that goes far beyond defending the status quo, chastening corporate media owners, and preventing the fascistic drift of the current media oligarchy. We need to both de-commercialize and radically democratize our media from root to branch.

If there’s any silver lining to Trump’s ongoing corruption of our media landscape, it’s that he’s exposing how paper-thin the commercial media’s commitment to journalism actually is, as well as how poorly equipped it is to safeguard the vestiges of American democracy. As Trump lays waste to what’s left of our media’s integrity, we should begin planning to rebuild journalism from the ground up, daring to imagine how we might create a truly democratic media system out of the wreckage.