The New Media Barons Are Easier to Pressure

The most dangerous media story right now is not that politicians yell at journalists. They have always done that. The more serious change is structural: the American press is getting poorer, smaller and more concentrated just as political pressure has become a business risk that owners can trade off against mergers, licenses and other corporate assets.

I do not think the answer is nostalgia for the mom-and-pop newspaper. A newsroom with no cash, no lawyer and no runway is not independent in any practical sense. But the current consolidation wave is not building a press fortress. It is building a smaller set of pressure points.

Start with the local-news collapse, because that is the ground underneath everything else. Northwestern’s Medill Local News Initiative reported in its 2025 State of Local News report that almost 40% of local U.S. newspapers have vanished since 2005, leaving 50 million Americans with limited or no access to reliable local news; it also found that more than 130 papers shut down in the prior year alone and that more than 270,000 newspaper jobs have disappeared since 2005, a loss of more than 75% across the newspaper industry (Northwestern Medill Local News Initiative¹). This is not a soft decline. It is civic deforestation.

The same report shows why the easy pro-consolidation argument has appeal. Local papers are not simply being killed by giant chains. Medill found that recent transactions often involved smaller and mid-size chains, and that the 10 largest companies controlled nearly a quarter of all newspapers and 60% of dailies in 2025 (Northwestern Medill Local News Initiative¹). In other words, smallness is not saving the press. But concentration is not saving it either. It is preserving some assets while leaving fewer independent owners in position to say no.

The Paramount case is the warning label. On July 24, 2025, the Federal Communications Commission approved Skydance’s $8 billion acquisition of Paramount Global, including CBS’s owned-and-operated broadcast stations, by granting license-transfer applications (FCC²). The FCC’s own announcement did not read like a dry competition filing. It praised Skydance’s written commitments that the new company’s programming would reflect “a diversity of viewpoints,” said CBS reporting should be “fair, unbiased, and fact-based,” and said Skydance would install an ombudsman for at least two years to evaluate bias complaints and report to the president of New Paramount (FCC²).

That language matters because it placed editorial governance inside the atmosphere of a regulated corporate transaction. Earlier that same month, Paramount agreed to pay $16 million to settle President Donald Trump’s lawsuit over the editing of a 2024 “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris, a case AP described as a test of whether the company would back its journalists while seeking approval for its Skydance merger (Associated Press³). Paramount said the legal settlement and merger review were separate, and one can accept that formal distinction while still seeing the institutional danger. CBS News did not need to lose a First Amendment case to become vulnerable. Its parent company needed something from the government.

That is the mechanism. Political pressure does not have to arrive as a censor’s order. It can arrive as a licensing question, an antitrust review, a merger condition, a retransmission fight or a vague public-interest inquiry. The newsroom becomes one compartment inside a larger corporate ship, and the captain may decide to flood that compartment to save the vessel.

The same pattern is now visible around ABC. On April 28, 2026, Axios reported that the FCC ordered an accelerated review of ABC’s local station broadcast licenses while investigating whether Disney’s ABC stations violated rules tied to unlawful discrimination and diversity, equity and inclusion policies; Axios also noted that the review came shortly after President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump condemned a Jimmy Kimmel joke and called for Kimmel to be fired (Axios⁴). ABC’s licenses were not otherwise due for renewal until between 2028 and 2031, according to Axios, which makes the early review look less like routine housekeeping and more like regulatory leverage (Axios⁴).

This was not the first Kimmel-related pressure episode. In September 2025, Axios reported that Nexstar and Sinclair kept “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” off their ABC affiliates after criticism from FCC Chair Brendan Carr, and that the broadcast groups had transactions requiring regulatory approval (Axios⁵). In March 2026, the FCC approved Nexstar’s purchase of Tegna in a $6.2 billion deal that required waivers of ownership limits, while AP noted that Nexstar had pulled Kimmel from its ABC stations the prior fall after comments about Charlie Kirk (Associated Press⁶). The point is not that every decision was dictated by the White House. The point is that a handful of station owners can affect national distribution, and those owners often have business before the same regulator.

The best defense of consolidation is real. The New York Times Company ended 2024 with about 11.43 million subscribers, $2.59 billion in revenue and $455.4 million in adjusted operating profit; its annual report also said journalism costs rose by $46.2 million, driven largely by compensation and newsroom employee growth (SEC filing⁷). That is what a durable journalism institution looks like: recurring revenue, product investment, legal capacity and enough surplus to do expensive work.

The Gawker case is the brutal counterexample. Gawker Media filed for bankruptcy in 2016 after a jury awarded Hulk Hogan $140 million in a privacy case funded by Peter Thiel, and TechCrunch reported that the judgment helped push the company into Chapter 11 and a sale process (TechCrunch⁸). If a billionaire can litigate a publisher into bankruptcy, then fragmentation alone is not press freedom. Sometimes it is just a collection of weak targets.

But the New York Times is not a general argument for conglomerate media consolidation. It is an argument for a strong, journalism-centered business model. The Times makes most of its case to subscribers, not to broadcast regulators. Its core asset is trust in its journalism, not a portfolio of licenses and non-journalistic businesses that can be bargained over. That distinction is everything.

Billionaire ownership adds another layer of exposure. In October 2024, the Los Angeles Times reported that both the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times declined to endorse a presidential candidate after their editorial boards had proposed backing Kamala Harris; the decisions triggered resignations and subscription cancellations, while Jeff Bezos defended the Post decision by arguing that endorsements create a perception of bias and non-independence (Los Angeles Times⁹). I do not think presidential endorsements are sacred. A paper can reasonably decide they are outdated. The problem is process and power: when a single owner can override an editorial board at the most politically sensitive moment of a campaign, editorial independence becomes dependent on one person’s appetite for risk.

So the right distinction is not big versus small. It is journalism-first scale versus bargaining-chip scale. Journalism-first scale means reader revenue, nonprofit capital, transparent governance, enforceable editorial firewalls and owners whose main upside comes from the newsroom’s credibility. Bargaining-chip scale means news divisions embedded in companies that need federal approvals, license waivers, distribution favors, procurement goodwill or protection for other assets.

The policy answer should follow that distinction. Regulators should not bless media mergers based on vague promises of “localism” or “viewpoint diversity” while leaving staffing, debt and editorial independence to vibes. Any deal involving news assets should carry hard conditions: public ownership disclosure, limits on debt extraction, newsroom staffing floors, independent boards for editorial matters, transparent ombudsman structures that do not report to corporate presidents, and a ban on merger conditions that pressure content viewpoint. If a company wants the public benefits of scale, it should accept public-interest obligations that protect journalism from its own owners and from the government.

My prediction is simple: unless courts or Congress narrow the FCC’s room to use license reviews as leverage, the next year will bring more “voluntary” editorial-governance concessions attached to media transactions. The indicator to watch is not whether a license is actually revoked. That is the dramatic version. Watch instead for earlier renewals, bias-review pledges, ombudsman promises, DEI conditions and staffing-free merger approvals. That is where press freedom will be traded, quietly, before most viewers know a negotiation happened.