Micah Loewinger: Hey, you're listening to the On the Media midweek podcast. I'm Micah Loewinger.

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Micah Loewinger: As once formidable media behemoths like The Washington Post and CBS News continue to take more and more damaging blows, it would be easy to point fingers at entirely modern causes. Press scholars have been crying for decades that this industry's foundations contained significant cracks. There's actually a phrase for what's happening, not just in the United States, but around the world.

Media capture, or the idea that when the government fails to codify protections around the press's obligation towards public interests, political and commercial interests can take over. No coup required, just a slow, steady transfer of power. Victor Pickard is a professor of media policy and political economy at the University of Pennsylvania. He recently wrote about how American media have actually seen three cascading layers of capture, capitalistic, oligarchical, and authoritarian. To start with capitalistic, we have to go a little ways back in time.

Victor Pickard: In the late 1800s, early 1900s, in the newspaper industry, there was a structural transformation where they shifted to a more advertising-dependent business model. They went from relying on advertising revenue, roughly 40% of their overall revenues, in the mid-1800s into the 1860s. By the early 1900s, they were relying on advertising for well over 70% of their revenues. What that did was it changed the relationship between publishers and readers.

Publishers saw their readers not as engaged citizens in a democratic society, but primarily as consumers whom they would deliver to advertisers. It also led them to rely on more sensationalized media coverage. It also incentivized further media consolidation. You saw the rise of newspaper chains and press barons, Pulitzer and Hearst and others, that took over many newspapers and would sometimes exert political control over the types of coverage and content that was being produced. For broadcast media, it makes sense to look at the early 1930s.

Micah Loewinger: Yes, in the 1930s, there were three networks that essentially dominated the market: CBS, NBC, and the Mutual Broadcasting System. The FCC, in the early 1940s, basically cornered NBC, splitting it up into what has become NBC and ABC. What do you think regulators could have done at the time to steer us away from the type of media consolidation that would follow?

Victor Pickard: This critical juncture in the early '30s, which culminated with the Communications Act of 1934, established the Federal Communications Commission and really sanctified this commercial broadcast media system. At that time, there was even, up until the very end, ongoing debates about, should we at least have some set-asides for public programming? There was this proposed amendment called the Wagner-Hatfield amendment that tried to reserve 25% of the airwaves to non-profit, non-commercial educational programming.

Not to leave your listeners in suspense, that did not pass. Therefore, we ended up, as you say, with a highly commercialized oligopolistic. There were really just three. Even to call MBS one of the three big players is probably overly generous. It really was just CBS and NBC that dominated the public airwaves at that time. As you also noted, they did force NBC to essentially break itself into two, but going from two big players to three big players did not transform the media landscape.

Throughout the '40s, you had these ongoing media policy battles where they tried to mandate things like mandated public affairs coverage or to not allow for excessive advertising. They did not succeed in passing these public interest protections, but by the end of the decade, they did establish what later became known as the Fairness Doctrine, 1949, which, of course, was later jettisoned in the Reagan administration.

Micah Loewinger: What exactly was the Fairness Doctrine? How did it work?

Victor Pickard: The Fairness Doctrine is widely maligned and misunderstood. It's often conflated with the equal time rule, but in fact, the Fairness Doctrine was more progressive than that. It was based on this idea that broadcasters, in order to hold on to their monopolistic rights to the public airwaves, to hold on to their licenses, had to cover controversial issues that were important to local communities and to do so in a balanced manner. It was this affirmative duty that broadcasters had to uphold.

There's a long history to how this very imperfect media policy was deployed and adhered to. It was at least some kind of social contract that these commercial broadcasters had to give something back to democratic society in order to hold on to their licenses.

Micah Loewinger: You talked a little bit about how earlier efforts to introduce some kind of regulation for public interest content fell flat. In the late '60s, we did finally see the birth of public media. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting was created in 1967. We're speaking on public radio right now. Obviously, it's been defunded by this administration, but how would you say that American public media has compared to other Western democracies?

Victor Pickard: The US was a global outlier pretty much from the beginning when we established this hyper-commercialized broadcast media system dominated by a handful of corporate television networks, what FCC Chairman Newton Minow referred to at the time as a vast wasteland. By the end of the '60s, we did finally establish a public broadcasting system, but it never followed the original blueprint that at least one of the revenue streams would be based on a 5% excise tax on television sets.

Compared to most democratic societies around the world, the US public media system was always deeply impoverished. It was always forced to rely on private capital. To even call it a public media system really was a bit of a misnomer. Most of its funding came from individual listeners and viewers like us, also foundations, and also corporations, sometimes euphemistically referred to as enhanced underwriting.

If you look at how much we allocated towards our public media system at the federal level, and this is before the rescission package, when even this paltry amount was jettisoned, it came out to about $1.59 per person per year. You compare that to the Brits, who spend close to $100 per person per year for the BBC, and many other democratic countries spend far more than that, and it shows, I would argue, in the health of their democratic society.

Micah Loewinger: You've actually studied the sort of correlative effect between public media spending and the strength of a country's democracy. How do you study that kind of thing?

Victor Pickard: It's actually not as complicated as it sounds. The Economist magazine puts out this democracy index on an annual basis that really assesses the health of democratic societies around the world. The US, of course, has been characterized as a flawed democracy for a number of years now. What you find is that the countries that are determined to have the strongest democracies also have the healthiest and best-funded public broadcasting systems.

This doesn't necessarily argue for causation, although my co-author Timothy Neff and I found positive correlation that they tend to rise and fall together, but at the very least, it puts to rest this deeply American fear that if government gets involved in funding our media, we're on some kind of slippery slope towards totalitarianism.

In theory, the US could have adopted something much more similar to a BBC model, but even to compare us to our neighbors to the north, the CBC, the Canadian Public Broadcasting System, they all put ours to shame in terms of how much they're allocating towards their public broadcasting at the federal level. It's fairly well established that a commercial media system can never guarantee universal service, can never make sure that all members of society have access to a baseline level of news and information. This might seem counterintuitive because people are often saying, "Oh, maybe we don't need public broadcasting anymore," but honestly, I think it's fair to say that we need it more now today than ever before.

Micah Loewinger: I have more to ask you about the future of public media in just a moment, but let's talk a little bit more about history. You were walking us through how early revenue models for newspaper and other commercial media, radio and TV, set us up for this capitalistic capture that we're currently experiencing. You argue that regulators have made it worse over the course of the 20th century, culminating with the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which essentially dictated how many radio and TV stations a single company could own. This move opened the door for another type of capture, oligarchical. Can you explain that?

Victor Pickard: Sure. What you see with the capitalistic form of media capture are these systemic incentives to grow larger, to consolidate and conglomerate, and you start seeing these massive media conglomerates spanning a number of markets. The 1996 Telecommunications Act was a major manifestation of this kind of deregulation, although I must point out that deregulation is a misnomer as well. It's really a form of re-regulation, re-regulating our media along more corporate lines and basically ensuring that we're going to have media ownership concentration.

To give one stark example would be the radio company Clear Channel. Prior to the 1996 Act, one company could not own more than 40 stations nationwide, 20 AM stations, 20 FM stations. The Telecommunications Act jettisoned that rule. It allowed Clear Channel to quickly buy up a bunch of stations so that, before long, they had more than 1,200 across the country. Oftentimes, with this consolidation in media ownership, you had a homogenized form of radio content.

Micah Loewinger: In the case of Clear Channel, they would basically buy up local stations, turn them into like automated pop-rock stations. There's one famous example in Minot, North Dakota, a city that had seen its radio market gobbled up by Clear Channel. There was a train crash that sent a noxious gas cloud into the city, and public officials were not able to get word out quickly enough because of this highly automated, highly consolidated local news market, right?

Victor Pickard: That's right. The sociologist Eric Klinenberg covers this in the introduction or in the early part of his book, Fighting for Air. Essentially, people were calling into radio stations trying to report and get the word out about this toxic event that was perhaps even life-threatening. It's certainly a public health disaster.

Micah Loewinger: Here's a clip from a video on the disaster put together by investigative journalist Sue Wilson.

Sue Wilson: Dispatchers were advising callers to listen to their emergency broadcast station. A full hour after the crash, there was still nothing on KCJB or any other radio station.

Dispatcher: We've been putting it on over the radio.

Caller 1: What's the radio station?

Dispatcher: All the radio stations, sir.

Caller 1: I had it on. I haven't heard it once.

Caller 2: How come there's nothing on the radio or the TV yet?

Micah Loewinger: No one was home. No one was answering the phone because these programming formats were all automated. This is just a glaring example of a media system that has no allegiance to local communities, no allegiance to public service responsibilities.

Victor Pickard: Of course, one very timely example of an oligarch who is having his way with a once great news outlet is Jeff Bezos and The Washington Post.

Geoff Bennett: Washington Post is laying off a third of its workforce across both the newsroom and its business operations, a massive blow at a storied newspaper that has struggled in recent years to stay profitable and retain subscribers.

Micah Loewinger: Now that we've seen him gut this organization, it's painfully obvious that relying on the whims of one very rich man, one very rich owner, is a bad idea. Is it possible for billionaire newspaper owners to be responsible, good stewards of news organizations?

Victor Pickard: Perhaps in theory, it might be possible, but I think by now it's time to put to rest this notion of a benevolent billionaire. We should not invest so much power into one individual over our media system and over our democratic society. It's just a problem, if not immediately, and I think you could say that about Jeff Bezos. Early on, critics like myself began to feel like maybe we overreacted. When I first heard that he was buying The Washington Post, I thought, this is very bad, but then he supported a very robust newsroom that was doing fantastic journalism for a number of years. I think we should be learning from these mistakes by now.

When Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post in 2013 for $250 million, that was less than half of what he later paid for his superyacht. This is like pocket change for someone like him. The temptation to use it instrumentally for political aims is always going to be there. This is part of the oligarchic media capture problem, which is, it might be the case where Jeff Bezos is losing money with The Washington Post.

Reportedly, he was losing somewhere around $100 million a year, but he stands to gain billions of dollars in government contracts with his aerospace company, Blue Origin. We could look at Musk. Musk might be losing money with X, but he stands to gain tremendous amounts of money with SpaceX and some of his other companies. Even if it looks like they're taking a hit and these are kinds of lost leaders, they're still performing at benefit for their long-term political and economic objectives.

Micah Loewinger: Just to drill down a little bit more specifically on The Washington Post, why do you think Jeff Bezos is killing it? If he doesn't want to lose $100 million a year and he doesn't want to even attempt to right the ship anymore, why not just sell the paper and just stop worrying about it?

Victor Pickard: That would be great for all of us if he decided to let go of this asset and give it to more responsible owners, but it's still a highly valuable asset. It's still a major newspaper. It's based in the nation's capital. Unfortunately, I don't think he's caring about the health of democracy. He cares more about the future of his own political economic power.

It's important to note that there are exceptions, that not every commercial media outlet becomes oligarchic, and that even commercial media outlets are quite capable of delivering amazing content and hard-hitting journalism. It's not over-determined. At the same time, I think there are some very clear systemic trends here, and there are some deep structural problems that we're going to have to wrestle with if we're going to try to ensure that there is a healthy democracy going well into the future.

Micah Loewinger: We've talked about capitalistic capture. We've talked about oligarchical capture. Do you mind just quickly defining what authoritarian capture is?

Victor Pickard: Authoritarian media capture would be a scenario where a government takes over or influences media, and I think in most cases, it's the latter. Newsrooms aren't taken over by gunpoint, but instead it's what might be referred to as the Viktor Orbán model, where governments can rely on friendly oligarchs to police the media for them. It often happens in subtle ways and gradually, although increasingly in our own political moment, we're seeing quite glaring and obvious interventions from the Trump administration and the Federal Communications Commission.

Micah Loewinger: Maybe on the more subtle side of the spectrum, you encourage your buddies, Larry Ellison and Marc Andreessen, to put up cash to buy TikTok, or maybe you signal that if a certain owner of CBS wants to buy Warner Brothers, then they better not let somebody say bad things about the president, et cetera, et cetera. On the less subtle side of the spectrum, you have raiding the home of a prolific Washington Post reporter or having agents arrest Don Lemon and independent journalist Georgia Fort because of their coverage in Minneapolis. I guess we're kind of getting all flavors of coercion from this administration.

Victor Pickard: Another way of thinking about it is that there is this kind of broad spectrum of authoritarian media capture, and we seem to be sliding down that spectrum towards more overt cases. Oftentimes, the more dangerous form are these subtle influences, even at the level of the individual psychology of individual journalists, where they're internalizing a chilling effect throughout media coverage. Certainly, this administration has made it abundantly clear what it sees as off-limits.

Micah Loewinger: Let's say tomorrow you and I are imbued with magic powers, and we can just snap our fingers and reimagine, remold, rebuild American media from the ground up. We've got well-funded public media. We have no more billionaires, strong antitrust regulations, et cetera. What evidence do we have that audiences would like this, would want this? Have people not gravitated away from legacy journalism on their own volition?

Victor Pickard: You're absolutely right to suggest that it's not as if we can simply build a new media system and they will come. Current survey studies show even amongst people who might hate the media, when you talk about their local media institutions, they have warm, fuzzy feelings towards those kinds of media outlets. Another way of looking at this commercial logic that drives so much of our media, there's this implication that if a news media outlet is no longer profitable, then it's a shame, but it's just going to have to wither away. The market has spoken. There's not enough consumer support, but there are many public goods and democratic needs whose value aren't determined by how much they fetch on the open market.

An analogy that I sometimes use is to imagine, what if there was no longer demand for public education? Would we just let public schools all wither away? Would we just determine that the market has spoken, and we can no longer provide education for all children throughout society because it's no longer profitable? That simply is no way to design a democratic society, and we have to start looking at our media in the same way. It's a public good that should not be left up to the mercy of these market logics.

Micah Loewinger: Victor, thank you so much.

Victor Pickard: Thank you so much for having me, Micah. It's been great talking to you.

Micah Loewinger: Victor Pickard is a professor of media policy and political economy at the University of Pennsylvania. His latest book is titled Democracy Without Journalism? Confronting the Misinformation Society. Thanks for listening to the On the Media midweek podcast. You can find us on TikTok, Reddit, and Instagram. Just search On the Media. Don't forget to listen to the big show this weekend. I'm Micah Loewinger.

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