A New Roosevelt Institute Report Confronts the Roots of Our Media Crisis—and Calls for Breaking Up Corporate Media

The desire to attack and ultimately control the media is a through line of modern authoritarian governance around the world. President Donald Trump's reign as the defining political figure of the last decade has demonstrated how quickly these tactics can take hold here. In courtrooms, news outlets and White House briefings, Trump and his allies have tried to punish and delegitimize journalists. During Trump's second term, the bully pulpit turned into a battering ram, with explicit or implied threats To revoke broadcast license or block media mergers of insufficiently loyal companies. But the emphasis on government intervention ironically obscures how authoritarian regimes wield so much power over the media system in the first place, and why a free press should be protected from both the government and the state. And commercial coercion.

What we are experiencing now is a dangerous convergence of these two factors.

The truth is that the administration's threats have rippled through a media ecosystem buckling under the weight of commercial pressure—pressure that existed long before the fateful ride on the golden escalator more than a decade ago. It is these long-standing commercial imperatives that Trump knows how to weaponize to manipulate the media. He understands that newsrooms that are primarily accountable to investors will sell their accountability function to survive. Likewise, media conglomerates seeking mergers cannot afford to anger regulatory officials. When journalism finds itself in a commercial straitjacket, it cannot fight back.

In our oligarchic age, when billionaires can decide who from the young media lives and who dies. penny on the dollar and even yourself command influential roles In government, the line between state-run media and public media becomes vanishingly thin. A press dependent on the whims of the super-rich cannot claim meaningful independence from the political forces its owners serve. And while our Constitution protects the press for democratic reasons, our political regime expects news organizations to behave like profit-maximizing firms.

How did we get here? As we show at our new Roosevelt Institute reportToday's media crisis was not inevitable, but a consequence of politicians adopting a corporate libertarian approach to media policy. This framework treats our information ecosystem as a mere marketplace rather than as a vital democratic infrastructure, resulting in a media system riddled with structural deficiencies. This media environment is vulnerable to pressure from all sides, from the White House to the C-suite.

The consequences of this political failure were catastrophic. Newsrooms have been devastated by falling advertising revenue. Local newspapers closed or were taken over vulture capitalists whose short-term incentives are fundamentally at odds with the public mission of journalism. More than 1000 counties not enough now the equivalent of one full-time journalist; the number of journalists per 100,000 inhabitants has fallen by 75 percent since the early 2000s. Platforms dominate news distribution, leaving publishers dependent on algorithmic systems designed to maximize engagement rather than inform the public. A handful of billionaires can change the flow of information with the proverbial push of a button, and conglomerates continue to merge: just today, after a major trade war, Netflix won Paramount Skydance and Comcast have reached a deal to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, which will lead to a merger that will further concentrate cultural and information power in fewer hands.

Today, most Americans and even many politicians take these events and the system that led to them for granted. As the late media scholar Robert McChesney said arguedMedia policies have become invisible, developed behind closed doors on behalf of the public but without their consent, placing key issues related to our information ecosystem outside the bounds of democratic struggle. This invisibility has given cover to a set of neoliberal assumptions that define the boundaries of what is possible, empowering a small group of wealthy private players to decide for the rest of us what our media system looks like and whose interests it serves.

This invisibility obscures how the design of our media system—and many of the problems associated with it—are the result of political decisions. For decades, policymakers have diluted the media's responsibility to the public interest into something more akin to consumer preferences. At the same time, the media market has faced a series of structural reregulatory steps that have shifted power from the public to corporate players. And long before Trump dismantled By the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Congress has resisted significant investment in public media. All of these events, in turn, were legitimized by First Amendment media jurisprudence, which prioritizes unbridled commercial speech over the public's “right to know.” Together, these restrictions have created a media system that treats commercial imperatives as natural law and democratic obligations as optional.

Before we can find solutions, a fundamental question must be addressed: should our media system primarily serve democracy or profit?

For us, the answer should be the first. News and journalism should be seen as the core infrastructure of democracy—infrastructure that needs to be restored by rebuilding our impoverished public media system, treating platforms as the essential utilities that they are, and developing a meaningful view of the public interest in media governance. In addition to breaking up corporate media conglomerates, we must free journalism from its impossible mandate to turn a democratic obligation into a profitable business model. Only then can our media serve as a true democratic counterweight to authoritarianism. Almost every second developed democracy invests much more in public media and views information as a civic good rather than a commercial product. The United States can—and should—do the same.

The stakes extend beyond the newsroom. Democracy cannot function when citizens do not have access to reliable information or when the country's most powerful media operates at the mercy of wealthy patrons and political dictators. Our media system must reflect this truth. The first step is to recognize that its failures were designed and can be reverse-engineered for the public good.