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censorship
Trump White House Pushes Satellite Firm to Withhold All Images of Iran War
The decision "will make it much more difficult to monitor US-Israeli bombing there, which seems to be the point," said one human rights campaigner.
Apr 05, 2026
The satellite firm Planet Labs told customers, including major news outlets, that it was acting on the Trump administration's request as it announced it was implementing "an indefinite withhold of imagery" in Iran and across the Middle Eastern countries where the widening conflict started by the US and Israel is unfolding.
The Saturday announcement, said UK rights campaigner Sarah Wilkinson, was a sign that images of the war will be censored "to hide the truth."
Planet Labs sent an email to journalists who have regularly used the company's satellite images to report on the US-Israeli bombing of Iran and Iran's retaliatory actions on Saturday, saying that after receiving a request from the US government, it was "moving to a managed access model... and releasing imagery on a case-by-case basis and for urgent, mission-critical requirements or in the public interest."
Washington Post reporter Evan Hill suggested the announcement would limit reporters' access to information from "one of the most important US-based commercial satellite imagery providers on whom most media outlets rely."
The announcement comes as Iran's military capabilities have reportedly exceeded US expectations, with US intelligence reporting Iran has retained many of its missile and mobile launchers and casting doubt on the Pentagon's claims that the US is severely diminishing Iran's missile stockpile.
The White House's request for a suspension of satellite imagery was the latest sign that "Trump’s war is going swimmingly," said podcast host Mark Ames sardonically.
It also coincided with multiple threats over the weekend from President Donald Trump, who said this coming Tuesday would be "Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one"—with increased attacks on Iran's civilian infrastructure unless Iran agrees to a deal on Monday.
A major bridge was destroyed by the US on Saturday, while Israeli forces bombed a significant petrochemical complex, reportedly sending pollution into the surrounding city. At least 13 people were killed in the two attacks combined. A projectile that struck the vicinity of the Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant also killed at least one person and raised concerns about a larger attack, which "could trigger a nuclear accident, with health impacts that would devastate generations," as World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.
Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch, said the Trump administration's demand for satellite images to be withheld "will make it much more difficult to monitor US-Israeli bombing there, which seems to be the point."
Data and imagery collected starting on March 9 will be withheld by Planet Labs. The company previously instituted a 14-day delay on the release of satellite images to ensure they would not be "leveraged" by "adversarial actors."
Also on Saturday, Al Jazeera reported that Israeli soldiers had "destroyed all of the CCTV cameras" around the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, a mission in the southern part of the country where three peacekeepers were wounded in a blast on Friday and several others have been killed since early March, including some by Israeli fire.
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Mega Media, MAGA Lies
Corporate media consolidation amplifies Trump regime propaganda.
Mar 17, 2026
“The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better!”
So said war-addicted Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth at a Pentagon press briefing last week as he complained about news outlets—specifically CNN—not covering the death and destruction of the war on Iran with the elated positivity Hegseth feels it so clearly deserves.
It was the latest example of the Trump regime demanding not merely a pliant news media, but an entirely servile industry that functions as its propaganda arm. While this fascist worldview has been most dramatically displayed in President Donald Trump’s brazen attempts to censor and cancel late-night comedians like Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert for their anti-Trump commentaries, ruling elites in Trump’s orbit have long pursued a dangerous realignment and consolidation of media power to serve their right-wing agenda.
Hegseth’s outburst directed at CNN reflects the Trump regime’s ploy to concentrate more corporate news networks under the command of David Ellison, the CEO of Paramount Skydance and son of right-wing billionaire Larry Ellison.
The growth of the Ellison father-son empire is based on refashioning the American press—or what’s left of it—into the palm of Trump’s hand.
Last year, Trump cleared the way for Paramount’s merger with Ellison’s Skydance Media after Paramount paid a $16 million lawsuit filed by Trump against Paramount’s CBS News. Now Paramount Skydance is on the verge of acquiring an even larger legacy media giant, Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns CNN.
“One family, the right-wing Trump-aligned Ellisons, will soon control: TikTok, CBS, CNN, HBO, Discovery Channel, BET, Cartoon Network, Comedy Central, DC Studios, Fandango, Miramax, MTV, Nickelodeon, Paramount, PlutoTV, Showtime, TBS, The CW, TNT, Warner Bros., and more,” US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) warned. “This is oligarchy.”
David’s father, Larry, is a staunch Zionist and the sixth richest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of more than $198 billion. He is also one of Trump’s closest allies. The growth of the Ellison father-son empire is based on refashioning the American press—or what’s left of it—into the palm of Trump’s hand.
But it isn’t merely one family’s broadcast news juggernaut that rules this age of media monopoly power.
Censorship and MAGA’s Mouthpiece
Over the weekend, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr issued new Orwellian threats against unnamed networks running “fake news” (i.e., reporting that lacks the government’s deliriously upbeat spin) on the Iran war. Carr suggested he would revoke or refuse to renew the broadcasting licenses of networks that don’t “correct course.” While the reactions against Carr’s threats were swift, Trump wholly endorsed the FCC edict on Sunday while deriding media organizations as “Corrupt and Highly Unpatriotic.”
But outside of media mergers and acquisitions, a wider net of news outlets has been pulled closer into the Trump regime’s hold. This includes the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post, with its newly stated commitment to “personal liberties and free markets” along with editorials that reveal its increasing fealty to Trump.
The New York Times, while seemingly less beholden to the Trump regime, continues to churn out a steady stream of poorly disguised Zionist propaganda and breathless coverage of Trump’s imperialist military interventions. The so-called newspaper of record is so steeped in the machinery of empire that screaming prejudice drips from its discriminate use of language, as demonstrated by its passive headlines on Israeli atrocities against Palestinians that obscure Israel’s role versus its matter-of-fact reporting on recent Iranian strikes targeting Israel.
CBS News, however, proves that the Ellison media empire buys more consistent right-wing editorial leadership and allegiance to Trump.
Bari Weiss, spawned from the journalistic cesspool of the Times to later found the hilariously named website The Free Press, has been catapulted to unearned heights of the Ellison empire. While she possesses no experience as a reporter, her hard-line Zionism and anti-woke politics made her a perfect editor in chief to lead CBS News aggressively to the right.
“The mega rich have always been willing to hire, promote, and fund people willing to unquestioningly run interference for their interests while making them feel like their near-pathological selfishness, hoarding of money and power, and total disregard for the public interest is somehow morally justifiable. CBS News editor in chief Bari Weiss is simply another in a long line of feckless water carriers for the one percent,” Elizabeth Spiers wrote in The Nation last December.
“[Weiss] has shown she’s not merely stupendously unqualified—she’s ideologically opposed to the practice of good journalism,” Spiers added.
Since Trump led the US empire into its unprovoked war on Iran last month, Weiss’ CBS has featured an infinite lineup of pro-war commentators, leading CBS’s own staffers to describe the network’s war coverage as a “propaganda-palooza.” Of course, such propagandizing isn’t exclusive to Trump’s newfound love of foreign wars. This was made clear in December when Weiss—who doesn’t hide her cringeworthy fawning over Trump—abruptly pulled a "60 Minutes" story on the notorious El Salvadoran prison camp where the Trump regime has sent many deportees in its ruthless war on immigrants. Since Weiss’ takeover, there’s also been a decline in CBS coverage on climate change.
Breaking the Fascist Echo Chamber
Against this grim backdrop of the decaying “Fourth Estate” of American “democracy,” there remains the ever-exploding and unwieldy landscape of independent media and social platforms. Oligarchs and authoritarians like Trump have struggled to exert control over the endlessly diverse and expanding universe of information and narratives exponentially building itself on these platforms.
Not that they haven’t tried.
Right-wing elites have successfully pushed the Meta platforms of Facebook and Instagram as well as Google’s YouTube to censor pro-Palestinian content. Trump launched his own social platform, Truth Social, in reaction to perceived anti-conservative biases in Twitter’s algorithm—which is now run by Trump’s favorite Big Tech billionaire sociopath, Elon Musk, who renamed it “X” and has proudly moved the platform’s algorithmic biases decidedly to the right. And, of course, we cannot forget TikTok, whose new US owned operation is now controlled by an investor group led by none other than Larry Ellison.
Now, as Trump oversees the final stages of a decades-long merger of corporate power and the state, his regime expects media organizations to serve not just Wall Street but the White House as well.
As is true of most pernicious policies from the Trump regime, right-wing designs on big media did not begin with Trump. Corporate media has long been an industry rife with monopolization and abuse of anti-trust laws to amass market dominance, from the Disney-ABC merger in the mid-90s to the right-wing Sinclair Broadcast Group’s ongoing vast control over local news outlets reaching more than 40% of US households.
But alongside the Trump regime’s growing media machine, which is designed to shield it from public scrutiny, is also the inverse agenda of strengthening the regime’s ability to scrutinize the public through domestic surveillance technology. Led by Hegseth and Trump’s resident villainous creep Stephen Miller, the regime is pushing AI companies to hand over unrestricted use of their technology to spy on Americans and urging Congress to expand government surveillance powers.
If it seems that warnings about Trump’s right-wing media takeover are sensationalist or overstated, Trump himself is quite clear about it. The despot shared an infographic over the weekend illustrating how “President Trump Is Reshaping the Media,” celebrating the defunding of NPR, the departure of prominent news anchors from major networks, and mass layoffs at the Washington Post.
Corporate media consolidation has always been about serving the interests of the elite and their capitalist system of endless personal profit. Now, as Trump oversees the final stages of a decades-long merger of corporate power and the state, his regime expects media organizations to serve not just Wall Street but the White House as well.
The good news is that the public is not powerless against this slide toward state-controlled media. If viewers can pressure a corporation as powerful as Disney with the threat of canceling their subscriptions until it spurns government bullying, as in the case of Kimmel’s show, such collective action can be replicated and broadened to other forms of economic pressure by the masses. In the same way, news worker unions like The NewsGuild CWA, WGAE, and others can work to mobilize newsrooms against the fascist media coup.
The Trump regime’s right-wing media echo chamber can and must be broken through collective people power, both in the form of boycotts and by supporting independent media that answer to no politicians, no government masters, and no corporate overlords.
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Why the US Media Is in Crisis and How to Rescue It
What we’re witnessing isn’t a singular breakdown, but discrete and cascading layers of “media capture” by capitalists, oligarchs, and authoritarians that produce censorship, exclusion, and democratic failure.
Feb 17, 2026
From the recent gutting of the Washington Post to the rightward lurch of CBS, the sheer proliferation and variation of media failures and attacks on the press during Trump 2.0 are difficult to grasp. Regulatory bodies have become political weapons. Major news organizations have complied and retreated. Media ownership has consolidated in the hands of a few feckless billionaires. Taken together, these developments endanger our information and communication systems, our First Amendment freedoms, and our democracy. Yet they resist easy synthesis.
This essay offers a schematic for making sense of the chaos. I argue that what we’re witnessing isn’t a singular breakdown, but discrete and cascading layers of “media capture” that produce censorship, exclusion, and democratic failure. This analysis is a necessary first step towards structurally reforming—and, ultimately transforming—our media institutions and infrastructures to privilege democratic needs over profit and power.
The polycrisis afflicting our media necessitates a political economic analysis that focuses on ownership, control, and market structure. It also calls for critical analyses of how law and policy determine such power relationships—both how they’re weaponized against democracy and how they could be deployed to create a more democratic media system.
To understand contemporary media failures, we must tease apart overlapping but distinct forms of capture. There’s often a tendency to focus on state capture of media, especially in countries experiencing democratic backsliding, where both public and private media systems fall under government influence and control. US media failures, however, require a broader lens. Here, authoritarian encroachment is dependent upon preexisting forms of media capture—capitalistic and oligarchic. Below, I analyze how these layers build on each other but require different interventions.
Capitalistic Capture
Extreme commercialization has long defined the US media system. The US newspaper industry became highly commercialized in the late 1800s with its increased reliance on advertising revenues. US broadcast media followed a similar hyper-commercialized path when policymakers in the early 1930s essentially privatized the public airwaves instead of building a public media system. As a result, several corporate media networks came to dominate radio and flooded it with advertising-supported programming.
Television replicated radio’s hyper-commercialized model, with the very same corporations dominating another lightly regulated medium. Although the US eventually established a public broadcasting system in the late 1960s, it remained chronically underfunded—literally almost off the chart compared to other democracies in federal funding per capita. And Congress entirely rescinded even that paltry support last year.
Jeff Bezos purchased the Washington Post for less than half of what he paid for his superyacht, and now he’s dismantling the paper while currying favor with President Donald Trump.
Meanwhile, the few public interest protections that were installed to protect media diversity from unfettered capitalism—like the long-dead Fairness Doctrine—were gradually weakened or jettisoned altogether. The “Postwar Settlement,” a social compact which allowed commercial media to remain lightly regulated if they practiced social responsibility, has come undone over the ensuing decades as commercial logics overwhelmed public interest protections and professional norms.
The commercialization of US digital media began in earnest in the 1990s when the internet’s infrastructure, originally funded by the National Science Foundation, was privatized with little public debate. Today, capitalist logics permeate the entire digital stack, from the wires that deliver internet services to our homes (if we can afford the exorbitant rates from the “broadband cartel”), to the targeted advertising that operates as the internet’s core business model. Artificial intelligence is now following this same well-worn path.
In the extremely inegalitarian US, where billionaires command disproportionate power, treating our media as private commodities instead of public services all but guarantees concentration in the hands of oligarchs. To give one glaring example, Jeff Bezos purchased the Washington Post for less than half of what he paid for his superyacht, and now he’s dismantling the paper while currying favor with President Donald Trump. With primary media organizations reduced to the playthings of plutocrats, media oligarchy becomes the dominant paradigm.
Oligarchic Capture
As ownership concentration accelerates, US information markets tend toward monopolies and oligopolies. This trend, endemic to lightly regulated capitalist systems, has only increased with the erosion of media ownership restrictions, from the Telecommunications Act of 1996 to more recent “deregulatory” moves during two Trump administrations.
Extreme corporate consolidation creates a wide range of social hazards and harms. It has allowed Trump-aligned right-wing oligarchs to take control of vast media empires, from the Murdochs to the Ellisons. This kind of capture also manifests in algorithmic gatekeeping, such as Elon Musk’s X selectively amplifying and suppressing political speech. In Canada, Meta is blocking news media on its platform to avoid paying for content. More recently, concerns have risen that TikTok, following its acquisition by Trump-friendly owners, has begun to censor political expression.
Such oligarchic capture is the predictable culmination of what’s essentially a pay-to-play system where the highest bidder takes all. Under this regime, what Americans hear, see, and read is increasingly dictated by a handful of billionaires with their own agendas. These private tyrannies have the luxury of treating their media assets as a kind of “loss leader” for broader political and economic goals. Our hyper-commercialized media system was ready-made for this kind of weaponization, making authoritarian capture easy.
Authoritarian Capture
Highly concentrated media systems are structurally vulnerable to authoritarian capture. This is essentially the Viktor Orban model: Autocrats needn’t take over newsrooms at gunpoint; instead, they can count on friendly oligarchs to police the media for them. As a result, screens and airwaves are flooded with uninterrogated official narratives that flatter the administration in power.
In addition to arresting individual journalists, the Trump administration has engaged in various forms of regulatory intimidation. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman, Brendan Carr, who’s been known to sport a gold lapel pin featuring Trump’s profile, recently informed Congress that the FCC is not an independent agency. As if to prove the point, Carr has shamelessly used the FCC to carry out Trump’s agenda, often by punishing—or threatening to punish—perceived enemies. He has used mergers as leverage to extort major news companies and influence media coverage favorable to Trump.
If capitalist capture is the foundational condition that turns our media against democracy and enables other types of capture, then the most transformative remedy must confront that root problem.
In other cases, the administration has threatened regulatory intervention against recalcitrant media companies and individual commentators, such as the comedian Jimmy Kimmel. Recently, the FCC has threatened to apply the “equal time” rule—requiring that broadcast media organizations give equal airtime to competing political candidates—against late-night and daytime television shows, which previously had been exempt from this rule. As the Trump administration bullies the media, many organizations have capitulated.
While shifts in media ownership and conglomeration are often narrated as natural developments—often featuring dramatic twists and turns of individual protagonists and business interests—it’s important to remember that our media institutions are human-made, structured, and maintained through law and policy. They’re subject to change if we as a society so wish. We must resist any sense of inevitability and dare to imagine democratic alternatives.
What’s To Be Done?
One line of defense against authoritarian media capture is public interest regulation. But decades of regulatory capture—where government agencies internalize the logics and imperatives of the industries they purportedly regulate—have hollowed out such normative foundations, rendering them vulnerable to co-option and “discursive capture.” With anti-democratic tendencies already entrenched, new federal policies are nonstarters for the near term, though targeted state and local initiatives may still be viable.
A frequently invoked—though rarely realized—solution to media conglomerates is to simply break them up. Moreover, antitrust arguments have gained prominence amidst a growing anti-monopoly movement, exemplified by Lina Khan’s admirable work chairing the Federal Trade Commission. Such anti-corporate and anti-oligarchic politics clearly resonate with broad swaths of the public and should be encouraged. But this strategy can be overly reliant on competition policy, presupposing that trust-busting a few corporate giants will return social responsibility to the marketplace.
No doubt, preventing or dismantling media conglomeration is critical. We’ve seen the dangers of these vertically and horizontally integrated firms, with tentacles across advertising, content production, distribution, and data extraction. If nothing else, shrinking them and diluting their political and economic power would be real progress.
But dealing with systemic media market failures requires a more fundamental intervention. Competition alone won’t bring local journalism back to news deserts, eliminate surveillance advertising, or guarantee affordable broadband. Furthermore, smaller, profit-driven media entities are likely to exact some of the same social harms as larger ones. Many of these problems are capitalism problems, not just monopoly problems.
Fortunately, the anti-monopoly toolbox contains instruments that do more than tame capitalist excesses through market discipline. For example, the public utility regulatory tradition offers a diverse set of policy tools, ranging from robust public oversight to institutional arrangements approaching municipal and public ownership. These models can directly challenge corrosive capitalist logics at the level of media governance, reflecting a more democratic vision of ownership and control.
If capitalist capture is the foundational condition that turns our media against democracy and enables other types of capture, then the most transformative remedy must confront that root problem. We should endeavor to create non-capitalist information and communication infrastructures. The clearest antidote to hyper-capitalistic media—an argument I’ve made in these pages before—is to remove media from the market altogether and create public alternatives. A “democratic capture” of our media would ensure these institutions serve us all, not just the wealthiest few.
Such a policy program is decidedly ambitious and long-term. It requires not just a Project 2029 but a Project 2050 for structural media reform. Despite such distant projections, we must begin to clearly articulate these plans now. It’s precisely during dark political times that we must assert bold policy visions for a democratic future.
This piece was originally published on the LPE Blog.
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