Hands up, Media!

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Article in Daily Kos by TheBradBlog, 8/6/25

Headline:  ” ‘Ain’t Nobody Here But Us Chickens’: Media Giants Continue Trump Capitulation: ‘BradCast’ 8/6/2025″

“. . .The corporate capitulation is worse than you think. And it strikes right at the heart of what this nation’s founders saw as perhaps the most important protection for freedom from monarchs and tyrants. Ya know, like the one we ended up with anyway. . .”

“Following Donald Trump’s gutting of the 80-year old Voice of America earlier this year, his and the Republican Congress’ ending of federal funding for NPR and PBS a week or so ago, and the absurd $16 million dollar settlements of ridiculous defamation lawsuits filed by Trump against the corporate owners of Disney/ABC and Paramount/CBS, the largest media conglomerates in the nation continue to rollover in fear, in hopes of placating and/or currying favor with our press-freedom hating, tyrannical man-baby President. . .”

Read the full article at:

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/8/6/2337193/-Ain-t-Nobody-Here-But-Us-Chickens-Media-Giants-Continue-Trump-Capitulation-BradCast-8-6-2025?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=latest_community&pm_medium=web

We Used to Trust the Media

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Article in Poynter by Amaris Castillo, 8/6/25

Headline:  “Walter Cronkite signed off — and trust in the press steadily eroded”

Subhead: “Once a voice of authority, the decline of trust in the press has mirrored the rise of a more fragmented, polarized media world”

“. . .Cronkite was often cited as “the most trusted man in America.” For millions of viewers, his farewell symbolized the pinnacle of journalistic trust. He was the man they relied on, the one who shaped how they saw the world. But that trust didn’t last forever.

In the four decades since, trust in the media has been in steady decline. Cronkite’s departure is seen in hindsight as one of the last moments when Americans collectively turned to a single, authoritative news source. Whether that’s true or just a convenient fable, there’s no doubt that trust is much lower now. . .”

Read the full article at:

https://www.poynter.org/ethics-trust/2025/walter-cronkite-most-trusted-man-america-poynter-50/

Unbalanced Fairness

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Update

Article in Columbia Journalism Review by Lisa Armstrong, 8/6/25

Headline:   “When Neutrality Is a Constraint”

Subhead:  “Journalism in the 1930s failed to communicate the danger of Hitler’s rise. Are we repeating the same mistake now?”

“I do not know what Brandenburg was like in 1940, when the smoke and smell of the first burning bodies drifted across the town. But on a blue-skied day in May 2019, as I sat outside what was once the Brandenburg State Hospital, I was struck by the sounds coming in—the shrieks and laughter of children from a nearby playground washing over the remains of a place where Nazis killed at least nine thousand people.

It was the proximity that disturbed me, the fact that ordinary people had lived so close to such evil. The question that I would continue to ask myself over the two-week trip through Germany and Poland was: Why didn’t journalists do a better job of warning people, by giving them the information they could have used to act? . . .”

Read the full article at:

https://www.cjr.org/analysis/when-neutrality-is-a-constraint.php

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Article in The New Republic by Michael Tomasky, 8/4/25

Headline:  “The Media’s Urge to Be “Fair” to Trump Is Killing the Republic”

Subhead:  “Seventy percent of Republicans understand that Trump’s tariffs will raise prices. Why is the press acting like they’re a huge success?”

“The New York Times remains, by any measure, our greatest newspaper. As much as liberals complain about the way it covers Donald Trump—which I did pretty aggressively during last year’s campaign—it still behooves us to remember that a lot of what we know about bad stuff Trump has done, we know from the Times. . .”

“However, it’s in the way the paper chooses to explain and interpret our nation’s politics that it so often falters. The excess of caution, the relentless urge to be ‘fair,’ the no-doubt painstaking search for the perfect headline word that will appear objective.… Oy, those headlines. ‘Trump, Claiming Weak Jobs Numbers Were ‘Rigged,’ Fires Labor Official.’ Really? ‘Claiming’? Without mentioning that Trump offered no evidence to support this ‘claim’?. . .”

Read the full article at:

https://newrepublic.com/article/198756/media-fair-trump-killing-republic-tariffs-economy

Impact on Native Americans

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Article in Indian Country Today by Kevin Abourezk, 8/2/25

Headline:  “Radio silence? Public media braces for impact of federal budget cuts” 

Subhead:  “Tribal communities will be impacted by $1.1 billion in federal budgets cuts to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which provides funding to dozens of tribal community radio stations, plus funding cuts from the Federal Emergency Management Agency “

Article ins waves of snow battered the Rosebud Indian Reservation in December 2022, John Miller went to work alerting his community about closed roads, closed tribal programs and places where people could take shelter. Residents learned about the storm’s extent from the radio, which broadcast National Weather Service alerts, from people they knew and trusted.

Many residents of the South Dakota reservation lived in remote places that had become cut off by impassable roads, and some were cut off for as long as two weeks and ran out of propane to heat their homes. Miller, station manager for KOYA 88.1 FM, answered phone calls from people seeking help and directed them toward programs that could help. . .”

“Even though there were other ways people learned about the storm and where they could find help, many still relied on their local radio station, KOYA 88.1 FM, to provide them with constantly changing weather information and resources. . .”

“ ‘People may see media such as radio as something that is very dated, but it’s absolutely not,’ Edsitty said. ‘They are the first and foremost for these communities providing news and community updates, cultural programming, emergency alerts given circumstances that a lot of Indigenous communities experience’. . .”

” ‘Most of our stations are going to lose most of their funding’ he said. . .”

Read the full article at:

https://ictnews.org/news/radio-silence-public-media-braces-for-impact-of-federal-budget-cuts/

Media Consolidation Threat

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News Release from Free Press by Staff, 8/5/25

Headline:  “Press Freedom Groups Tell FCC: Media Consolidation Poses Grave Threat to Independent News and Information in the United States”

Subhead:  ” ‘Allowing for even more media consolidation poses too great a risk to our democracy, and to the free press on which it depends.’ “

“WASHINGTON — On Monday, 16 leading press freedom groups, civil liberties organizations and labor unions urged the Federal Communications Commission not to move forward with plans to loosen media ownership limits before it fully assesses the negative impacts media consolidation has had and will have on local news and information in the United States.

Earlier this summer, the FCC asked for public comments on changing or eliminating a longstanding rule that limits the size and national reach of giant broadcasters — like Sinclair, Nexstar and Fox Corporation — which already own hundreds of local stations across the country.

“Our chief concern regards the impact further consolidation of media ownership will have on the independence of the nation’s press and the vitality of its local journalism,” wrote the groups, including the NewsGuild CWA, Free Press, Open Markets Institute, Reporters Without Borders-USA, the Society of Professional Journalists, the National Coalition Against Censorship, Project Censored, Writers Guild of America East and Writers Guild of America West, among others. . .”

Read the full article at:

https://www.freepress.net/news/press-freedom-groups-tell-fcc-media-consolidation-poses-grave-threat-independent-news-and

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Article in Common Dreams by Jessica Corbett, 8/5/25

Headline:  “Press Freedom Coalition to FCC: Don’t Ditch Checks on Corporate Media Consolidation”

Subhead:  “The 16 groups urge the agency “to uphold its obligation to promote competition, localism, and diversity in the U.S. media.”

“A coalition of 16 civil liberties, press freedom, and labor groups this week urged U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration to abandon any plans to loosen media ownership restrictions and warned against opening the floodgates to further corporate consolidation.

“Public comments on the National Television Multiple Ownership Rule were due to the Federal Communications Commission by Monday—which is when the coalition wrote to the FCC about the 39% national audience reach cap for U.S. broadcast media conglomerates, and how more mergers could negatively impact “the independence of the nation’s press and the vitality of its local journalism. . .”

Read the full article at:

https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-fcc

Constitution Not for All – Rt. Wing Media

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Article in Media Matters by Toni Lonergan, 8/5/25

Headline:  “Right-wing media’s campaign against due process for immigrants”

Subhead:  “Figures on the right falsely claimed that migrants don’t — or shouldn’t — get constitutionally protected rights”

“The Constitution guarantees due process rights for everyone in the United States, regardless of citizenship status, but as part of their ongoing effort to defend President Donald Trump’s mass deportations, right-wing media have repeatedly and wrongly insisted that immigrants are excluded from this constitutional protection.

“Some right-wing media figures have alleged only ‘nut jobs’ believe undocumented immigrants deserve due process, and some have claimed that even legal immigrants ‘have no rights at all.’ Others on the right acknowledged that migrants have rights but cheered at the prospect of taking them away, lamenting that constitutionally enshrined rights like due process and habeas corpus were slowing down mass deportations. . .”

Read the full article at:

https://www.mediamatters.org/immigration/right-wing-medias-campaign-against-due-process-immigrants

Captive Media?

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Article in Columbia Journalism Review by Joel Simon, 8/5/25

Headline  “Is the US Media Captured?”

Subhead:  “The phenomenon comes in many forms. Experts believe it’s already here.”

“Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, who was born in Romania and today is a leading scholar of democracy, first observed ‘media capture’ two decades ago in Eastern Europe. The press there was not facing active repression. But it was far from free. Governments, she realized, were exercising control through indirect means—collusion and corruption. Captured media, Mungiu-Pippidi wrote in a 2013 paper, ‘trade influence and manipulate rather than inform the public.’

“Other scholars of media capture have since examined the phenomenon in different parts of the world—Mexico, Kenya, Hungary—highlighting government strategies ranging from manipulation of advertising to economic and regulatory pressure to the exploitation of informal relationships with media owners.  . .”

“The US government-funded Center for Independent Media Assistance, part of the National Endowment for Democracy, produced a video in 2019 describing how government cronies buy up struggling media outlets and bring them to heel.  . .”

Read the full article at:

https://www.cjr.org/analysis/paramount-la-times-media-capture.php

Media and Hands Off

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Article in Common Dreams by Stan Cox, 8/4/25

Headline:  “As Gaza Starved, NPR Coverage Grew but Didn’t Get Any Better”

Subhead:  “As conditions worsen on the ground, some establishment media have indeed increased their quantity of coverage, but few are expressing the heightened sense of horror and urgency that’s needed at this juncture.”

“Before the third week of July, when mass-starvation alarms finally started sounding, only a tiny minority of Americans were focused on the crimes against humanity that Israel was committing in Gaza. Common Dreams readers had long known what was going on, of course, but most Americans who depend on establishment media, whether liberal or MAGA, for their news had little idea. . .”

Read the full article at:

https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/npr-gaza-coverage

Lessons From Sudan

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Article in Status by Oliver Darcy, 8/4/25

Headline:  “Applebaum on Autocracy”

Subhead:  “Anne Applebaum warns that Sudan’s descent into chaos whoushows what happens when institutions fail – and why a free press is essential to prevent America from following the same path”

“Anne Applebaum has spent decades chronicling the rise of authoritarianism and the collapse of democratic norms around the world. In her latest piece for The Atlantic, appearing on this week’s cover, she turned her attention to Sudan, where a brutal civil war has displaced millions of people. . .”

“In a conversation with Status, she explained why Sudan’s tragedy is a warning for the U.S. as it drifts further from the post-war role it has played in geopolitics, with Donald Trump in his second term. Applebaum also discussed the hollowing-out of independent media and why decisions like Paramount’s payout to Trump matter in the slide toward autocracy. . .”

Read the full article at:

https://www.status.news/p/anne-applebaum-autocracy-interview

Losing Public Media

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Public media are not state-controlled media

Article in Daily Kos by Eclift, 8/4/25

Headline:  “Mourning the Loss of Public Service Media”

“. . .Following PBS, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) was established in an act of Congress. Its mission, along with that of PBS, was to provide quality programming often overlooked by commercial broadcasters. It focused on education, history, culture, nature, science, public affairs, and children’s content. PBS has been going strong all these years, and the thought of losing it is painful. . .”

“In July the Trump administration declared that it was ending funding for CPB, which funds PBS and NPR. The Senate passed the measure supporting that goal immediately. Followers of public broadcasting, editors, and journalists were stunned, and deeply troubled, at the thought that over a billion dollars, which had been appropriated by Congress for two years, would disappear. . .”

Read the full article at:

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/8/4/2336835/-Mourning-the-Loss-of-Public-Service-Media?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=latest_community&pm_medium=web