In 1997, President Bill Clinton tabbed me to co-chair a Presidential Advisory Committee on the Public Interest Obligations of Digital Television Broadcasters, to report to Vice President Al Gore. Ever since the Telecommunications Act of 1934, broadcasters (then radio, later television), given the gift of free airwaves from the public, had pledged in return to act in the public interest. Airwaves worth billions, for free. But in the late 1990s, technology had changed the nature of television—the digital era meant we were moving from stations and networks with one venue to having dozens, the advent of hundreds of channels, and a need to take a new look, in a new era, at how the transition to digital television would uphold or potentially erode the public benefits of free, local, over-the-air broadcasting.

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But there is another way the media world is different. Five companies—five—now control 90 percent of the marketplace. Disney, Comcast, Warner Brothers Discovery, Paramount, and Fox are the media Godzillas, and if Ellison and Paramount get their way and purchase WBD, it will be four. Add to that the fact that right-wing billionaires dominate social media, from X to Meta and now TikTok, and other billionaires with wide business interests that are affected directly by federal government action own The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, among others of our key newspapers, and we are in an extraordinarily dangerous place. And add further the evisceration via government cuts of public media like NPR and PBS, hitting rural areas especially hard.

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Of course, some of this dynamic has been deliberately manipulated by those malign actors like Elon Musk, using small—by their standard—portions of their vast wealth to buy, transform, and shape key new communications avenues and tools. And it now describes Trump’s illegal actions involving TikTok, violating the law and engineering a takeover by Peter Thiel and other allies of his authoritarianism. Some of these entities have a history of turning a blind eye to manipulation of elections from Russia, China, and other foreign actors. We can expect more of that. The combination of malign actors manipulating platforms like X and Facebook and taking over TikTok, alongside billionaires and huge corporate conglomerates who will do anything to avoid authoritarian retribution, has left us with a desolate media landscape.

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But we are dangerously close to having the vast majority of audiences out there getting information solely or largely from sources either directly manipulating the content, or making sure to downplay or ignore anything Trump does not like or want. If we continue to devolve in this way, we will look more like the countries of Russia, Hungary, and China than our own constitutional democracy. Any hope of having the pillar of a free press to provide a meaningful guardrail against incipient authoritarianism will disappear before our very eyes. As my commission experience showed, the Golden Age of broadcasting ended before the new century began. Enter the Dark Ages of media.