NEVER SURRENDER

A Call to Arms for the Fourth Estate

Welcome back to Media War & Peace. Unfortunately, it’s time for battle…

Right now, we are witnessing a pincer movement against the First Amendment by the most powerful people in America.

On one side, the current administration is systematically weaponizing federal power to intimidate, penalize, and silence independent reporting. On the other, the wealthiest tech titans and media moguls are eagerly engaging in preemptive surrender — sacrificing their own journalists and cutting massive checks to buy regulatory favor and protect their balance sheets.

We — in the media and in the public — have a choice. We can follow the corporate elite into a crouch of compliance, or we can look to The New York Times’ recent courtroom victory as a definitive profile in courage. This is a call to arms for the media to remember its core mission: to defend the First Amendment and hold the most powerful accountable — including the federal government, the tech oligarchy, and even the media elite itself.

THE DEATH OF TRUST AND THE WRESTLEMANIFICATION OF NEWS

According to the latest Gallup data, Americans’ confidence in mass media to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly has hit an all-time historical low.

The public has completely lost faith in the media. But it is not their fault.

There are numerous reasons for this historic collapse of trust: The failure of our legislators to properly regulate social media; cable news’ abject abandonment of actual reporting in favor of WrestleMania journalism; mainstream media’s refusal to accept that social media is the only way to reach younger generations; the Joe Roganification of the political cycle; the conversion of our elections into a bottomless cash machine; and most urgently, the recent capitulation by Big Media and Big Tech to the current autocratic administration and their blitzkrieg against free speech and the Fourth Estate.

The last thirty years has seen the slow, sad enshitification of American news. But the last 553 days have brought a full-out assault on the First Amendment by the very officers entrusted to protect it. This is epitomized by The White House and Department of Justice’s recent attacks on reporters from The New York Times.

THE WAR ON FACTS

Justice Department attorneys – with a sworn duty to protect the Constitution – admittedly lied to a grand jury, “forgetting” to tell them that the subpoenas they sought were meant to unmask anonymous sources and silence US journalists.

To be clear, The Federal Bureau of Investigation issued legal demands to American phone companies to turn over call logs and text messages of a reporter’s mom, because they were in a panicked rush to salve the raging paranoia of a sitting President who is actively trying to hide the truth about the $400,000,000 gift he took from the Qatari Royal Family.

Now, put that Orwellian scenario in context of the following dirty laundry list:

🎃 The Attempt to Strangle PBS and NPR: Because the sitting President does not like the factual reporting of PBS NewsHour and NPR’s All Things Considered, the administration pushed through a brutal billion-dollar federal rescission of funding for public media, murdering the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

🎃 Late Night McCarthyism: In response to a joke, Federal Communications Commission Chair, Brendan “Goebbels” Carr, threatened the broadcast licenses of local affiliate stations. Nexstar and Sinclair – both with business in front of the FCC and representing more than 25% of the US broadcast footprint – aided and abetted Carr, unilaterally removing Jimmy Kimmel Live! from the airwaves.

🎃 The Epstein Filing: The President filed a $10 billion defamation lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal over their reporting of Trump’s signed birthday card to Jeffrey Epstein. After a federal judge dismissed the case, the administration refiled it. The goal is obvious: introduce crushing, endless discovery costs to force this traditionally conservative publication, owned by Rupert Murdoch no less, into editorial submission.

🎃 Blackmailing The Beeb: The President of the United States filed a different $10 billion lawsuit against the BBC over their documentary about January 6th. The suit represents a coordinated attempt to use the US legal system to exhaust the resources of global public broadcasters.

However, the BBC has been granted the right to subpoena the President’s closest family members and political advisers to testify about the his actual intent on January 6^th; and the right to demand Trump’s personal cell and text records, his daily diaries, and his private schedules leading up to the attack on the Capitol. While the current administration are draconian autocrats, they also do not seem to comprehend the basic rules of discovery.

🎃 The Quid Pro Quoing of CBS: In return for approval of the Skydance/Paramount merger, Federal Censor-in-Chief Carr solicited guarantees from David “CEO Because-My-Daddy-Says-So” Ellison to fire Stephen Colbert and dismantle 60 Minutes. Six days after Colbert was fired, Carr issued the FCC approval. Bari Weiss was hired ten weeks later, then shitcanned all of 60 Minutes senior management at the end of the season.

🎃 Kimmel’s Contract Killing: After Jimmy Kimmel – a standup comedian – satirized the President and the illegal alien First Lady, FCC Chair Brendan “Pravda” Carr issued a wholly unprecedented directive, bypassing normal FCC schedules, to force ABC’s eight major owned-and-operated stations to reapply for their broadcast licenses early, and threatening to cut off their right to broadcast.

🎃 Executive Editor-in-Chief: Live on CNN, the sitting US President told America that he’s “working to bring CNN back to normal.” Likely due to his creeping dementia, Trump said the quiet part out loud. After accepting a $16 million bribe from Sugar Daddy and Nepo Kid Ellison to approve their first mega-merger, Paprika Putin admitted, on live television, that he is actively colluding to grant approval of their attempt to buy Disco Bros, so they can do to CNN what they’ve accomplished at CBS News – silence dissent and convert the news media into an extension of the White House.

🎃 Jail Time For Journos: The sitting US President and his weaponized Justice Department Gestapo then attempted to prosecute NY Times journalists and their families, for reporting on a faulty aircraft given to him by a foreign oil oligarchy. Thankfully, Judge Subramanian understands that his duty is to the US Constitution, and not a Chief Executive attempting to silence the Fourth Estate and establish an autocratic state, where questioning the President is against the law. However, make no mistake: just because it failed – primarily due to the rabid incompetence of the Justice Department and FBI – does NOT make this maneuver any less dangerous.

These are eight case studies in fascism.

This is an existential crisis for the American Media Establishment. If you work in the media, all of this should set your hair ablaze.

THE RESISTANCE BLUEPRINT

Disney’s newfound mouse balls in fighting Der Commissar Carr, the BBC’s ingenious discovery play, and The New York Times’ legal knockout are all prime examples of profiles in courage. Even Rupe’s WSJ shows that standing up to the bully pulpit is possible – for the most part, our legal bulwark is holding back Trump’s tsarist tsunami. Even Mango Mao’s assault on PBS and NPR is backfiring, generating an enormous outpouring of support from the public for the public media – millions of new donors have contributed to public media since the rescission (YET, all the money has not been replaced, so you all should donate right now).

But there are numerous other fronts on which the media can fight back in this war against the First Amendment.

📣 Stop The Shouting Heads: Please stop disguising pundits as journalists. Report the news, facts, and reality. Americans distrust news media because there’s precious little real news media left. “Horse Race Reporting” on politics makes politics sports. That is the opposite of what we need right now. The public believes that the media is biased, because most notable TV news hosts are, in fact, biased.

The primetime roundtable cage matches with “both sides” trading blows is not debate; it’s clickbait. It isn’t even entertaining; it’s just enraging. However, the endless, talking-head “yes, and” confirmation bias echo chambers are just as bad, if not worse. Feeding red meat exclusively to your own choir teaches nobody anything – and it will never convince anyone to leave the entrenched tribes that the polarizing cable news wars created.

📣 Fish Where The Schools Are: In France, public broadcaster France TV is working with news Creator HugoDécrypte and TF1 is working with Creator/reporter Gaspard G to produce long-form, quality journalism distributed directly on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. The NY Times and The Guardian have both embraced these platforms. Because that is where most consumers younger than Boomers get their news – every day. If you do not report directly onto these platforms, even quality journalism will fall on deaf ears.

📣 Grow A Set: This goes beyond the news. In the initial fight over Kimmel, Disney caved. Even more recently, The Kennedy Center censored comedian Whitney Cummings during Netflix’s edition of the Mark Twain Prize Ceremony. Netflix passed the buck and blamed The Kennedy Center. Weak friggin’ tea.

Here’s the joke by the way: “I heard Trump wanted to come tonight, but he couldn’t make it — he got caught in sex traffic.”

This pales by comparison, however, to the self-serving acquiescence most of media now demonstrates in standing out of the way while the billionaire buddies of Orange Julius Caesar consolidate control over the American news media, through their attempt to combine CBS News and CNN under the thumb of neo-fascist puppet Bari Weiss. The industry elite knows this is the goal. Yet even notable defender of the free press Jeff Zucker is playing along, because his benefactors at Red Bird (aka The Saudi Princes), are backing the deal with blood money.

Preemptive fealty may buy you time, but it only delays the inevitable. If they win now, as the Niemöller poem says, eventually they will come for you.

CHOOSE A SIDE OF HISTORY

The stakes could not be clearer. We are in the middle of a coordinated assault on independent journalism, executed by an increasingly authoritarian state, that is sending an armed, untrained militia into the streets to arrest and kill its own citizens, using their power to enrich themselves, and currently attempting to end free and fair elections as we know them. And they really don’t want anyone reporting on it.

We can no longer separate the threat of the state from the threat of the billionaires who own the infrastructure of our public square. When Big Tech buys federal contracts with inaugural tributes, and when media moguls fire late-night hosts and gut investigative newsrooms to get mergers approved, they are telling us exactly who they are. They are choosing their own wallets over the First Amendment.

This is precisely why the Economist Intelligence Unit Democracy Index has degraded the United States from “Full Democracy” to “Flawed Democracy,” ranking America 34^th for democratic values, worse than Batswana and Malta. It is the core reason why 72% of Americans now believe that “America no longer serves as a good example of democracy for other nations around the world.”

Last week, The New York Times showed that the authoritarian broligarchy can be stared down. European creator-broadcaster collabs show us that audiences will reward actual, transparent reporting over performative cable news cosplay.

Media’s most important role is holding those in power accountable. Period.

It’s time for the rest of the media establishment to find a spine, reject WWE-style journalism, follow The Times’ lead, and stand up for the First Amendment.

If we fail on this, it won’t just be the media that falls, democracy itself will also get cancelled.

I sometimes get pushback for being “too political.” I often hear some version of “shut up and make maps.” If that’s your reaction to this piece, please feel free to unsubscribe. No one is forcing you to read this newsletter. In my humble opinion, standing up for the free press is not at all political. It’s the most American thing we can do.

If, on the other hand, you are up for this fight, please let me know!

Good Day and Good Luck.

ESHAP