The party that spent a generation accusing the press of bias just sold it to the man in the White House. Senator Elizabeth Warren warned this week, in an interview with The Guardian, that a Trump-administration “frenzy” of mergers — $111 billion for the Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount Skydance combination, Nippon Steel’s $14.9 billion for U.S. Steel, Omnicom’s $13.5 billion for Interpublic, and Capital One’s $35 billion for Discover — has put two of America’s largest news outlets under the control of a family “sympathetic to the president,” and could be undone by a “coming political tsunami of anger” once voters get the chance. She is correct about the politics, and I will grant her the politics. The betrayal here is not hers. It is the right’s, and the right has not yet named it.
Grant the steelman first, because the steelman is real. Concentration of the press into two or three corporate hands is exactly the danger the right once claimed to fear — and it is the danger a free society has always had reason to fear. When the controlling family is politically aligned with the president whose Justice Department approved the deal, “pay-to-play” is no longer an accusation; it is the structure. The state attorneys general preparing an antitrust lawsuit to block the Paramount combination see the math plainly: one family, one editor-in-chief — David Ellison installed Bari Weiss, a commentator with no television experience, as the head of CBS News — one ultimate decision-maker across CNN and CBS. The technical antitrust tests have been satisfied, perhaps. The test that mattered — whether a free press remains free when its new owners favor the man who signed off on the sale — was never even tried.
Now the prosecution. The Republican Party that ran against concentrated media power, that accused the press of being the propaganda arm of the Democratic establishment, that spent decades calling CBS and CNN enemies of the people, has in eighteen months approved the largest media merger in a generation and watched the new owner reject an ad criticizing its own family, install a partisan editor at the news desk, and hand the newsroom to a man whose fortune depends on the administration’s good will. The consolidation is not just at the news desk. Under the same family, HBO Max and Paramount+ are merging into a single platform — one set of executives deciding what Americans stream, what gets made, and what gets shelved. This is not a glitch. It is the price of admission. The companies cut the deals; the administration approved them; the new owners cut the checks — a ballroom column here, an arch there, a presidential library in the offing. The party that wrote the book on what to do with a captured press has captured one of its own, and called it the free market.
But the framing betrays her class. Warren promises a “tsunami of anger,” and her colleague Senator Chris Murphy made the partisan threat explicit in February, warning the companies to “enjoy its growing news monopoly while they have it because when Democrats win back power we are going to break up these anti-democratic information conglomerates. All of them.” They treat monopoly as a Republican failing and the federal antitrust axe as the Democratic cure. They reduce the liberty of the local community to a partisan football, waiting for the next administration to swing the sword.
This is the trap. Concentrated corporate power and concentrated state power are the same disease in two coats. The same federal government that looked the other way while four meatpackers captured eighty percent of the beef trade, while the chemical giants locked the family farm into debt-peonage contracts, while private equity bought the rural hospital and billed the estate for the privilege — this is the same federal government Warren now trusts to play whack-a-mole with the Ellisons. You do not cure the addiction to bigness by building a bigger state to manage it. You cure it by dispersing power to the lowest competent level.
And her priorities betray the very people she claims to defend. The professional-managerial class cares about the information monopoly because it controls their narrative. The working class cares about the material monopolies because they control our survival. A monopoly on the evening news is a scandal to a senator; a monopoly on the seed, the fertilizer, and the hospital bed is just Tuesday in Adams County. When the Ellison family decides what goes on the evening news, it is an affront to the journalist in Washington. When the corporate ag giants decide what a bushel of potatoes is worth, or when the institutional landlord decides what a starter home is worth, it is a funeral in my county. We have lived the hollowing out of the real economy — the lost rail jobs, the idled mills, the conversion of the working town into an amenity — while the Senate debates the consolidation of the very platforms that will broadcast their indifference.
The conservative tradition I was raised in believed the press was a mediating institution — not a creature of the state, not an arm of the party, not private property to be flipped between coalitions like a piece of rental real estate. It was the fourth estate because it stood outside the other three. A free press protected the towns and the farms and the small businesses the rest of the conservative program was meant to defend. Concentrated media power threatened that the way concentrated financial power threatened it — by replacing local judgment with remote command, by treating a community’s news as a disposable abstraction owned by people who will never set foot there. That was the argument. The argument was right. The argument is being sold off for the price of a donor check.
Give Warren her due on the diagnosis, though, because the instinct to resist the curse of bigness is the oldest and best instinct in the American republic, shared by Jacksonian populists and Catholic encyclicals alike. She is correct that the Ellison merger, the Nippon deal, the Omnicom absorption of Interpublic, the Capital One absorption of Discover — these are the fruits of a forty-year bipartisan surrender to the rentier, a system where the same firms that own the news now own the ads that pay for it. When a single family can dictate what is news to half the country, the universal destination of goods has been violated. The earth was given for all, not leased out to the absentee owner. Her diagnosis that we have drifted from a market economy into a market society, where everything is an extraction play for the distant shareholder, is sound.
The deeper answer lives not in a Democrat returning to power and breaking the trusts — that is a real lever, but a temporary one, and a law that runs to the next election is a law that runs against the next election too. The deeper answer lives in what the country can build while the lawyers argue, and it does not require the White House at all.
A free press is a member-owned institution the way a rural electric cooperative is a member-owned institution. The reason a co-op member has lights is that nobody could make a killing stringing wire to a farmhouse five miles down a sand road, so the federal credit and the cooperative form did what the private market would not. The same arithmetic is repeating itself in news. The newspaper chains that used to employ reporters in towns of fifteen thousand have been bled out by leveraged buyouts. The broadcast affiliates that used to do a local eleven o’clock have been consolidated into groups headquartered three time zones away. The advertisers followed the audience to the platforms, and the platforms kept the money. What is left for a town that wants to know what its school board did last Tuesday is, in many places, nothing.
Into that gap a thousand small, distributed things are growing. Member-supported public radio stations, structured as nonprofit co-ops, sit in more American communities than any single national cable network. Reader-supported investigative shops — ProPublica, The Marshall Project, the newsrooms that survive on monthly pledges and a bequest — have done reporting in the last decade that no consolidated chain could afford to publish. The Minnesota Star Tribune was taken over by a nonprofit and kept its newsroom alive, even as the industry’s collapse has forced the kind of cuts the model was meant to prevent. A few dozen community newsrooms have organized as multi-stakeholder cooperatives, with the reporters, the subscribers, and the local civic institutions each holding a seat at the table. The capital that sustains them is not heroic — community-foundation matching gifts, modest philanthropic endowments, the same small-dollar subscriptions that built public radio for half a century — but it is durable, and the cooperative form is what kept the lights on through the lean years. They are small, underfunded, and they will not replace the big networks. They do not have to replace the big networks. They have to be there, the way the Adams-Columbia co-op is there, doing the work nobody else will do.
The cooperative is the answer the party Warren now assails has forgotten it once claimed to believe in. The farm cooperative, the credit union, the mutual insurance society — these are not relics. They are the constitutional antidote to the rentier. A farm cooperative owned by the men who work the land cannot be bought by a conglomerate. A rural electric cooperative answers only to the people who flip the switch. This is the distributist answer: widely distributed ownership, so that no block of interests can dictate the sustenance of the community. Subsidiarity means the town comes before the bureau, and the co-op comes before the conglomerate. The answer is not to wait for the political tsunami. The answer is to build the ark before the flood. We do not need a senator to promise us that her party will eventually break up the giant for us. We need the courage to build the small, the local, and the shared, so that the giant never gets the power to break us in the first place.
The Oakeshott line is pinned above my desk: a preference for the familiar to the unknown, the actual to the possible, present laughter to utopian bliss. A free press is not a utopian project. It is the work of an inheritance. The conservative tradition I was raised in — the one I still try to serve — used to know that. The administration now in power has forgotten it. The press is not a coalition trophy. It is the institution that, when it works, tells the town what its banker did, what its county board voted, what its own representative said on the floor. Sell that, and you have sold the country. Build the alternative — the member-supported nonprofit, the multi-stakeholder co-op, the local newsroom that answers to its subscribers and not to a donor with a ballroom column to underwrite — and the country, with all its noise, may still tell itself the truth.