Sarah Kendzior writes (Gutting the Fourth Estate: The US media were willing cogs in Trump’s machine. Now he’s tearing it down. Sep 23, 2026):
Trump’s first term has been memory-holed. His dirty deeds are treated as discrete acts instead of as a continuum of crime with recurring players. His prior decades of illicit activity have vanished from the public domain: because there is no public domain.
The public domain was purchased and destroyed by oligarchs: purchased to be destroyed. The Thiel example I gave in 2016 was a preview. Musk bought and transmogrified Twitter. Google replaced its search engine with AI. Other outlets, unable to profit off paywalls, sold themselves to plutocrats who erased their archives.
This week, Trump banned CNN, MSNow, and Politico from the White House. The outlets that long acted as Trump’s friend... Trump has long attacked media who support him, creating a mirage of dissent to cloak the reality of compliance. ... This corrupt synergy is one reason Americans stopped watching.
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The real attack is not on these outlets, but on the First Amendment itself.
In 2016, Trump’s goal was to control the media. In 2026, it is to destroy the media. He recognizes it as a depreciated asset. Trump is a corporate raider doing what corporate raiders do. He seeks to destroy the media much as he seeks to destroy the US itself.
Trump has been honest about his goals, stating in 2014 that he sought to destroy the US and then employing the playbook of Project 2025 to do it."
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“Access journalism” is not about the journalist having access to the regime, but the regime having longtime access to the journalist. It is a common prerequisite in mafia states.
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...the ban is wrong on principle, even when the banned lack principles — and because the goal is to supplant everyone with hallucinating robots.
A failed journalist is a human being. One can critique their coverage and parse their propaganda. The goal of a technofascist regime is to replace reporting with sycophancy and silence. The only guaranteed way to do that is to eliminate people.
Banning reporters is wrong. It doesn’t matter which reporters. I don’t care who you are. Let me repeat: I don’t care who you are. No one does anymore. Hallowed halls turned hollow as media institutions were gutted of the bravery that made them real. There is little to admire. But there is something to protect: the potential for change.
A. R. Moxon writes (Thank You For Your Support: Sep 26, 2026):
Most of our legacy media services—print, web, video, cable, what have you—have been bought up by billionaires, and most of the billionaires are becoming more and more open about putting their old thumbs on the old scales, so to speak, to promote their billionaire agenda. Jeff Bezos has the Washington Post. Larry Ellison now owns TikTok. Elon Musk has Twitter. Somebody or other has Newsweek, somebody else or other has TIME. Maybe they're the same somebody. They've hired opinion writers and talking heads who exist only to launder the most retrograde opinions and abject moral complacency into common currency. You've got spectacle of degradation such as centrist-posing right wing troll Bari Weiss running CBS as a far-right conspiracy mill, spiking stories critical of the current fascist regime, and hiring the likes of longtime consent manufacturer Ross "Don't" Douthat as a featured correspondent on the once-respected journalism magazine show 60 Minutes. The billionaire idea doesn't seem so much to get people to believe in the lies their mouthpieces pass into common currency (though they'd be well pleased if people did believe them and a lot of people do) so much as to convince people there's no such thing as truth, or that it's no longer worth the work of trying to figure out the difference.
Plus, Moxon continues:
They've got these machines, the billionaires, word-guessing machines that have sucked up the sum total of human creativity and now are able to output simulacrums of human creativity that are good enough to fool less discerning sensibilities, able to convince people that they too can be creative without engaging in the work of creativity and the craft of creation that makes creativity worthwhile in the first place; to fool people who want to be fooled, that the outputs of the guessing machines are the results of their own work rather than just a flat-soda counterfeit of what others have done.
These days authors are losing big contracts for suspicions of using AI. Are they using AI? Who can say? Maybe so. Some authors surely are. But corporations use AI for anything and everything, and it's not a scandal when they do it. It's almost as if the plagiarism isn't making machines that issue outputs based on everyone else's work, but when anyone else writes something that seems to be aping the style of the plagiarism machine. Isn't that interesting?
Also this performance: 'You Cannot Be Asking Me That!': Trump’s AG Goes Nuclear On Live TV Over Press Ban: Todd Blanche claimed Trump never “denied access” to the outlets during the heated exchange. Jazmin Tolliver, HuffPost, Sep 27, 2026
Now this:
...Paramount and Warner Bros. overcame the key hurdle to closing their deal, when California Attorney General Rob Bonta and 11 Democratic state attorneys general dropped their opposition... It isn’t quite done, the judge hasn’t agreed to approve the consent decree, and there are amicus briefs and a well-received letter from Senator Cory Booker that the judge will hear arguments about. But it’s hard to imagine this one being paused for legal reasons.
It’s easy to see this merger fight as a catastrophic loss, which it is. It will combine two of the five major movie studios, CNN and CBS, and major streaming platforms under the control of a highly politically connected owner of Oracle and TikTok. Iconic TV writer Mike Schur basically said it’s game over for Hollywood, and the American news media will likely become more corrupt, feckless, and aligned with capital.
But the merger challenge is also more than that, and it has implications beyond the castle walls of media, as important as those are. This fight was a battle between coalitions, and in some ways, it is a prelude to more of that fight in this election cycle and beyond.
David Ellison, son of Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison, wasn’t alone in his empire-building ambitions. It takes a village to centralize media. Wall Street was fully on board, as was the defense bar. In August, JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon said that the state challenge to the Paramount-Warner merger has the potential to “deeply damage our capital markets, our dynamic system.” Donald Trump pushed the deal, but so did Democrat Ari Emanuel, brother of Rahm Emanuel. So did Tom Cruise. So did the Director’s Guild and the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees. So did California Governor Gavin Newsom, LA Mayor Karen Bass, incoming Governor Xavier Becerra, and much of the state legislature.
The other group were populists on the left, the anti-monopoly world, artists, the Writer’s Guild of America East and West, and the public itself.
Monopoly Round-Up: Paramount-WB Isn't Just a Loss, It's a Prelude The unorthodox development isn’t that politicians caved; it’s that people noticed it. Plus, bond yields go nuts, and Trump and Xi meet to hash out China-U.S. relations. Matt Stoller and Lee Hepner. BIG by Matt Stoller, Sept 28, 2026
Trump keeps demonstrating that his press ban has nothing to do with the administration’s stated "national security" pretext. www.mediamatters.org/donald-trump...
— Matthew Gertz (@mattgertz.bsky.social) September 28, 2026 at 12:24 PM
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