The Rightwing’s Chokehold on American Media Is Tightening
Sep 26 2025Many voices across America during the past week insisted on the safeguarding of unabridged free speech after the cancellation of Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show and after no less than the attorney general, Pam Bondi, 
declaring that the Justice Department will “will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech”. That’s the very speech the amendment protects. “Pam Bondi Needs a Free Speech Tutorial” was the title of a Wall Street Journal editorial.
But there is the looming question of where we will be able to hear free speech other than populous ideology and propaganda as ever more media outlets are scooped up by rightwing owners.
ABC, Now TikTokOn Thursday, President Trump signed an executive order that, still subject to China’s Xi Jinping’s final approval, would move content control of TikTok away from China and into the United States. A group led by Oracle Corporation of Austin, Texas, would own 45%, leaving the rest still in the hands of TikTok’s Chinese owner ByteDance and its investors, but Vice President JD Vance says, “What this deal ensures is that the American entity and American investors will actually control the algorithm” that decides what to serve up in an unending stream to the viewer.
Several Trump-aligned billionaires led by Oracle founder Larry Ellison have previously been spoken of as in on the deal, but Trump didn’t mention them Thursday. He had assured us on Fox News...
To make this happen, Trump has three times broken a law passed by Congress the day before the president took office — four if the deal doesn't go through by December 16. The law required that TikTok be sold to American interests within 90 days else be shut down out of worry that the powerful social media phenomenon is a conduit for Chinese propaganda and for gathering data about American viewers. The deal would deliver the same potential of the social media giant into the hands of a clutch of rightwing oligarchs.
SkydanceEllison’s son David is CEO of Skydance Media, which just took over Paramount Global, a merger that puts the younger Ellison in charge of Paramount Pictures — and CBS.
Paramount board chair Shari Redstone needed FCC approval for the deal to go forward. But there was Trump’s lawsuit against CBS’s “60 Minutes”. It charged that editing of an interview with Kamala Harris before last fall's election — no different than editing practiced over the program's 50-year history — was somehow damaging. CBS could easily have won, but Redstone had the broadcast network pay Trump $16 million to resolve the dispute, a payment widely viewed as a "bribe". Trump’s FCC approved the deal.
The approval also followed Redstone's cancellation of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert”, a comedian who, along with Jimmy Kimmell, made Trump the object of jokes nightly. Redstone says that Colbert’s cancellation was not to please Trump. Rather, it was because Colbert's show is a money loser, except, oddly, no salvage attempt was made to trim the show's 200-person staff.
The upshot: CBS now has solid Republican ownership. David Ellison acceded to the FCC requirement that there be a "bias ombudsman" to oversee programming, which would include not just keeping "60 Minutes" in line but CBS News overall.
That’s already in effect. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem complained that “Face the Nation” had “shamefully edited [her] interview to whitewash the truth”. Missing were her unproven accusations about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran migrant deported in error and without due process by the administration. Instead of defending editorial policy, CBS capitulated to the Trump government without any evident resistance, agreeing henceforward to air interviews in full.
an Ellison empireHardly catching his breath after putting together a company valued at $28 billion, the young Ellison is now working up a bid to buy Warner Bros. Discovery for cash, and that would bring HBO and Trump-reviled CNN under his control. CNN’s conversion to yet another right-slanted channel would add to an already formidable list: Fox, Newsmax, OAN, Epoch Times, NewsNation.
On the left, cable offers only MSNBC, now being renamed MSNOW because it is being severed from NBC as parent company Comcast spins off most cable assets into a new company called Versant. Liberal MSNBC is vital for airing news that the rightwing channels don’t cover for their being contrary to their political viewpoint. No telling for now whether MSNOW has the financial wherewithal needed to endure.
reversing congressTrump and the Republican-controlled Congress scrubbed funding of NPR (National Public Radio) and PBS (Public Broadcast System) in their so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and Trump even went to the extent of rescinding funding Congress had already approved. The two networks, established by Congress in the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 and operating for the 58 years since, believe themselves to be unbiased, but if so or not, they do provide news that the rightwing cable channels simply suppress.
broadcast giantsABC’s cancellation of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” made us aware of how immediately willing two major television corporations are to cancel free speech in fealty to or fear of Donald Trump. Sinclair Broadcast Group and Nexstar Media Group together own 66 ABC local television stations (“affiliates”) but are much larger than that — the two largest TV station operators in the United States having bought up hundreds of ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox affiliates in the past 25 years.
Millions still get their news by tuning into broadcast TV every evening. Sinclair tilts its news well to the right and gained some notoriety a few years back when sports site Deadspin.com discovered that Sinclair management required newscasters on every one of its stations to read on air the same political message sent by headquarters. Deadspin stitched them together in a composite of all reciting the same script simultaneously. At once hilarious and depressing. You can watch here..
Nexstar wants to buy Tegna Inc., which has 64 broadcast outlets, in a $6.2 billion deal. The combined companies would have a total 265 stations reaching 80% of the U.S. This extreme concentration is double the FCC rule that caps ownership at a reach of 39%. It would also violate the agency’s “top four” rule that says a company can’t own more than one of the top four stations in a given market; a federal appeals court has struck that down. No problem. Chairman Brendan Carr, who triggered the Kimmel imbroglio, looks sure to accommodate. He’s indicated he plans to repeal nearly a hundred broadcast rules.
Disney, about to anger customers by raising prices, thought it prudent to reinstate Kimmel, who was back on the air Tuesday.
“I can’t believe ABC Fake News gave Jimmy Kimmel his job back”, tweeted Trump. After insults and accusing him of being an “arm of the DNC” (Democratic National Committee), Trump continued…
I think we’re going to test ABC out on this. Let’s see how we do. Last time I went after them, they gave me $16 Million Dollars. This one sounds even more lucrative. A true bunch of losers. Let Jimmy Kimmel rot in his in his bad Ratings.”
Kimmel’s return proved limited. Nexstar decided to not offend Trump is more important than free speech and is keeping him off the air.
President Trump repeatedly threatens revoking the licenses of broadcasters that permit negative coverage of him. To a gaggle of reporters aboard Air Force One on the return flight from the United Kingdom he complained:
“They're 97% against ‒ they give me only bad publicity or press. I mean, they’re getting a license. I would think maybe their license should be taken away. It will be up to Brendan Carr.”
About Kimmel, Carr made the implicit threat that media corporations need to “find ways to change conduct, to take action, frankly, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.” Trump agrees:
press suppressionI'm a very strong person for free speech. At the same time when you have networks that, where I won an election, like in counties, I guess it's two-thousand-six-hundred to five-hundred-and-twenty-five .That's called landslide, a landslide times two. But ninety-seven, ninety-four, ninety-five, ninety-six percent… of the newscasts are against me...They'll take a great story and they'll make it bad. See, I think that's really illegal, personally."
Trump aims to silence the press. He sued The Wall Street Journal for a ludicrous $10 billion for describing a page in Jeffery Epstein’s 50th birthday book as being a forgery, a claim undermined when the page was reprinted visually far and wide. And he then sued The New York Times and a few of its journalists for a still more ridiculous $15 billion for articles and a book published near the 2024 election that defamed him, he says, by diminishing his reputation as a successful businessman.
Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post to protect a national institution, or so it seemed, but has since deferential to Donald Trump out of fear for Amazon, decreeing that the opinion writers be subject to certain of his precepts.
When Patrick Soon-Shiong, a doctor, professor, and billionaire creator of healthcare companies bought The Los Angeles Times, it seemed the paper would retain its liberal voice, but he required the editorial staff to veer to the center and initiated a "bias meter" to watch over content.
A federal judge in Tampa threw out the Times suit this week, calling it too long at 85 pages and giving Trump’s lawyers four weeks to come back with a revised complaint not to exceed 40 pages.
No matter the outcome of such suits, their real and peripherally intended effect is to intimidate – to cause journalists and the their publishers to hold back stories that might unleash costly-to-defend lawsuits from a Trump who has used the presidency to make billions of dollars and will be happy to bankrupt critical media.
Trump might want to team up with “great guy” Ellison, who believes that a China-style surveillance society governed by all-seeing artificial intelligence holds great promise for humanity. In a Q and A session with Oracle investors he said:
"Citizens will be on their best behavior because we're constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on. It’s unimpeachable."
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