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How to Stop Billionaires from Hijacking the Midterms
The bulk of political dark money flows directly back into media companies that the nation’s richest donors control. We can break the cycle.
Oct 30, 2026
There’s a drama playing out across American screens in 2026. But not the sort you might expect. There are villains and heroes, yes, high finance and political intrigue, too. There may even be a surprise ending—but we’ll have to wait until the Nov. 3 season finale to find out.
The actual plot, though, is not unfolding on television screens or streaming platforms but in corridors of political power and extreme wealth, far from public view. It’s a tale about the hijacking of US elections by the world’s richest people.
According to the Federal Election Commission, as of early October a record-setting $16 billion and counting had been plowed into the 2026 midterm-election cycle. Hundreds of millions more have been added to that tally in the weeks since. Much of this money comes from the world’s richest oligarchs, many who built their unlimited wealth from ownership stakes in massive tech and media conglomerates.
So much for the idea that our news-and-information systems should foster the public exchange of diverse ideas that are the lifeblood of civic society.
Elon Musk has contributed just shy of half-a-billion dollars to Republican-aligned political campaigns and Super PACs for the 2026 midterms. That’s more than his total political contributions during the 2024 presidential election. With no limit on how much he can spend, Musk made the biggest electoral donation in American history—$158 million—to help one candidate (senatorial hopeful Ken Paxton of Texas).
Lesser known are the contributions lower-ranking multibillionaires have made: Mike Bloomberg, Reid Hoffman, and George Soros have contributed a combined $227 million to Democratic-aligned campaigns; GOP election initiatives have received hundreds of millions of dollars from the likes of Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz ($92 million); Elizabeth and Richard Uihlein ($150 million); and Jeff and Janine Yass ($110 million) .
Hundreds of millions more have found their way into the accounts of shadowy Super PACs that are not required to disclose their donors.
Musk millions for media manipulation
Most of this whopping cash infusion pays for political ads: The media-tracking firm AdImpact projects a record-breaking $11.6 billion of that $16 billion total—or approximately 73 percent of all political contributions—will buy ads on broadcast and cable-TV stations, radio outlets, streaming services and social-media platforms.
Viewers are left with little to help them separate fact from fiction before they head to the polls. That’s because the media outlets that serve up campaign spots have zero legal obligation to reject ads that peddle lies. While nearly half of this money goes to air political ads on broadcast outlets, the Communications Act of 1934 prohibits television and radio stations from censoring or editing candidate-sponsored ads, even when they know the content is false.
And while the Federal Communications Commission does require a degree of transparency regarding who paid for a given broadcast ad, it does not monitor or regulate the accuracy of an ad’s claims.
Since 2024, the owners of social-media platforms like Facebook, X and YouTube—which account for a growing piece of the ad-spending pie—have largely abandoned efforts to fact check the political ads that course across their networks.
The money-and-media-election complex
That’s a lot of data points to digest. But the information on political-ad spending leads to one disturbing conclusion: The bulk of money spent to manipulate and even misinform viewers flows back to media companies that many of the nation’s richest donors control. This cycle of money and influence is turning people away from meaningful political engagement, put off by the deluge of dishonest attack ads that will have aired hundreds of thousands of times before viewers become voters on Nov. 3.
It’s a toxic combination of ingredients that Free Press co-founders Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols called the “money and media election complex,” in which wealthy donors, giant corporations, politicians, regulators and corporate media align their interests against a public seeking to legitimately engage in democracy.
“The complex has tremendous gravitational power,” McChesney and Nichols wrote more than a decade ago, “which increases the degree of difficulty for those wishing to participate in elections in a manner not conducive to wealthy funders, corporate media or preservation of the status quo.”
So much for the idea that our news-and-information systems should foster the public exchange of diverse ideas that are the lifeblood of civic society. Instead we have a political system that’s beholden to billionaire donors, and a hyper-commercial media that are getting rich off keeping voters in the dark.
Media outlets must take their obligations more seriously. In exchange for First Amendment freedoms, they need to cover the money that’s poisoning our politics, expose the groups and individuals funding political ads and address the falsehoods presented in many of these spots. With little time remaining before the midterms, the time to do this reporting is now.
Right-sizing Big Media
Public policy must also address the media’s systemic failings. And while communications regulation may look fuzzy when viewed from 30,000 feet, at the ground level the consequences of bad rules and regulations come into sharper focus. Nowhere is this more evident than during elections.
Instead of nurturing democracy and free speech, commercialized media today threaten to distort it.
The lack of adequate diversity and competition in media has encouraged industry owners to think of their outlets as profit-making machines with no obligation to disclose to viewers the political money and special interests that make them tick. And the lack of local reporters holding candidates to account—the consequence of runaway media consolidation in turn spurring newsroom cutbacks and closures—in many ways explains the rise of a class of politicians who spend more time wooing wealthy contributors than attending to the needs of voters back home.
This has created a dependency between those who control political power (and need access to the media to keep it) and those who control the media (and need access to political power to keep it). This cycle has gotten so toxic that instead of nurturing democracy and free speech, commercialized media today threaten to distort it.
These systemic remedies include making political ad-spending information easily available, including exposing the true funders bankrolling Super PACs. Such disclosure should happen in the body of the ads themselves. We must also get serious about strategies and policies that foster independent, local political journalism. Free Press Action has made a number of promising inroads here through state-level legislation to fund civic media.
And we need to right-size massive media conglomerates, using existing antitrust law and media-ownership limits while strengthening other rules that have been gutted at the urging of a powerful media lobby and far-too compliant lawmakers and regulators.
There’s a growing backlash against billionaire control of our political and media systems that could make these reforms possible.
The failures of corporate media have undercut the First Amendment goal of creating, in the words of the Supreme Court in 1969, an “informed public capable of conducting its own affairs.” True participatory democracy will have no chance at survival if we fail to insist on serious changes now.
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How Corporate Media Let Real Estate Industry Define Housing Crisis in Southern California
By the end of three years, local news about an LA mansion tax had evolved to be largely negative and dominated by just two narrative frames: that it "reduced housing development” and needed "to be reformed”—meaning weakened or eliminated entirely.
Oct 25, 2026
Billionaires in California are pushing to sink the wealth tax proposition on this fall’s ballot in California, which would levy a one-time 5% wealth tax on those California billionaires, with the scary—and empty—threat that they’ll leave the state and ruin the economy.
Appeals to appease the wealthiest—lest they take their money and bolt—are a common plea in California, even when society’s least wealthy are the ones most afflicted. Consider, for example, the ongoing resistance of wealthy developers to Los Angeles’ “mansion tax,” and the ability of their grievances to dominate a sympathetic news media.
In 2022, Los Angeles voters approved Measure ULA to create a dedicated, long-term funding source for solutions to homelessness in LA, including funding the construction of affordable homes and preventing homelessness by helping low-income tenants stay in their homes. The funding comes from a new tax on the most expensive real estate transactions in LA, affecting fewer than 4% of property transactions, and is one of the most ambitious measures ever taken by a US city to address the problem of homelessness and the related housing crisis.
The US desperately needs more housing, and those programs must include specific plans and sufficient funding for affordable housing to keep low-income people securely housed.
But, by the end of three years of local news coverage about Measure ULA from the Los Angeles Times and LAist, two of LA’s largest news organizations, the news about Measure ULA had evolved to be largely negative and dominated by just two narrative frames: that “ULA reduced housing development” and “ULA needs to be reformed”—meaning weakened or eliminated entirely.
At the same time, local stories about what Measure ULA was doing to reduce homelessness and support affordable housing, and the people who were aided by its programs, were exceedingly rare. For example, of the 97 reports about Measure ULA from the Los Angeles Times and LAist over three years, only 7 stories included any sourcing of people who were homeless or who were helped by a tenant program to stay in their home. And, over 30% of the stories didn’t even mention the words “homeless” or “homelessness.” This is based on my research in a study of news stories of Measure ULA in the Los Angeles Times and LAist.com from April 2023 (when the law went into effect) to March 2026.
The news coverage of Measure ULA has wide political impact. Today, those negative news frames about Measure ULA have informed the positions of local politicians (including the mayoral battle between incumbent Karen Bass and challenger Nithya Raman), have helped to put a statewide measure on the ballot to make approving local taxes more difficult, and have been adopted unproblematically by the national news media as the official story of the shortcomings of LA’s so-called mansion tax. A May 20, 2026 story in The Wall Street Journal, for example, completely encapsulated the dominant narrative set by the Los Angeles news media. The WSJ headline read: “Los Angeles Tried to Tax Mansions. Apartment Construction Tanked.”
Yet, the LA news media got it wrong, and it has warped how Southern California and the nation think about homelessness and the housing crisis.
The LA news media of this study unquestionably accepted the commercial building industry’s idea of “filtering,” which posits that building more market-rate housing will ultimately increase low-cost affordable housing by increasing overall supply. The news media popularized the trickle-down notion of filtering (without using the term) in the Los Angeles housing environment despite the existence of ample expert counterevidence.
For example, researchers at the Sol Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California wrote in 2020 that “filtering can no longer be taken for granted as a ‘naturally occurring’ source of affordable housing. For one thing, the shortage crisis has caused all housing to be unaffordable, consuming a larger share of occupants’ incomes—even in the middle class—than deemed acceptable.” Similarly, a Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality study in 2026 concluded that the “market” alone doesn’t solve the problem for affordable housing, and that “public investments are necessary for the production of income-restricted, affordable housing.”
The news media’s commonsense acceptance of this business-oriented filtering mindset to housing development ends up undermining the ability of Los Angeles—and other cities across the country—to adequately respond to the need for public investment in affordable housing. The US desperately needs more housing, and those programs must include specific plans and sufficient funding for affordable housing to keep low-income people securely housed.
Meanwhile, after getting delayed by lawsuits and resistance from the real estate industry, Measure ULA has started to work: Homelessness dropped significantly in Los Angeles from 2023 to 2025, yet none of the ULA-related stories from the Los Angeles Times or LAist noted this. Although homelessness increased slightly in a 2026 report, it is still down 5.6% overall in LA since 2023. Moreover, by May 2026, the city reported that a round of $360 million in ULA funding supported 80 projects for “5,241 affordable housing units—1,528 newly constructed units and 3,713 units preserved or stabilized.”
The news media—and all of us—need to better understand the relationship of affordable housing and homelessness, and not let powerful developers and real estate interests insist that less taxation and more market-rate development will solve the problem. It won’t.
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US Billionaires Compete for 'Most Awful Human Being' Award
If these horrible billionaires control everything we see and hear in the media and on social media, they won’t have to spend a penny on elections to keep their candidates in power.
Oct 23, 2026
Our billionaires seem to be in a competition for most awful human being alive. We have Larry Ellison, along with son, taking over CBS and immediately destroying its prized news show, 60 Minutes. They appointed Bari Weiss, a right-wing apparatchik, to oversee CBS’s entire news operation. She has immediately sought to make the news more Trump-friendly. This has led to many reporters being fired and threats to others to make their reporting toe the Trump line or risk being fired. Many of the network’s longest-serving reporters just quit.
The fun doesn’t stop here. The Ellison clique is also getting control of CNN through Paramount’s takeover of Warner Bros. Presumably we can look forward to more Trump-friendly reporting there also.
To be clear, neither of these networks was a paragon of objective reporting before the Ellison family takeover. Both networks regularly marginalized and belittled progressives in the US and around the world. But they did at least have an ostensible commitment to objectivity, unlike, say, Fox News.
Allowing the rich to dominate the media and social media to the extent they do is at least as much an offense to democracy as their hundred-million-dollar campaign contributions.
Then we have Mark Zuckerberg, who seems to view the huge Meta social media platforms as important mechanisms for pushing his political agenda. Last Saturday, the Instagram site for the No Kings march went down for four hours, exactly when it was being most widely used. Meta claimed there was no political motive; it was just incompetence.
We might be more inclined to accept the incompetence story if there wasn’t a comparable picture in Brazil in the lead-up to its presidential election. Lula, the incumbent president, is locked in a tight race with Flavio Bolsanaro, a right-winger who is openly allied with Donald Trump. It seems that the sites of supporters of Lula and his supporters have repeatedly run into the same sort of technical difficulties with Meta.
Then we go to everyone’s favorite evil billionaire, Elon Musk. Musk bought Twitter with the explicit intention of using it as a vehicle to support his politics. He not only opened the gates to all sorts of racist, sexist, and harassing material; he has throttled the accounts of many progressives so that their comments are less widely viewed.
Musk also has teamed up with Ellison, who was given a controlling stake in TikTok, after Donald Trump wrestled it away from its Chinese owner. TikTok decided to suspend the account for the documentary Musk, just before its initial release. Musk apparently gave the film a bad review, which was enough to get it banned from TikTok for at least a period of time. Musk is also contributing hundreds of millions of dollars to get some of the most awful people on the planet elected as governors or senators.
This crew of centibillionaires sees the purpose of government to make themselves ever richer, and are prepared to use their money to ensure that it does. Their use of campaign contributions for this purpose is widely recognized, but that is only part of the story.
Their control of major media outlets is at least as important. If a television or radio ad can affect people’s votes, then surely what people hear between the ads also can affect their votes.
Allowing the rich to dominate the media and social media to the extent they do is at least as much an offense to democracy as their hundred-million-dollar campaign contributions. It is essential to weaken their control.
One good place to start would be reforming Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which exempts the huge social media platforms from liability for third-party content. This gives social media platforms an advantage over broadcast and print outlets, which are liable for harms (defamation or fraud) caused by third-party content. Fox News famously paid out $787 million for spreading third- party lies about the 2020 election. Section 230 can be amended in a way that levels the playing field and favors smaller non-profit or subscription-supported platforms.
The other route is to increase support for alternative media. There has been serious progress in this area. The Local News Act was recently signed into law by California Governor Gavin Newsom. This measure gives a subsidy of up to $20,000 per reporter for news outlets to cover local news. Several other states are considering similar measures.
It’s a long way from measures giving modest subsidies for local news to the multibillion-dollar media outlets and social media platforms that dominate what people see and hear. But these are an important foot in the door. If these measures succeed and are popular, they can spread to other states and possibly be implemented nationally.
In any case, if we are serious about limiting the ability of the billionaires to buy democracy, we have to go beyond worrying about campaign contributions. If these horrible billionaires control everything we see and hear in the media and on social media, they won’t have to spend a penny on elections to keep their candidates in power. Those concerned about democracy need to recognize this fact.
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Billionaire Media Barons Are Destroying the United States
Why are billionaires so interested in owning our social, on-air, and online media? Because regulating the conversation Americans can see and hear protects everything else they own.
Oct 22, 2026
As many of us were showing up this past Saturday for our local No Kings marches, with over 3,000 of them underway, the movement’s organizers suddenly found themselves locked out of their Instagram account for hours.
Meta blames it on a software glitch or something close to that, but that episode illustrates exactly the concern progressives and anti-fascists have been voicing for years: that Big Tech and the billionaires behind it have way too much power, and that they are using it to control public opinion to their own benefit.
Then on Tuesday morning, Christiane Amanpour announced that after reporting for CNN for 43 years she’s leaving the network. While she didn’t mention nepo-baby David Ellison who now owns the network, she didn’t have to: back in May at a journalism summit in London she said she was “concerned” about Ellison ownership and how it might bring about the same kind of “ideological realignment” that he’d already imposed on CBS News.
What we’re seeing here with these two companies in microcosm is that the men who own the social media digital square where a near-majority of people get their news, and the people who own the TV networks and papers like The Washington Post, are the same handful of billionaires with political and financial axes to grind that fit nicely with Trump’s vision of a strongman state run by a ruling elite.
Whether it turns out that Meta did something for politics or it was just an error doesn’t change the fact that one company run by one man can switch off a national movement’s megaphone and doesn’t legally owe anybody an explanation.
(The good folks at Indivisible have a shocking list of egregious political insertions and manipulations by Facebook over the years that you can read here.)
Down in Brazil, Facebook deactivated one of lefty Lula’s Facebook pages just before the election, leading a top judge in that country to rule that Meta can’t throttle political content, restrict searches, or remove posts in ways that create a political imbalance. Meta denies bias, but the AP notes they never explained why Lula’s channels were getting beat down on Facebook’s algorithm.
Here at home, after Trump worked out a TikTok deal with an investor group led by Larry Ellison, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office said it had “independently confirmed instances” of suppressed content there critical of Trump.
TikTok says it’s a glitch, but a study published in Nature in May found TikTok’s algorithm had systematically favored Republican content in three swing states during 2024 when the Chinese—who Trump is courting—still largely owned the platform. Another Nature study this year found X’s feed measurably pushes users to the right so quickly that it just takes a few weeks of exposure to happen.
And this is nothing new. Back in 2017, Google rolled out a change to the news and opinion websites they were pointing people to that caused AlterNet, then one of the biggest progressive sites in the country, to lose 40 percent of its search traffic almost overnight, about 1.2 million readers a month, along with progressive sites Common Dreams, Truthout, and a dozen others.
No announcement, no hearing, no appeal.
After throttling comes self-censorship, which I watched Sunday night on CNN as a host gave a warm, friendly interview to a Republican congressman who told several easily debunked naked lies and she never called him on a single one. No memo from Ellison was necessary; Timothy Snyder calls it “anticipatory obedience.”
I’ve lived through this movie before. In late 2006, as Mitt Romney was leaving the Massachusetts governorship to run for president, his company, Bain Capital co-led a $26.7 billion leveraged buyout of Clear Channel, the radio network that carried Air America programming to around 90% of American households.
I helped start the network, wrote its first business plan, and was on its air, regularly beating Limbaugh in the ratings, and we helped get Obama into the White House. But when Bain took it over they started dropping us off their stations until, in 2010, we couldn’t sell enough advertising to stay in business. I can’t prove this was a sneaky trick by Romney or Bain, but that’s the point; we have virtually no rules or regulations to require disclosure to protect our public square.
Why are billionaires so interested in owning our social, on-air, and online media? Because regulating the conversation Americans can see and hear protects everything else they own.
Lewis Powell laid it out for the Chamber of Commerce in his 1971 memo, telling corporate America that television “plays such a predominant role in shaping the thinking, attitudes and emotions of our people” that business had better take it over.
It took them fifty years, Project 2025, and the internet to finish the job, but here we are.
— Zuckerberg paid Trump $25 million for having suspended his account after the January 6th attempt to end our democracy. Then when Trump came into office again Zuck scrapped fact-checking, and has been a regular visitor to the White House ever since. Common Dreams reports the Justice Department, just by coincidence of course, has since halted a federal probe of Zuck’s company.
— ABC paid Trump $15 million, Paramount paid $16 million over a 60 Minutes edit, and in June Trump approved the Ellisons’ $110 billion merger without demanding a single change. Even Gavin Newsom caved on that one, presumably for fear of offending the billionaires.
— Meanwhile Trump’s FCC chairman, Brendan Carr, has openly threatened broadcasters’ licenses over coverage of Trump scandals that he calls “news distortions.”
This is not only wrong, it’s ahistoric. From the founding of America, we’ve treated information systems as a public trust. George Washington’s administration, via the Postal Service Act of 1792, subsidized American newspapers with a special one-cent charge to deliver anywhere in the country while a letter could cost a quarter.
Washington and Madison understood that a republic can’t survive an ignorant or misinformed citizenry.
The result of that act was that between 1783 and 1820 we went from 73 newspapers in America to over 620.
Telegraph lines, also privately owned, were made “common carriers” by legislation that required them to carry everybody’s messages at the same rate.
Radio and television broadcasters got their licenses in exchange for serving what the Fairness Doctrine called “the public interest, convenience and necessity” which was generally enforced as requiring honest news reporting hourly on radio and during primetime on TV. Reagan killed that in 1987 and fast-tracked Rupert Murdoch’s citizenship, paving the way for Fox “News.”
But then the neoliberals got into their deregulation act. Bill Clinton signed the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which erased the national cap of 40 radio stations per company.
Clear Channel exploded from 40 stations to nearly 1,200. In 2017 Trump’s first FCC chairman, Ajit Pai, repealed the rule that kept one company from owning the newspaper and the TV station in the same town, by coincidence the same year Google buried AlterNet.
And Section 230 of that law made it so that while newspaper publishers can still be held responsible for the content of their publications, owners of social media can’t be. At the time, Nigel Peacock and I were making a good living moderating content for CompuServe; all that went away when they no longer needed to care if there were drug sales or human trafficking on their sites.
What’s truly astonishing is that the internet itself was built by our government (DARPA and the National Science Foundation) with our tax dollars; these oligarchs who lord over our content today didn’t build this public square, they simply appropriated it and now insist it’s their private property.
The internet, in fact, is the first vehicle for the widespread dissemination of information since George Washington’s day that hasn’t been subject to any meaningful form of regulation or blocking of monopolies.
John Sherman, when he wrote the antitrust law that bears his name in 1890, put it in words that could have been found on a No Kings sign this past weekend:
“If we will not endure a king as a political power, we should not endure a king over the production, transportation, and sale of any of the necessaries of life.”
As I laid out in The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream, Robert Bork and the Reagan Justice Department rewrote that law into meaninglessness.
While pre-Reagan we had enormous diversity in media ownership and every downtown and mall was filled with small local businesses, forty-five years later there’s not a single significant industry in America that’s not dominated by a small handful of companies that typically behave like cartels, our media is in a half-dozen hands, and our downtowns and malls are nothing but big national chains.
Sherman’s law being gutted by Reagan and subsequent neoliberals is the only reason the Ellisons, Zuck, Musk, and Alphabet can own so much of our nation’s information system and exercise such extraordinary power over public opinion and elections.
There are some quick and easy solutions:
- Break up the empires with reinvigorated anti-trust laws.
- End Section 230 so social media owners have responsibility for what’s on their platforms.
- Restore the statutory cap on how many news outlets a single company or family can own.
- Require algorithms that manipulate our feeds to be publicly disclosed, and that people can get a non-algorithmically modified feed if they want.
And then there are some truly transformational bigger solutions that America could consider:
- Create a 21st century Digital Postal Services Act that establishes a publicly-owned, publicly financed, independently governed national social network, with no advertising, no billionaire owners, no political manipulation of feeds, and no selling personal information. Call it the United States Digital Postal Social Service, with constitutional protections against government censorship and surveillance.
- Establish a “right to digital exit” where you own all the information about you that the social media sites have collected (followers, contacts, photographs, posts, and social connections), with the power to edit, remove, or take them to a different site. You can change phone companies and still call your friends; why not the same with social media?
- Prohibit advertising based on sensitive personal information and cross-site behavioral surveillance, while still allowing contextual advertising and subscriptions. This could restrict political microtargeting and secret tailoring of messages to different voters.
- Codify a democratic right to reach your own followers, so your messages (other than spam, fraud, threats, harassment, and illegal material) aren’t limited, shadow-banned, or otherwise manipulated by the social media site’s ownership.
- Outlaw government contractors from owning social media sites that they can use to promote their own interests that are, essentially, being funded by our tax dollars.
We don’t let Elon Musk own the Interstate Highway System, or Mark Zuckerberg own the Postal Service, or Larry Ellison own the streets and sidewalks where Americans gather to protest.
Why, then, do we let them have such extraordinary control over the “digital streets and sidewalks” where Americans increasingly gather, organize, debate, and learn about the world?
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Coalition Files Emergency Motion to Stop Trump FCC From Unleashing Media Consolidation Spree
"The FCC simply cannot ignore the laws Congress makes just because the current agency head wants to."
Oct 10, 2026
A coalition of nonprofit groups and labor unions filed an emergency petition on Friday aimed at blocking the Federal Communications Commission's recent repeal of a decades-old rule that limited consolidation among television broadcasters, a move that would allow media conglomerates to seize even more control over local news stations.
The petition states that the Republican-controlled FCC's decision—pushed by Chair Brendan Carr and approved in August in a 2-1 vote along party lines—was "plainly contrary to law and violates core administrative law principles." The filing notes that Congress enacted the rule barring any single TV broadcaster from reaching more than 39% of US households—and only Congress can roll it back.
"The FCC simply cannot ignore the laws Congress makes just because the current agency head wants to," said Matt Wood, vice president of policy at Free Press, one of the groups that joined the new motion. "Chairman Carr serves only [President] Donald Trump, not the people of this country. Carr threatens broadcasters when their coverage angers the administration, but tosses them bones like this repeal when the biggest broadcast conglomerates toe the line."
The petition was submitted days after the FCC published the final text of its order repealing the National Television Multiple Ownership Rule, which Carr's FCC effectively ignored earlier this year when it approved Nexstar’s $6.2 billion acquisition of rival TV company Tegna—a deal that Trump vocally supported. Free Press noted that the merger would "give Nexstar access to 80% of US households over the nation’s broadcast airwaves."
Clayton Weimers, executive director of Reporters Without Borders North America, said Friday that repealing the 39% cap "eliminates the only meaningful limit on TV ownership consolidation in the US, reducing media pluralism, eliminating choices for news consumers, and threatening jobs in an industry already reeling from widespread layoffs and closures."
"If allowed to move forward, this policy will benefit a small handful of powerful owners of media conglomerates, while harming journalists, local and independent TV stations, and, not least of all, the American people," said Weimers.
Cable industry groups are also taking action against the FCC over its move to repeal TV ownership constraints. Ars Technica reported earlier this month that "cable lobby groups notified the Federal Communications Commission that they will sue the agency to block its controversial repeal of the National Television Ownership Rule."
The industry's filing states that the FCC's repeal "arbitrarily and capriciously ignores the harms that will surely follow from allowing broadcast station groups to exceed the National Cap, in the form of increased retransmission consent fees for multichannel video programming distributors... and higher monthly TV bills for consumers."
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Billionaire Trump Suck-Ups Owning More News Outlets Is an Existential Threat
This is critical stuff: no democracy can survive the assault of what Jefferson referred to as “an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents” when only one family or political perspective dominates the media.
Sep 24, 2026
A CNN insider told Variety magazine yesterday that the mood inside CNN right now is “like a funeral.” Nepo-baby David Ellison, bankrolled by his father who’s one of the richest men in the world and a major Trump suck-up and donor (and is in the Epstein Files), is on the verge of taking over the company that owns the news network.
The day-before-yesterday, California Attorney General Rob Bonta and a group of Democratic state attorneys general rolled over and agreed to stop trying to block the $111 billion takover of Warner Bros. Discovery, now to be almost 50% funded by rightwing dictatorships in the Middle East who’ve given billions in gifts, loans, and investments to Trump and his family.
California Governor and presidential hopeful Gavin Newsom hailed the agreement, saying it would both protect California jobs and preserve CNN’s “editorial independence.”
If you believe that, I’ve got a bridge for you in Brooklyn.
As The Lever reported yesterday, the fine print tells the entire story:
Going forward, CNN and CBS will be overseen by an “editorial independence board” composed of people hand-picked by the Ellisons and their agents. When Rupert Murdoch took over The Wall Street Journal from the Bancroft family back in 2007, he ran the same scam, as CBS News then reported:
“As part of the deal package that cemented Rupert Murdoch's longstanding effort to acquire Wall Street Journal publisher Dow Jones & Co., the two sides agreed to create an editorial board that would act as a buffer between the media mogul and the newspaper…”
That worked out real well, right?
There are also squishy promises for movies and jobs that are not backed up with any meaningful enforcement mechanism, and all of Ellison’s commitments can be set aside via a force majeure clause that lets Paramount off the hook in the event of “strikes, labor disruptions, [or] economic recessions.” So, all Trump has to do is extend the Iran war another few months to crash our economy and the oligarchs are free to do what they want!
And if that doesn’t happen, there’s still the sunset clause that ends all their commitments in five years. Lee Hepner of the American Economic Liberties Project called it “a countdown to a cliff.”
These are the same billionaires who handed Trump a check for $16 million to “settle” a frivolous lawsuit against 60 Minutes, then cancelled Stephen Colbert’s show days after he referenced that as a “big fat bribe,” then reportedly offered the Trump White House up to $20 million in free “public service announcements” and installed a Trump-humping “ombudsman” at CBS News to police “bias” at the network.
The simple reality is that in every country that’s slid from democracy into strongman rule over the past half-century, the first step was capture of the media by friends of the regime.
And the FCC, run by Trump’s favorite brown-noser Brendan Carr, has blessed Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar taking a 49.5 percent equity state in the new entity that will control two of the three most important news networks in America.
Don’t expect any future analysis of Saudi involvement in 9/11, critical exploration of what Trump gave up in exchange for a $400 million 747 jet, or the billions that have gone to Kushner and the Trump boys, Uday and Qusay.
Because of momentous decisions made by presidents Reagan and Clinton, freedom of the press in America is now as much an economic issue as a political one. As I laid out in The Hidden History of Monopolies (with a foreword by Ralph Nader), when Reagan came into office 90 percent of the American media landscape was scattered among over 50 companies; now a mere five conglomerates dominate that 90 percent of the media Americans consume.
Reagan stopped enforcing the Sherman Anti-Trust Act (and others) in 1983, leading to the “M&A Mania” of mergers and acquisitions that characterized the late 1980s and 1990s. As a result, there’s not a single major industry in America that’s not dominated by a handful of companies that generally behave like cartels, and the average American family pays an annual “monopoly tax” — in additional costs for pretty much everything — of around $5,000, according to economist Thomas Philippon.
Cell phone service that costs $15 a month in France or $12 a month in Australia bills out at an average of $61.85 per month in the United States. High-speed broadband that’s a bit over $31 a month in France or $36 in Germany (for higher speeds and better reliability than almost anywhere in the United States) averages nearly $70 per month in the US.
Similar metrics are found with pharmaceuticals, airfares, and medical costs, among dozens of other product and service categories.
But it’s most deadly to democracy when it comes to the media.
Since Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996 — which eliminated most of the rules about how many outlets one family or company could own — oligarchic monopoly of the media has spread its cancerous tentacles into politics, as well, destroying the ability of government to make policy that allows free people to make their own decisions about their own lives.
As Teddy Roosevelt, the great trust buster, said:
“There can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains. To put an end to it will be neither a short nor an easy task...”
And as Adam Smith wrote, in Wealth of Nations,
“...the monopoly which our manufacturers have obtained...like an overgrown standing army, they have become formidable to the government, and upon many occasions intimidate the legislature.”
And this is no small project by billionaires who explicitly distrust democracy and want complete control over America and her people. I’ve seen how this works up-close and personal when a Republican billionaire came after a media business I helped start.
In 2003, Louise and I had sold our last business and were retired in Vermont; that Thanksgiving, we drove to Michigan to visit my family for the holidays and all the way there I kept tuning across the radio dial looking for an intelligent conversation to occupy my mind while driving. In city after city, all I could find was Sean Hannity.
The outcome of that trip was my writing the initial business plan for Air America Radio and starting the radio show I’m still hosting 23 years later as a “proof of concept.” We were leasing stations from Clear Channel and reached over 90 percent of America; many credited Obama’s 2008 victory to our being on the air.
So, of course, billionaire Mitt Romney — with an eye to running for president in 2012 — had his company Bain Capital buy up all of the Clear Channel radio stations and, one at a time, take us off the air until we didn’t have enough of a signal to make money selling advertising. The network died in 2010 (and Romney lost).
The people who own the media pipes, in other words, get to decide what flows through them.
Remember when Uber was offering rides for half the price of taxis, until they’d put so many of the taxi companies out of business? Or Walmart offering goods at little to no margin just to drive local competitors out of business? Monopolists and wannabe monopolists understand exactly how this works.
While Rupert Murdoch reportedly lost an average of $80 to $90 million a year for about five years before Fox News turned a profit, he never viewed that as a loss: it was an investment. Economists Stefano DellaVigna and Ethan Kaplan later did the math and found that Fox News succeeded in shifting 3 to 8 percent of its audience toward the Republican Party, which in Florida alone in the 2000 election was worth more than 10,000 votes for George W. Bush in a state he carried by fewer than 600.
Had there been no Fox “News,” in other words, there would have been no war in Iraq or Afghanistan, and thousands of Americans and millions of Iraqis and Afghans would still be alive. And there would have been no Bush tax cuts, so our national debt would be nowhere near so bad. And Al Gore would have done something about the environment.
This is critical stuff: no democracy can survive the assault of what Jefferson referred to as “an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents” when only one family or political perspective dominates the media.
Franklin D. Roosevelt — the Bernie Sanders of his day — saw all of this coming. On April 29, 1938, in his Message to Congress on the Concentration of Economic Power, he told the country what fascism actually is:
“The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism—ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.”
FDR understood that when a monopolized industry gets big enough, its main rival then becomes the government itself because only the government has enough remaining power to break it up. Adam Smith made the same point in Wealth of Nations in 1776, writing that the East India Company and its allies had, “like an overgrown standing army,” become “formidable to the government” and could “intimidate the legislature.”
The simple reality is that in every country that’s slid from democracy into strongman rule over the past half-century, the first step was capture of the media by friends of the regime.
— Four days after Vladimir Putin was inaugurated in May, 2000, ICE-like masked agents raided the offices of Media-Most, the company that owned Russia’s largest independent national TV network (NTV). They threw its owner, Vladimir Gusinsky, in prison on fraud charges and confiscated his stake in Gazprom, then took over the network with the deal finalized in April of 2001. That same year Boris Berezovsky was forced to sell his share of the ORT network to Roman Abramovich, a fellow oligarch but one who’d pledged his total loyalty to Putin. Within a few years, every national channel in Russia was in the hands of the state or a Putin-friendly billionaire, and still are.
— Viktor Orbán’s people were slightly more sophisticated in 2018, having his oligarch buddies buy up media properties after he sued dissenters into bankruptcy by claiming libel. By the following year, the media monitor Mérték estimated that 77.8 percent of Hungary’s news media was directly or indirectly controlled by Orbán’s party, which is why when Péter Magyar successfully ran against Orbán he had to visit virtually every city and town in the country to get around the media blackout on his candidacy.
— In Egypt, el-Sisi was less elegant in his approach to the media. He had his version of the FBI — the General Intelligence Service — use a front company called Eagle Capital to buy up virtually every TV network, radio station, and newspaper in the country. Reporters Without Borders found that a dozen once-powerful media owners were pushed to sell to intelligence-linked companies, while the handful of businessmen who backed Sisi got to keep theirs. The spy agency’s media group now owns the ON, CBC, Al-Hayah, and DMC networks, and those Egyptian journalists who dared criticize the regime all went to prison.
— Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines used regulatory power the same way Trump lickspittle Brendan Carr’s FCC does. The country’s largest newspaper, the Philippine Daily Inquirer, was forced to sell to a billionaire Duterte ally under threat of imprisonment for breaking “media rules.” Duterte’s rightwing buddies in Congress then refused to renew the broadcast franchise of ABS-CBN, the nation’s biggest network, which had made the mistake of exposing the extrajudicial killings of his so-called drug war. Eleven thousand people lost their jobs, and Nobel laureate Maria Ressa’s little opposition newspaper The Rappler was ordered shut.
Almost without exception, this is the process autocrats use to destroy democracies, as documented brilliantly by people like Timothy Snyder and Ruth Ben-Ghiat.
First the strongman’s friends acquire the newsrooms, then the coverage softens, then the elections start experiencing “anomalies,” and by the time most people notice, there’s nobody left on the air to expose the oligarchs and fascists.
As Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1786:
“Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.”
So, here we are. Bonta and Newsom have caved, and only the attorneys general of New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Minnesota tried to hold out. You may want to call your own state attorney general and ask where they were on this case; you should be able to easily find their number with a quick internet search.
We should also contact our members of Congress (202-224-3121) and demand hearings on the FCC’s corrupt behavior, restoration of our anti-trust laws, and a return to the media ownership limits that Clinton blew up in 1996.
And please share this piece and hartmannreport.com with anyone who still thinks it can’t happen here. It has already happened everywhere else that’s seen their democracy disintegrate, and the first thing to go into oligarchic hands was always the news.
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The Best Propaganda Money Can Buy Can't Convince Americans to Like Trump's Iran War
Only about a quarter of respondents to a new poll think the US should have gone to war with Iran, and that the US is winning.
Sep 01, 2026
A new University of Massachusetts-Amherst opinion poll, conducted August 21-26, finds profound American disillusionment with President Donald Trump, with his Iran War, and with its economic fallout in their lives.
Apparently the Ellison family’s attempt to drum up support for Donald Trump and his Iran War by buying up CBS News and gutting it as a respected news organization was a costly failure. Likewise, Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp and his various pro-Trump organs, from Fox Cable News to The Wall Street Journal, have not pulled the wool over the public’s eyes in the ways that Murdoch hoped. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu boasted of the effort he expended convincing the American people to go to war with Iran, saying he had a thousand hours on US television , but while he may have prevailed on the gullible and avaricious Trump to fall on that country like a ravenous wolf, he did not succeed in altering the views of the American public on the desirability of such a war. The only significant impact of Netanyahu on most Americans has been to convince them that the Israeli government is a combination of genocidal maniacs and welfare queens that Americans should cut off economically and perhaps even militarily.
The UMass poll asked a weighted sample of respondents how well Trump has handled his Iran War. The response of 55% of those asked this question was “not well at all.” Ouch. Another 13% replied “not too well.” So 68%, over two-thirds, think he has done a piss-poor job on his Iran War, which was his war of choice. Two-thirds is the percentage needed in the Senate to impeach and remove a president, so if our representatives actually mirrored public opinion, Trump would be toast.
That question had to do with Trump’s handling of the war. Asked whether they approved of the war on Iran, a majority, 54%, said they strongly or somewhat disapproved, and another 20% were noncommittal, which I would interpret as not actively supporting the war even if they didn’t particularly oppose it. Those statistics yield a picture of a war that nearly three-fourths of Americans either oppose or about which they just don’t care. It isn’t what the commander of a war would want to hear from his own public.
Trump and the Republicans are always campaigning on being the party of business and therefore the party that knows how to handle the economy, but only a tiny minority, 7%, think Trump is handling the economy very well.
A majority think the war was a mistake and question whether it has made the US safer or forestalled an Iranian bomb.
Another way of putting it is that only about a quarter of respondents think the US should have gone to war with Iran, and that the US is winning.
The UMass report on the opinion poll noted that Raymond La Raja, professor of political science at UMass Amherst and co-director of the poll, said, “Americans are overwhelmingly negative about Trump on the Iran situation.” He continued: “Only 1 in 4 Americans thinks he is handling Iran well. The real divide is increasingly between Trump’s hardcore MAGA base and almost everyone else. Among Republicans who identify very strongly with MAGA, 87% approve of Trump’s handling of Iran. But that falls to 58% among Republicans who are ‘somewhat MAGA’ and just 30% among Republicans who say they are ‘not MAGA at all.’ The more loosely attached Republicans are to the MAGA identity, the more skeptical they are of the war.”
Conducting a war in the Middle East, as even the cowboys in the G. W. Bush administration recognized, requires at least some allies. But Americans don’t think Trump plays well with other children. Asked how he has handled working with allies in global affairs, 52% say “not well at all” and 12% say “not too well,” showing that nearly two-thirds view his foreign policy performance negatively.
Based on this sounding, we can further project that Americans are even more angry about the main fallout of the failed war on Iran, which is high inflation. Fully 80% of respondents said that the Iran War has increased the cost of gasoline and groceries. Asked about how Trump has dealt with inflation, 57% responded, “not well at all.” A further 18% said “not too well.” That is 75%, fully three-fourths, who disapprove of his handling of inflation. Trump and the Republicans are always campaigning on being the party of business and therefore the party that knows how to handle the economy, but only a tiny minority, 7%, think Trump is handling the economy very well, and I presume they are wealthy investors in Trump’s casino stock market. The tech-heavy Nasdaq is up 14-16% so far this year.
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In Post-Primary Media Tour, Angie Nixon Refuses to Take Corporate Media's Bait on Hasan Piker, DSA
"I am actually focused on Florida and making sure that I'm talking to voters here, to uplift their needs and their concerns," said the progressive Democrat. "And so that's what my focus is going to be over the next 76 days."
Aug 21, 2026
The corporate media has spent months helping to push the narrative that progressive Democratic candidates are anti-American and have radical foreign policy views that are out of step with a majority of voters—claims that are not backed up by polling—and news outlets were ready this week to pepper Florida state Rep. Angie Nixon with questions after her stunning Democratic primary victory in the US Senate race.
But Nixon (D-13) suggested Thursday night she prefers to discuss her desire to represent working Florida residents' interests in the Senate over the topics that news anchors are eager to talk about, including various positions held by some members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the specific label she would apply to her political views, and the progressive political figures she does or does not plan to campaign with ahead of the November midterms.
On NBC News, correspondent Kristen Welker asked Nixon on Thursday why she recently joined the DSA "if you disagree with various parts of their platform."
Nixon has expressed in interviews in recent days that she does not support the DSA's platform positions of abolishing prisons—noting that she does support abolishing those that operate for profit—or defunding the police.
Welker asked if Nixon's disagreement with some aspects of the DSA's platform becomes "a distraction from your own campaign and your own agenda."
The state lawmaker, who supports Medicare for All, universal childcare, and annual wealth tax on billionaires, replied, "You all are the only ones that are distracted."
KRISTEN WELKER: Why join the DSA if you disagree with various parts of their platform? Does it not just become a distraction from your own campaign and your own agenda?
ANGIE NIXON: You all are the only ones that are distracted. I’m actually going out, talking to voters about… pic.twitter.com/wgEX6csNB8
— Drop Site (@DropSiteNews) August 21, 2026
Nixon's hint of exasperation at the question came after a number of interviews in which she was grilled about topics that, she suggested, had nothing to do with the priorities of Floridians whom she's met on the campaign trail.
She quickly pivoted away from Welker's DSA focus and toward the struggles a growing number of Americans are facing with affording healthcare, following the Republican Party's termination of Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies and cuts to Medicaid.
"The fact remains that there are people who are dying because they don’t have access to quality healthcare," said Nixon as she turned her attention to her GOP opponent, Sen. Ashley Moody. "Meanwhile, Ashley Moody voted to end the ACA subsidies. As I stated, nearly 300,000 people fell off the Affordable Care Act rolls."
"The status quo is broken," she added, "and the people at the top want to stoke division... At the end of the day I have always been about the people of Florida, which is why my campaign is Angie for Florida."
Welker didn't follow up with a question about Nixon's plans to make healthcare more affordable for Florida voters, instead asking whether she views herself as "a capitalist."
The interview was the latest in a slew of media appearances Nixon has made this week after she won the Democratic primary by 12 points despite being outraised by an estimated 13-to-1 average by former national security official Alex Vindman.
The candidate's suggestion that the corporate media is "distracted" when it comes to her campaign came a day after CBS News anchor Gayle King questioned Nixon about who she has campaigned with, incorrectly claiming that left-wing commentator and streamer Hasan Piker had joined her on the trail during the primary race, along with Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.).
Nixon politely but firmly replied that she has not campaigned with Piker before noting that Tlaib, who has joined her at rallies, "wants the same things that I want, to make sure that government is working for people and not against it."
"So I'll continue to do the same thing, but I have not campaigned with Mr. Piker at all," she said. "Not sure where that came from."
King then pressed her on whether she would be interested in campaigning with Piker—whose involvement in Michigan US Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed was used by the centrist think tank Third Way as an attack line against the progressive earlier this year. The news anchor appeared incredulous when Nixon replied that she didn't "really know who he is."
"I am actually focused on Florida and making sure that I'm talking to voters here, to uplift their needs and their concerns," said Nixon. "And so that's what my focus is going to be over the next 76 days."
Journalist Glenn Greenwald commented that King's shocked reaction at the news that the progressive candidate didn't know Piker was "so revealing of the insular media mindset."
"It's the only thing we in the media ever talk about," he said sardonically. "You must be fixated on what we're fixated on."
Nixon also used questions from journalist Don Lemon and MS NOW's "Morning Joe" about whether she supports abolishing prisons as a jumping-off point to discuss her opposition to for-profit prisons, which have secured hundreds of millions of dollars in federal contracts to run immigration detention centers after they donated millions to President Donald Trump's 2024 campaign.
"They exploit labor, and they usher many of our children into the school-to-prison pipeline," said Nixon.
Florida Democratic Senate nominee Angie Nixon faced a DSA platform gauntlet on Morning Joe, with hosts pressing her on “defunding police,” “abolishing prisons,” and “open borders.”
🔹Nixon, who recently joined DSA, rejected all three characterizations. She said she supports law… pic.twitter.com/uwh1Lr1UPf
— Drop Site (@DropSiteNews) August 19, 2026
Screenwriter Dan Therriault said that "younger left candidates" like Nixon "are dealing with media in an assertive way that the old Democrats don’t have to do because they’re the status quo."
"The push by media against young left Democrats, who are fighting for their voters," he said, "is causing the media’s conservative corporate bias to be exposed day after day."
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Corporate Democrats to Young People: Run for Office! Corporate Press: No, Not Like That...
Instead of being praised for contributing to civic life by participating in democracy, young progressives and democratic socialists have been pilloried as threats to both the Democratic Party and democracy itself.
Aug 21, 2026
As he was leaving office in 2017, President Barack Obama urged Americans concerned about where their country was headed to act. “If something needs fixing, then lace up your shoes and do some organizing,” he said (Time, 1/11/17). “If you’re disappointed by your elected officials, grab a clip board, get some signatures, and run for office yourself.”
Ten months earlier, then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had made a similar comment (The Hill, 3/1/16). At a campaign stop in Minnesota, a young woman pressed Clinton about her past remarks on “superpredators.” After a brief exchange, Clinton said, “You know what, dear? You have a different opinion… Why don’t you go run for something?”
A decade later, it’s clear that a new generation of leaders has taken that advice. But instead of being praised for contributing to civic life by participating in democracy, they and the organizations that support them have been pilloried as threats to both the Democratic Party and democracy itself.
DSA as ‘Parasite’
The Atlantic, which published a 2024 essay (5/17/24) asserting, in the context of Gaza, that “it is possible to kill children legally,” ran an article (7/21/26) on the Democratic Socialists of America headlined “The DSA Is a Parasite.” (I belong to the organization’s New York City chapter.) Writer James Kirchick averred that “ideologues on the left are attempting a hostile takeover of the [Democratic] party.” He suggested that the organization’s rise was enabled by a
yearslong effort by socialists and progressive activists to steer one of America’s two major political parties toward identity politics, isolationism, and hostility to capitalism.
Kirchick’s disdain for those who join standard efforts to influence political parties is anti-democratic, ahistorical, and willfully obtuse. He also conflates and misrepresents the goals of progressive and socialist activists. “Hostility to capitalism” is accurate enough if one is describing socialists—not necessarily progressives—but “identity politics” and “isolationism” are not.
DSA opposes military bases and economic warfare, but it explicitly champions immigration and international law, and working toward “a world without war or poverty”—that’s not “isolationism.” The group also calls for “a world where no one suffers for their race, gender, or religion”—an enormously popular view that Kirchick dismisses, insultingly and inaccurately, as “identity politics.”
Kirchick and his ilk, of course, wouldn’t be able to caricature socialists’ views so easily if they were held to basic editorial standards, and if socialist perspectives weren’t almost entirely excluded from corporate media.
Hijacked by a ‘Radical Fringe’
A recent spate of articles have, like Kirchick’s, sought to repackage normal political practices as novel, violent, or disease-like threats unrelated to the will of voters. An Axios column (7/28/26) by the site’s co-founders Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen began: “Republicans didn’t decide to become President Trump’s party. They surrendered to him, one stage at a time, over a decade, in plain sight.” It then posed the (paraphrased) question: Will the Democratic Party similarly surrender to the creeping threat of socialism?
While acknowledging that socialism is popular with the Democratic base, the Axios story portrays it as a disease whose “transmission is slower” than Trumpism. It’s not clear why Axios treats socialism as a pathology; in what way is it harmful to, or impairing the normal functioning of, America or American democracy?
The Hill (7/24/26) also noted “fears” that “the [Democratic] party is being taken over” by democratic socialists.
The Wall Street Journal warned darkly that
DSA’s advances are stirring consternation—and sometimes panic—among mainstream Democrats dreading their own Tea Party moment, in which a radical fringe hijacks the party and taints their brand just as they are trying to appeal to swing voters to win control of Congress.
Odd if true, given that recent socialist wins have coincided with an uptick in favorable views of the Democratic Party, which suggests that DSA’s success may in fact be burnishing the party’s brand.
DSA’s leaders, the Journal continued, “scarcely hide their disdain for a Democratic Party they view less as a partner than a hostile takeover target.” It’s true that DSA does not view most senior Democratic Party leaders as its partners; the organization is succeeding by appealing directly to the party’s supporters. (In the words of DSA member and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, “What’s a party if not its voters?”) If those who regularly vote or are inclined to vote in Democratic Party primaries ultimately succeed in changing the party’s platform to better represent their views, that’s not a hostile takeover—that’s democracy.
The “takeover” language is telling: The corporate press sees any assertion of agency on the part of everyday people as a threat to establishment interests. The Free Press (7/21/26) sounded the alarm in an article headlined “What the Movement Taking Over the Democratic Party Wants.” And Fox News (7/27/26) went further with a story headlined “[US Rep. Steve] Scalise Warns ‘Bolshevik Revolution’ Taking Over Dem Party After Socialist Primary Wins.”
DSA does, like the Bolsheviks of more than a century ago, defend people’s rights to peace, land (housing, in a contemporary US context), and bread. But unlike the Bolsheviks, the organization is not armed or violent, and is committed to democratic change (hence the name).
‘Getting Away With’—What?
Seeking to change a political organization by appealing to its supporters and competing in its primaries is what politicians of all stripes do; it is how democracy works. Yet The New York Times(6/20/26) has characterized quotidian political participation as “an uprising from the left,” which poses a larger “threat”—it’s not clear to whom, other than House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), who may eventually be primaried from the left. To the Times, DSA is not competing in congressional primaries but “targeting high-profile House races.”
And though the Times (8/10/26) acknowledges that “democratic socialists and their allies have scored a series of victories over traditional Democrats with superior messaging and organizing tactics,” it also reports that these tactics have “terrified” the party establishment, causing them to “burn through gobs of cash,” and leaving them to wonder: “How do progressives keep getting away with this?” Most see winning a primary election thanks to better messaging and organizing as entirely above board; the Times tells readers it’s a scary heist.
Martial analogies are common in political writing, but the corporate press covers intra-Democratic Party tensions as if progressives and democratic socialists were the only combatants. As a recent AP article (7/27/26) noted:
Establishment Democrats, including former Democratic National Committee chair Jaime Harrison, have forcefully pushed back against DSA candidates who run in the party’s primaries while criticizing the way the party is going.
But if you’re seeking to change a party’s direction, forming organizations to influence it, running in its primaries, and organizing caucuses within it are the most obvious and common ways of doing so. Centrist Democrats—including Bill Clinton, who went on to win two of his party’s presidential primaries—did this when they founded the Democratic Leadership Council in 1985 and the Progressive Policy Institute in 1989. Clinton and his allies were fighting in what some at the time called a “battle for the party’s soul” (Time, 7/10/95)—a struggle that continues to this day.
Working together to alter the priorities and structure of theoretically representative institutions like Congress and the Democratic Party is a necessary and crucial form of democratic participation. It is precisely what leaders like Obama and the Clintons have repeatedly enjoined Americans to do. And when done by individuals and organizations that are honest and forthright about their intentions—e.g., those with clear public platforms—there is nothing sneaky, underhanded. or sinister about it.
Research assistance: Emily Marie Spencer.
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What the Corporate Media Never Says In Its Coverage of Cuba
Life in Cuba is full of suffering not because of socialism but because of a 67-year-long blockade by the world’s largest superpower.
Aug 20, 2026
Recently, while listening to an NPR interview with Cuban-American musician Arturo Sandoval, I was reminded of the late political scientist Michael Parenti’s classic text, "Inventing Reality: The Politics of the Mass Media."
In his 1986 book, Parenti described a situation that is still relevant 40 years later—when the US fears that another country’s non-capitalistic political model (and its attendant advances in social justice and quality of life) could cause US citizens to question their own system, it regularly imposes an embargo and sanctions against the country. Next, the news media reports on the suffering caused by these policies while, at the same time, avoiding any mention of the embargo and sanctions. Finally, when after years or decades of suffering, the people of this blockaded country take out their anger on the closest target and begin protesting against their government, the US steps in. It places a puppet president in power and pours into the country the money it had withheld throughout the embargo. Then, the media reports on how well everyone is now doing without, once more, acknowledging the oversized role the embargo played in the prior devastation.
In the aforementioned NPR interview, host Scott Simon perfectly perpetuated this model of media complicity by announcing towards the interview’s conclusion, “Arturo Sandoval, I’ve got to put you on the spot a little. You’ve been pretty quiet about politics over the years, but obviously you fled Cuba. When Fidel Castro died, you spoke out about your disdain for his regime. It was ten years ago.” Then, with no historical or even recent context, Simon concluded with, “Cuba seems to be almost worse than ever now.”
With this final declaration in which he erroneously implied a connection between Cuba’s current immiseration and Fidel Castro’s rule, Simon led Sandoval into his response: “Sixty-seven and a half years is way too long, man… The people in Cuba are desperate and hopeless.”
Citizens who are not given the context of the news cannot be engaged participants in the democratic process.
Simon allowed his guest to say this unchallenged as if these decades of desperation and hopelessness are the result of Cuba’s 1959 revolution. To the contrary, in addition to footing the bill for Sandoval’s musical education (he attended the free Cuban National Art School, founded by Fidel Castro), the Cuban Revolution redefined human rights as access for all to free education, free healthcare, low-cost daycare centers, and highly subsidized housing.
The desperation Sandoval referred to is the direct result of the 67-year-old embargo against Cuba imposed by the United States, the longest embargo in the history of the world. Combined with its multitude of supplementary sanctions (more than 200 of which were enacted during Trump’s first term in office), these punitive measures prohibit Cuba from purchasing products, including medicine, manufactured abroad if they contain more than 10% of US-origin components. They restrict US residents’ ability to travel to Cuba. They hinder Cubans residing in the US from wiring money to their families, a common way for immigrants from all parts of the world to supplement the income of relatives back home.
The Cuban embargo has received worldwide condemnation. For more than three decades now, the UN General Assembly has annually presented its members with a resolution to denounce the embargo. Year after year, its 193 member states cast a near-unanimous vote affirming the resolution. The only two countries that consistently vote against it—and in favor of the embargo— are, unsurprisingly, the US and Israel.
Unfortunately, the UN resolution, while a significant show of solidarity, has no authority to end the embargo. As codified by US law, only the US Congress has this power.
In addition and sadly, the suffering caused by the embargo is not a mere result of the blockade but the explicit objective of it as stated in a declassified 1960 government document posted on the National Security Archive’s website and abstracted as follows: “This memo, written by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Lestor Mallory, provides the original, unvarnished, policy rationale for imposing trade restrictions on Cuba. Fidel Castro’s revolution is quite popular in Cuba, Mallory points out; since there is no effective opposition against him, the only way to undercut Castro’s support is ‘through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship.’ Mallory advocates a set of punitive economic actions designed to deny ‘money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation, and the overthrow of [the] government.’”
Beyond the embargo and its sanctions, the US designation of Cuba as a State Sponsor of Terrorism (SSOT) contributes to what Sandoval referred to as the Cuban people’s hopelessness and desperation. The partisan political boomerang of the SSOT was initiated by President Ronald Reagan in 1982 for Cuba’s support of Latin American leftist groups. It was removed by Obama in 2015, reinstated by Trump in 2021, symbolically removed by Biden on January 14th, 2025, at the end of his presidency, and again reinstated by Trump on January 20th, 2025, at the start of his second term.
Along with other restrictions, the sponsor-of-terrorism status forbids US international aid organizations, including Food for Peace and the Peace Corps, from offering humanitarian assistance to Cuba. It prohibits Cuba from receiving loans from the World Bank and other international financial institutions. These are loans which could be used for much-needed projects such as an overhaul of the island’s aging electrical grid, which has caused multiple nationwide blackouts over the past two years.
Furthermore, as described by the Washington Office on Latin America, the SSOT “has a chilling effect on businesses, including banking or telecommunications investments that are crucial to promoting the type of transformation essential to expanding freedom on the island.” Ironically, this freedom (ie: the opening of business and economic opportunities) is precisely what the US purports to desire for the Cuban people. And it is this lack of this freedom, which Sandoval said in the somber closing statement of his NPR interview, that prevents him from returning to Cuba and will leave him to “die dreaming” of a homecoming.
At this point in the interview, what Scott Simon didn’t say becomes as, if not more, significant than what he did. It is that, in Fidel Castro’s final two years of life, a sense of hope and a feeling of, yes, freedom pervaded Cuba.
Hope came to Cubans with Obama’s 2014 détente, which, while not a revocation of the embargo [only able to be repealed by Congress], still enabled the US Embassy in Cuba and the Cuban Embassy in the US to reopen for the first time in 50 years. Washington’s rapprochement permitted commercial and direct mail flights between the two countries to be reinstated and for restrictions on remittances to be loosened. This, in turn, allowed Cuban-Americans, like immigrants from other countries, to now easily send money to their families on the island.
Freedom came from an opening of the Cuban economy, from the government’s expanded opportunities for private businesses. Cubans responded enthusiastically, opening record numbers of cafés and restaurants and music and art venues, among other enterprises to which their new American friends, now able to travel freely to Cuba, flocked in record numbers.
It was a boon for both sides—and evidence that another way of engaging with Cuba was possible. Until, that is, Trump was elected at the end of 2016 and, soon thereafter, began systematically shutting everything down once more.
If not for the very real damage it inflicts on the country, the SSOT designation could be considered laughable, as, during all these decades as a supposed sponsor of terrorism, Cuba has remained steadfast in its commitment to a peaceful coexistence with its neighbors near and far. For the past quarter of a century, Cuba’s Latin American Medical School, esteemed for both its size (enrollment-wise, it is considered the largest medical school in the world) and its focus on preventative healthcare, has offered a full-ride, plus a monthly living stipend, for students from low-income communities around the world, including the US.
Additionally, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Cuba offered aid workers to the US, although President Bush rebuffed this overture. In the early days of COVID-19, Cuba sent medical brigades to help Italy contain its outbreak. And this was in addition to the doctors Cuba regularly sent to countries in need from Algeria to Honduras to Sri Lanka. Until, that is, in 2025 the US began threatening to deny visas to the leaders of countries accepting assistance from Cuban doctors; and the targeted countries, fearing retribution, terminated their contracts with Cuba.
This past March, as Jamaica’s Cuban doctors headed home following one such termination, hundreds of Jamaicans took to the streets for what they called a “Gratitude Walk.” For three miles, they marched wearing t-shirts reading, “Thank you Cuba for 50 years of medical service” and chanting, “We love Cuba” and “Bring back the doctors.”
Walk participant Rupert Walters, President of the Jamaica-Cuba Friendship Association’s St. Catherine’s chapter and a beneficiary of Cuban care for his prostate cancer, called his government’s decision to cave to US pressure “crazy.” Walters told the Jamaica Observer that he wished the government had “allowed the Cubans to support and give their services to the hundreds of thousands of Jamaicans who can’t afford it,” and warned that, as a result of the medical program termination, Jamaicans would die.
Rather than supporting terrorism, Cuba has long been the target of terrorist attacks by the US government. There was the CIA’s half-century of documented assassination attempts against Fidel Castro, involving everything from poison pens to exploding cigars.
Less comical and more lethal were terrorist attacks led by Luis Posada Carriles, a Cuban exile and CIA operative. In 1976, 35 years before September 11th, Posada Carriles masterminded the Western Hemisphere’s first act of political terrorism against a civilian flight. His bombing of a Cubana de Aviación airplane killed all 73 passengers, 24 of whom comprised the entirety of the Juvenile Cuban National Fencing team. In the summer of 1997, Posada Carrilles began another bombing campaign, this time targeting Havana hotels, restaurants, and discotheques—and killing an Italian tourist. Finally arrested in Panama in 2000 for attempting to assassinate Fidel Castro at a conference he was attending there, Posada Carrilles later fled to the US, where he was detained for illegal entry and then pardoned by President Bush. In 2018, he died a free man in Miami.
Although Scott Simon didn’t say this in his interview with Arturo Sandoval, the current “worse-than-ever” situation he referenced is due to the US’s oil blockade, initiated by an Executive Order from Trump in January. Under this latest act of economic warfare, tankers trying to deliver petroleum to the island are threatened with tariffs and, if they still attempt to do so, they are chased away by US Coast Guard vessels.
Like the embargo, like the sanctions, like the SSOT status, the fuel blockade has caused widespread suffering for the Cuban people. It impedes access to electricity and also to water, which arrives at most houses in Cuba via an electric pump. It prevents the preservation of not just food but also of medicines that need refrigeration.
Many Cubans now sleep outside, on rooftops or on the Malecón seawall, to escape the sweltering summer heat, made all the more unbearable without the electricity to run their fans. Because electricity (which has been prioritized for hospitals and schools) is now available in most houses for just two hours per day, Cubans must wake up whenever it arrives (even if it is at 3 AM) to do all they couldn’t without it—wash clothes and dishes, cook and bathe. And collect water for the next outage. So, sleep too, has become a casualty of this US-provoked humanitarian crisis, referred to by a group of US Representatives who visited the island in July as a “silent Gaza.”
By engaging in de-contextualized reporting rather than shedding light on the reasons why the current situation is as it is, mainstream US media outlets like NPR do their listeners a grave and dangerous disservice. For, as The Washington Post’s motto warns us, albeit a little more ironically after Jeff Bezos’ purchase of it, “Democracy dies in darkness.”
Citizens who are not given the context of the news cannot be engaged participants in the democratic process. Without the full story as to why what is happening in our world is happening, we are rendered powerless to change it. Without our consent, we become cogs in the bulldozer of US interventionism and imperialism.
Life in Cuba is full of suffering not because of socialism but because of a 67-year-long blockade by the world’s largest superpower. In a government now absent of checks and balances, we need to call out the offending media. We need to let them know that we’re paying attention, that we hold them accountable for their lies of omission— and that we demand better.
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