Washington Monthly - Don’t Let Independent Media Die

Policy director Phil Longman warns that unchecked Big Tech and AI monopolies are rapidly undermining the economic foundations of a free press and urges urgent public support for policy-focused journalism, like the Washington Monthly, as essential to preserving democracy and meaningful freedom of speech.

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.  
These threats, in many ways, are the consequence of structural forces that have long eroded the economic foundations of a free press. They have gone into hyperdrive over the last few years, including failing to regulate internet platforms like Google and Facebook and subjecting them to traditional antitrust and liability standards.  

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