"Katie Couric, the former Today and CBS Evening News anchor from the glory days of network news, recently declared 2025 "the year the media died." Maybe an obituary is a bit premature, but on the current course, the end is coming for meaningful freedom of speech and of the press in the United States. At the Washington Monthly, we're fighting back. These threats include, of course, the unprecedented attacks launched by Donald Trump's administration and its cronies against once mighty media institutions."
"There are the spurious defamation cases Trump brought against ABC News and CBS News, which their parent corporations settled for multimillion-dollar payouts rather than risk weaponized regulatory and antitrust prosecution by Trump's Federal Communications Commission. And the Trump-aligned oligarchs are competing for the remnants of once independent media empires such as Time Warner and turning them into far-right propaganda organs."
"More recently, the titans of Artificial Intelligence have run amok, training their algorithms using content stolen from news organizations. This year, media outlets, already reeling from the loss of digital advertising dollars due to Google and Facebook's monopolization of the digital ad market, have seen a 15-40 percent decline in traffic from search engine referrals, driven by internet platforms posting AI-generated articles in search results."
Unprecedented political and legal attacks have targeted major news organizations, prompting costly settlements to avoid regulatory and antitrust retaliation. Wealthy, politically aligned buyers are acquiring independent media outlets and converting them into partisan propaganda engines. Dominant internet platforms like Google and Facebook have monopolized the digital ad market and redirected search referrals, causing a 15–40 percent decline in newsroom traffic. Artificial Intelligence companies have trained models on stolen news content, and platforms are surfacing AI-generated articles in search results, further reducing traffic and revenue. These structural forces collectively undermine the financial viability and independence required for a free press.
Read at Washington Monthly
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