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The Latest Corporate Media and Telecom Trend? Caving to Trump
We expect our media to act as a check on abuses of power. Instead, these companies are enabling the Trump regime even as it’s actively and openly attacking journalism and undermining free speech.
Jul 13, 2025
In the Trump 2.0 era, media conglomerates aren’t just reporting news but making it as well—and for all of the wrong reasons.
Companies including Paramount (which owns CBS) and Disney (which owns ABC) have earned headlines for capitulating to the political thuggery of the White House and its improperly subservient federal agencies.
In December 2024, ABC News caved in advance of U.S. President Donald Trump’s inauguration, paying $15 million (plus $1 million in legal fees) to resolve Trump’s defamation lawsuit against the network and its anchor George Stephanopoulos, who had imprecisely said that the president had been found “liable for rape” in a civil trial in New York. (In fact, Trump had been found liable under New York State’s definition of “sexual abuse.”)
And in July, Paramount Chairwoman Shari Redstone paid Trump $16 million to settle a frivolous lawsuit the president brought against CBS News. Trump wrongly claimed that “60 Minutes” deceptively edited an interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris, allegedly causing him “mental anguish.” Redstone’s decision to settle the case (driven by her desire to gain official approval of a multibillion-dollar merger with Skydance) has sparked righteous discontent among CBS reporters and producers who see the ostensible bribe as a betrayal of the news organization’s journalistic principles and free-speech rights.
The Capitulation Trend
These disturbing examples of media capitulation are not isolated events but part of a worrisome trend across all sectors of the U.S. media and telecommunications industry. The nation’s largest telecommunications companies are busy pandering to the Trump regime as well. In recent months, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon have abandoned prior commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion in hopes of winning approval of various mergers, acquisitions, and other regulatory requests before federal agencies.
A series of Trump executive orders seeking to erase DEI programs in the public and private sectors prompted the capitulations in the telecommunications sector. In a stunning reversal of their previous commitments, companies have fallen into line.
In a July 8 letter to Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr, T-Mobile announced that it has scrapped all DEI initiatives, as it looks to the agency to green-light its proposed acquisitions of UScellular’s wireless operations and of internet service provider Metronet. Previously, the wireless giant had “dissolved” its partnership with several civil-rights organizations that had helped the company develop inclusive corporate-governance practices.
While many U.S. media institutions curried favor with political figures during previous administrations, these companies’ surrender to the tyranny of Trumpism poses an existential crisis of an entirely different scale—one that cuts to the core of our democracy.
Earlier, in May, the FCC blessed Verizon’s proposed merger with Frontier Communications. Buried in the FCC’s approval order—but proudly touted in the agency’s press release—is the claim that Verizon got the deal done only after promising to end its own DEI programs in a letter filed with the FCC just a day before it received agency approval.
In March, AT&T ended its DEI-focused employee training and cut off funding for the Trevor Project, a suicide-prevention group for LGBTQIA+ youth, and Turn Up the Love, a series of Pride events that partners with musical artists.
“In this political climate, there’s no such thing right now as corporate reckoning with systems of oppression,” said Free Press vice president of policy and general counsel Matt Wood. “There’s no T-Mobile as a magenta maverick. The only colors today are green and white: chasing dollars, and appeasing baseless white grievances over so-called reverse racism.”
Cozying Up to Political Power
And it’s not just phone giants that are following the craven path Disney and Paramount have forged. Caving to Trump has become a pattern across the entire establishment media sector, from broadcasting and entertainment companies to online platforms and newspaper owners.
While many U.S. media institutions curried favor with political figures during previous administrations, these companies’ surrender to the tyranny of Trumpism poses an existential crisis of an entirely different scale—one that cuts to the core of our democracy.
The wealthiest media companies have become so deeply embedded within the power structures of society—and so entangled with and dependent on government contracts and other official favors—that it’s not surprising to see them bend to the whims of an authoritarian leader. But that doesn’t make it any less dangerous.
We expect our media to act as a check on abuses of power. Instead, these companies are enabling the Trump regime even as it’s actively and openly attacking journalism and undermining free speech. That large telecommunications companies have joined the cowardly capitulations exposes the deep structural rot at the root of our entire media, journalism, and communications system.
These failures raise important questions about a captured media-policy infrastructure—fueled by hundreds of millions of dollars in fees to corporate lobbyists, lawyers, and trade groups—that has allowed a relatively small group of media and telecommunications companies to become this enormous.
As the Trump administration—with the help of a compliant FCC—attempts to roll back limits to media consolidation, it’s worth recognizing that bigger media isn’t better for the American people and our democracy.
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Trump FCC Chair Accused of 'Political Theater' to Please Net Neutrality's Foes
"The only reason" to take the rules off the books now, said one critic, "is to score points with broadband monopolies and their lobbyists, who've fought against essential and popular safeguards for the past two decades straight."
Jul 11, 2025
The advocacy group Free Press on Friday blasted U.S. President Donald Trump's Federal Communications Commission chief for an order that rips net neutrality rules off the books, without any time for public comment, following an unfavorable court ruling.
A panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit ruled in January that broadband is an "information service" instead of a "telecommunications service" under federal law, and the FCC did not have the authority to prohibit internet service providers (ISPs) from creating online "fast lanes" and blocking or throttling web content.
Trump-appointed FCC Chair Brendan Carr said in a Friday statement that as part of his "Delete, Delete, Delete" initiative, "we're continuing to clean house at the FCC, working to identify and eliminate rules that no longer serve a purpose, have been on our books for decades, and have no place in the current Code of Federal Regulations."
"Today's action is just the latest step the FCC is taking to follow the Trump administration's effort to usher in prosperity through deregulation," he said of the order that scraps the net neutrality rules. "And it's just one of many, with more on the horizon, so stay tuned."
Responding in a lengthy statement, Free Press vice president of policy and general counsel Matt Wood said that "the FCC's so-called deletion today is little more than political grandstanding. It's true that the rules in question were first stayed by the 6th Circuit and then struck down by that appellate court—in a poorly reasoned opinion. So today's bookkeeping maneuver changes very little in reality."
"What's sad about it is Brendan Carr, as usual, prioritizing political theater and ideological obeisance over actual legal reasoning and policy impacts," Wood continued. "There's no need to delete currently inoperative rules, much less to announce it in a summer Friday order. The only reason to do that is to score points with broadband monopolies and their lobbyists, who've fought against essential and popular safeguards for the past two decades straight."
"It also shows subservience to Elon Musk's incredibly destructive government-by-chainsaw attitude—which seems to have outlived Musk himself in some corners of the Trump administration," he argued, referring to the tech billionaire who initially spearheaded the president's Department of Government Efficiency but has since had a public breakup with Trump.
Wood noted that "the appeals process for this case has not even concluded yet, as Free Press and allies sought and got more time to consider our options at the Supreme Court."
"Today's FCC order doesn't impact either our ability to press the case there or our strategic considerations about whether to do so," he added. "It's little more than a premature housekeeping step, with Brendan Carr deciding to get out ahead of the Supreme Court in ways that someone with so-called regulatory humility might typically avoid."
The fight for net neutrality has been strongly influenced by Trump's time in office. During his first term, the FCC—led by the president's first chair, Ajit Pai—repealed the Obama administration's policies. Under former President Joe Biden, the agency voted to restore the rules, sparking a fresh legal battle with ISPs, which led to the appellate court's decision earlier this year.
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Why Trump's Troop Surge on US Streets Is a Blueprint for Authoritarian Power
This is not just about Los Angeles. It is about whether a president can override a state to deploy troops in support of domestic policy. It is about whether dissent is still protected in practice, not just in principle.
Jun 16, 2025
The images coming from Los Angeles in June 2025 are not without precedent. But the precedents are not American. They are global, and they are troubling. Military convoys rolling into a city over the objections of its elected leaders. Peaceful protest recast as a public threat. Immigrant communities targeted with sweeping enforcement actions and then blamed for resisting. What unfolded in Los Angeles this summer looked less like the United States of 1992 and more like Beijing in 1989 or Paris under curfew in 1961. These were moments when governments exploited protest as pretext and used the language of order to justify repression. What makes Los Angeles so alarming is not just the imagery of troops on domestic streets, but the quiet dismantling of legal guardrails that once kept that imagery exceptional.
This is not just a story about immigration raids. It is about the redefinition of dissent as rebellion and the deployment of military force to enforce that fiction. For the first time in modern U.S. history, active-duty federal troops were sent into a state not to uphold civil rights or restore public safety, but to enforce domestic policy over the objection of state leaders. There was no invocation of the Insurrection Act. Instead, the Trump administration relied on a lesser-known statute, 10 U.S.C. §12406, and vague assertions of inherent executive power to federalize California’s National Guard and deploy 700 Marines across Los Angeles. Governor Gavin Newsom objected. The Pentagon bypassed him.
For the first time in modern U.S. history, active-duty federal troops were sent into a state not to uphold civil rights or restore public safety, but to enforce domestic policy over the objection of state leaders.
The White House framed the move as necessary to restore order. But there was no large-scale disorder. There were protests, including vigils outside detention centers, marches through working-class neighborhoods, and union leaders acting as legal observers. There were curfew violations and some scattered vandalism. But there was no insurrection. The destabilizing force was not public protest. It was the decision to respond to it with troops.
Defenders of the administration reached quickly for precedent, citing the Rodney King riots in 1992 and the civil rights showdowns of Little Rock and Selma. But these comparisons obscure more than they clarify. In 1992, California’s governor requested help after riots erupted. In 1957 and 1965, Presidents Eisenhower and Johnson used the military to enforce federal court orders and protect constitutional rights that states had refused to uphold. In all of those cases, the goal was the expansion of rights. In Los Angeles in 2025, troops were sent not to defend civil liberties but to suppress protest against their erosion.
If the domestic record fails to explain this moment, the international one does. In Beijing in 1989, peaceful student demonstrators were labeled counterrevolutionaries. Martial law was declared. Troops rolled in. Thousands were killed or disappeared. In the years since, the Chinese state has denied, distorted, and buried the events of Tiananmen Square. The repression was not only physical. It was historical. Dissent itself was erased.
In Paris in 1961, Algerian immigrants marched peacefully against a discriminatory curfew. Police responded with overwhelming violence. More than a hundred were killed, many beaten and dumped into the Seine. The government minimized the incident for decades, calling it a minor clash. Only in recent years has the truth surfaced, slowly and incompletely, with no accountability.
In Myanmar in 2017, a stateless Muslim minority, the Rohingya, was framed as a terrorist threat after a small-scale insurgent attack. The state launched what it called a clearance campaign. Entire villages were destroyed. More than 700,000 people were forced into exile. The military denied responsibility and described the operation as a legitimate anti-terror response. The world called it ethnic cleansing. The government called it counterinsurgency.
What these cases share is a structure. A marginalized population asserts its presence, through protest, through migration, through visibility. The state reframes that assertion as rebellion. Force follows. Then comes denial or strategic ambiguity, and often historical erasure. Violence becomes policy. Policy becomes precedent.
What happened in Los Angeles has not reached that level of brutality. But the logic is already in place. Peaceful resistance was framed as a rebellion. The deployment of troops was not a last resort. It was a political maneuver. The administration used the machinery of national defense to discipline domestic opposition, and to do so under legal theories that dissolve long-held constraints on federal power.
Critics may call this comparison alarmist. They argue that America is not China, not Myanmar, not an authoritarian regime. We have elections, courts, and a free press. But the danger is not that the United States has already crossed the threshold into authoritarianism. It is that we are normalizing the tools that allow such a shift to happen incrementally and under cover of law.
Authoritarianism does not begin with the mass suspension of rights. It begins with the narrowing of who those rights apply to. It begins with the quiet reclassification of dissent as danger. It begins with language: radicals, illegals, rebels. It begins with the claim that protest is disorder, and that order must be restored by force if necessary. And it gains ground not only through coercion, but through public fatigue. If the streets are quiet, if the media coverage fades, if the courts stall, the logic settles into the baseline of governance.
That is why this moment matters. The deployment in Los Angeles is not just provocative. It is precedent-setting. It redefines the legal thresholds for domestic military use. It challenges the role of states in checking federal authority. And it reframes protest against government action not as a civic right, but as a federal security risk.
We have seen, around the world, how easily protest can be recast as provocation. How immigrants, minorities, and political dissidents can be treated not as citizens, but as threats. How democratic states can adopt authoritarian tools, first in exceptional cases, then in ordinary ones.
We are not there yet. But we are closer than we think.
This is not just about Los Angeles. It is about whether a president can override a state to deploy troops in support of domestic policy. It is about whether dissent is still protected in practice, not just in principle. It is about whether the line between order and oppression has already begun to blur, and whether we will recognize it in time.
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