Corporate Media

Circling Paramount Oscars

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Article in Free Press by Staff, 3/13/26

Headline:  “Free Press Circles the Oscars With a Mobile Billboard Protesting Paramount’s Terrible Takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery”

Subhead:  “Protest sign mockingly urges the Academy to consider David Ellison for ‘Best Performance in a Puppet Show’ — with President Trump holding the strings”

“. . . a mobile billboard parodying Paramount Skydance owner David Ellison will be circling the Dolby Theater, site of Sunday’s Academy Awards. The billboard is a roving protest of Ellison’s plans to take over Warner Bros. Discovery and transform the resulting media colossus into a mouthpiece for Donald Trump’s authoritarian agenda.

“The billboard urges members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to consider Ellison’s performance for the imaginary “Best Performance in a Puppet Show” category.. . .”

Read the full article at:

https://www.freepress.net/news/free-press-circles-oscars-mobile-billboard-protesting-paramounts-terrible-takeover-warner-bros

Fairness in Broadcasting?

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Article in Babylon Bee by Staff, 3/13/26

Headline: “To Save Time, CNN Will Now Run Retractions Simultaneously With News Stories”

“ATLANTA, GA — As part of the channel’s ongoing quest to ensure accurate media reporting, CNN has elected to run live retractions simultaneously with the news stories being reported at the time.

“Retractions will appear on an additional ticker at the bottom of the screen, retracting the usual live news updates with corrections of everything the on-screen anchor is saying. . .”

Read the full article at:

https://babylonbee.com/news/to-save-time-cnn-will-now-run-retractions-simultaneously-with-news-stories

Strait-Jacketed News?

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Article in Media Matters by Matt Gertz, 3/13/26

Headline:  “Dire Strait: Trump’s Fox Cabinet ignored Hormuz in the month before the U.S. attacked Iran”

“It’s little wonder that President Donald Trump didn’t seem to worry about the Strait of Hormuz in planning his war of choice against Iran: His Fox News advisers utterly ignored the possibility that Iran could respond by closing that critical shipping lane as they urged the president to launch the attack last month.

“Roughly 20% of global crude oil and liquified natural gas, along with a ‘dominant’ share of global fertilizers, reach world markets by flowing from the Persian Gulf through the narrow strait between Iran and Oman and into the Indian Ocean. . .”

Read the full article at:

https://www.mediamatters.org/us-iran-relations/dire-strait-trumps-fox-cabinet-ignored-hormuz-month-us-attacked-iran

Gambling With the News

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Article i in Columbia Journalism Review by Ivan L. Nagy, 3/11/26

Headline:  “Are Prediction Markets Actually Good for Journalism?”

Subhead:  “Dustin Gouker, the author of a Substack about prediction markets, says the media could benefit from keeping an eye on Kalshi and Polymarket.”

“By the time the US attacked Iran, on February 28, half a billion dollars had been wagered on Polymarket, one of the world’s top prediction markets, predicting when the strikes would happen. . .”

“Not long after the war started, Polymarket added a note to its Middle East markets. ‘The promise of prediction markets is to harness the wisdom of the crowd to create accurate, unbiased forecasts for the most important events to society,’ the company wrote. . . .”

Read the full article at:

https://www.cjr.org/the-interview/are-prediction-markets-actually-good-for-journalism-kalshi-polymarket-dow-jones-cnn.php

Fox Gives Advice to Tanker Pilots

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Article in Daily Kos by Walter Einenkel, 3/9/36

Headline:  “Sailing through a war zone is no big deal, says Fox News”

“The crew over at ‘Fox & Friends’ is twisting itself into a propaganda pretzel trying to spin President Donald Trump’s Iran war, with hosts Brian Kilmeade and Lawrence Jones unabashedly sharing their bizarre thoughts Monday. . .”

“Kilmeade then chastised oil-tanker captains for refusing to sail through a potential war zone in the Strait of Hormuz.

“If you want to diminish the Iranian threat, if you want to make sure that this ends up with complete Iran capitulation, sow some guts and go through that strait and do it,” he said. . .”

Read the full article at:

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/3/9/2372385/-Sailing-through-a-war-zone-is-no-big-deal-says-Fox-News?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=top_news_slot_9&pm_medium=web

FCC Doesn’t Probe Fox News?

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Article in Media Matters by Matt Gertz, 3/9/26

Headline:  “Shouldn’t Brendan Carr be launching an FCC probe of Fox Broadcasting Co.?”

“Federal Communications Chairman Brendan Carr faces an important test of his stated standards for news organizations this week: If he’s not just looking to punish media outlets for being insufficiently deferential to President Donald Trump, he must launch a news distortion investigation of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Broadcasting. . .”

“Fox News’ right-wing propagandists would lose their minds if a Democratic president did such a thing. But on Sunday morning, the network instead seemed to hide the president’s disrespect toward the dead. While purporting to cover the previous day’s event, Fox & Friends Weekend aired months-old footage. . .”

Read the full article at:

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/shouldnt-brendan-carr-be-launching-fcc-probe-fox-broadcasting-co

Objectivity or Bias?

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Article in popular Resistance by Chris Hedges and Ahmed Eldin, 3/6/26

Headline:  “Chris Hedges Report: The Media’s Capitulation to Power”

Subhead:  “The propagandistic purpose the corporate media serves in the age of the American-Israeli project of genocidal colonialism.”

Ahmed Eldin: “They think they can justify their biased coverage under the guise of objectivity in 2025 when people are getting information right from the source. And whether that information is framed in a conventionally journalistic way, which some people would say is like, this view from nowhere where you don’t put your own identity into the story. I mean, look, let’s be real. Journalism is changing for better or worse. Storytelling is changing. . .”

Chris Hedges: “I want to talk about objectivity because that is, that’s a trope. Objective truth is not what they print. . .”

Read the full article at:

https://popularresistance.org/the-medias-capitulation-to-power-w-ahmed-eldin/

Media Control Under the Rock

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Article in by Saurav Sarkar, 3/5/26

Headline:  “Three Massive Funds Control a Chunk of Most Media:”
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Subhead:  “Maybe that’s why you might not have heard of them”

“Recently, FAIR (2/3/26) took a look at the owners of the biggest online media outlets. It focused on the controlling owners of those outlets, which are mostly publicly traded corporations. But a lot of the money—about $2 trillion dollars—invested in the top 50 online media outlets in the US is not the controlling owners’. Rather, it is possessed by minority institutional investors that manage assets for others.

“Take BlackRock, Inc., for instance. Innovation & Tech Today (7/8/22) called it ‘the biggest company you’ve probably never heard of.’ The multinational’s influence comes from the $13.5 trillion it manages on behalf of retirement funds, governments, other corporations and individual investors. . .”

Read the full article at:

https://fair.org/home/three-massive-funds-control-a-chunk-of-most-media/

Slithering Around All The Media

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Article in The Ringer by Brian Phillipsm 3/3/26

Headline:  “The Terrifying Tentacles of Paramount’s Media Empire”

Subhead:  “The Ellisons are building a multicorporate network of data mining, surveillance, news, and entertainment. What could possibly go wrong?”

“What are the Ellisons building? I wonder if even they know. Last week, the news broke that the superbillionaire family had beaten out Netflix—or sort of beaten out Netflix? after Netflix had initially won?? and then the Ellisons swooped in and reversed the outcome through a combination of no-holds-barred political maneuvering and saying the biggest number???—in the battle to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery and its sprawling stable of media assets. . .”

Read the full article at:

https://www.theringer.com/2026/03/03/media/paramount-warner-bros-discovery-larry-ellison-david-merger-netflix7:37 PM 3/5/2026

Media Projecting War on Someone Else?

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Article in FAIR by Julie Hollar, 3/4/26

Headline: ” ‘What Do Americans Think?’—and by ‘Americans,’ We Mean Right-Wing Texans”

Subhead:  “Media are still trying to turn Trump’s decision into a problem for the party that didn’t launch the unpopular war rather than for the one that did.”

“Polling before and immediately after President Donald Trump’s Iran attacks has shown clear public opposition to war with Iran. . .”

“While public opposition to the war since it began has received fairly widespread coverage, at the New York Times, public opinion was framed in an entirely different way: The paper spotlighted six right-wing Texans in a piece (3/2/26) purporting to illustrate the question . . .”

“It’s one of the most egregious examples yet of the Times‘ ongoing series we like to call ‘Trump Supporters Support Trump’ (e.g., FAIR.org, 2/15/17, 7/24/19, 2/4/26). Frankly, it’s hard to come up with any explanation for this wildly skewed framing, other than offering a sop to right-wing critics of the paper. . . .”

Read the full article at:

https://fair.org/home/what-do-americans-think-and-by-americans-we-mean-right-wing-texans/