Article in Status by Oliver Darcy, 9/25/25
Headline: “Predicament at the Pentagon”
Subhead: “News organizations face a looming deadline from Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon which is demanding they sign restrictive new rules, or risk being expelled from the building entirely”
Read the full article at:
https://www.status.news/p/pentagon-press-restrictions-pete-hegseth
The FCC announced last month, the audit of many broadcasting stations: The list may be found in this link:
https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DA-25-673A1.pdf
Article in Poynter by Tom Jones, 9/25/25
Headline: “Opinion | Jimmy Kimmel came back defiant — and viewers rewarded him”
Subhead: “The late-night host walked back onstage without apology, defended free speech and turned a suspension into record-breaking ratings”
“On Tuesday, ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel returned from his suspension with an empathetic but defiant monologue and included a joke about President Donald Trump. Kimmel said, “You almost have to feel sorry for him. He tried his best to cancel me. Instead, he forced millions of people to watch the show. That backfired bigly. . .”
Read the full article at:
https://www.poynter.org/commentary/2025/jimmy-kimmel-monologue-disney-nexstar/
Article in Columbia Journalism Review by Carolina Abbott Galvao & Riddhi Setty, 9/25/25
Headline: “Local ABC Affiliates Are Getting Slammed”
Subhead: “Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, promised to bring power to community stations. But it’s their corporate owners who make the big decisions—while regional reporters and station managers take the heat.”
“Fewer and fewer local broadcasters are independently owned: “In the early eighties, it was north of fifty companies that owned or controlled 90 percent of broadcast media. And I think over the last decade or so, it’s become five or six, depending on how you break it down,” Reed Showalter, the former antitrust enforcer now running for Congress in Illinois, said. . .”
“. . .”Louis Wall, the president of Sagamore Hill Broadcasting, a privately owned broadcaster in Georgia . . . who considers himself to be “very supportive” of the First Amendment, has suddenly had to navigate a complex and often contradictory set of political, ideological, and financial concerns. “Broadcast is under attack from so many different mediums and video sources, we don’t need another piece of our armor or another piece of our programming to be lost,” he said.
Read the full article at:
https://www.cjr.org/news/local-abc-affiliates-nexstar-sinclair-getting-slammed.php
Article in The Atlantic by David Karpf, 9/24/25
Headline: “The MAGA Media Takeover”
Subhead: “Trump and his powerful friends are creating a dangerous moment for free speech.”
“American mass media has been transformed in these early months of President Donald Trump’s second administration. We’re about 35 weeks into a term that will last for 173 more, and in that time, we have seen a tech titan gut a once-great newspaper in an apparent act of capitulation to the commander in chief, government accounts gleefully spreading hateful memes on X (the far-right platform owned by a billionaire tech oligarch), a defamation lawsuit filed by Trump against The New York Times (and quickly dismissed by the judge as ‘superfluous’), and, of course, the assault on free speech carried out by Trump’s Federal Communications Commission chairman. Big things can happen very quickly. . .”
Read the full article at:
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2025/09/maga-media-takeover-tiktok/684351/
Article in The New Republic by Perry Bacon, 9/24/25
Headline: “Jimmy Kimmel Just Showed the Rest of the Media How to Fight Trump”
Subhead: “New York Times writer E.J. Dionne says that the late-night host essentially forced ABC to end his suspension because of the broad, strong coalition that defended him”
“Jimmy Kimmel strongly defended free speech and slammed President Trump in his return to late night after a brief suspension. In the latest edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon, New York Times opinion writer E.J. Dionne and Perry discussed why Kimmel’s fast return was such a coup for pro-democracy voices. . .”
Read the full article at:
https://newrepublic.com/article/200871/kimmel-brilliant-anti-trump-campaign
Article in The New York Times by Cecelia Kang, 4/24/25
Headline: “Brendan Carr Plans to Keep Going After the Media”
Subhead: “While “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” returned to ABC on Tuesday, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission has promised to continue his campaign against what he sees as liberal bias in broadcasts.”
“. . .Driven by the belief that liberal tech and media companies have unfairly silenced viewpoints on the right, Mr. Carr is working to transform the F.C.C. from a once sleepy agency best known for licensing local TV stations and expanding 5G cellular networks into a protector of conservative speech. . .”
Read the full article at:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/24/technology/brendan-carr-fcc-kimmel.html
Article in The Guardian by Blake Montgomery, 9/24/25
Headline: “Murdoch’s TikTok? Trump offers allies another lever of media control”
Subhead: “Under the known terms of the deal with China, TikTok would get a new board, including Murdochs and Ellisons”
“Donald Trump revealed last week the US and China are close to inking a deal to let TikTok continue operating in the US. Details are not final, but should the agreement go through as has been reported, the owners of the US’s most powerful cable TV channels may soon also steer the nation’s most influential social network. The arrangement would gift Trump’s billionaire allies a degree of control over US media that would be vast and unprecedented. . .”
Read the full article at:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/24/tiktok-trump-murdoch-ellison
Article in Media Matters by Matt Gertz, 9/23/25
Headline: “How Fox covers for Trump administration malfeasance”
Subhead: “Monday night was a perfect case study”
“The job of a Fox News evening host isn’t to cover President Donald Trump and his administration, it’s to give them cover. The network’s stars are shameless propagandists who employ a variety of tactics to hide the president’s misdeeds from their viewers.
Read the full article at:
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/how-fox-covers-trump-administration-malfeasance-0
Article from Poynter by Angela Fu , 9/15/25
Headline: “Media consolidation is shaping who folds under political pressure — and who could be next”
Subhead: “ABC sidelining Jimmy Kimmel and Paramount canceling Stephen Colbert underscore how corporate interests weigh on free speech in the Trump era”
“. . .Media watchers called Kimmel’s sidelining an alarming act of capitulation — one that fit into a larger pattern of media giants self-censoring in anticipatory obedience to President Donald Trump and his administration.
“Kimmel’s show, though popular, was just one cog in the Disney media empire (ABC’s parent company), and its distribution relied in part on two other media behemoths, Nexstar Media Group and Sinclair Broadcasting Group. That made it especially vulnerable to political pressure since both Nexstar and Sinclair are exploring acquisitions regulated by Carr’s agency, the Federal Communications Commission. . .”
Rad the full article at:
https://www.poynter.org/business-work/2025/which-media-outlets-could-capitulate-to-trump/