The Fine Print*

America's wealthiest, shittiest people are trying to hoover up the entirety of new and old media companies in a bid to pummel the plebs with propaganda. But what they want, and what they actually get, may not be the same thing.

The corporate press is already busy working hand in hand with bad actors to make life hell for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Her crime? Being a progressive minority woman.

Despite widespread U.S. corruption being anything but subtle, its presence consistently remains absent from corporate media narratives surrounding most U.S. dysfunction.

The denigration of CBS is best viewed as just part of a broader effort by oligarchs to create a propaganda-coddled permanent autocracy, propped up by a broad array of highly-paid, useful idiots.

The problem with AI isn't going to be Skynet. It's going to be amoral extraction class assholes applying half-cooked automation at scale onto deeply broken sectors in exploitative ways in a country too corrupt to have functioning regulators.

"CEO said a thing!" journalism is now utterly pervasive, and includes parroting billionaire and CEO claims with a total disregard for whether or not anything being said is actually true.

Trump's second term corruption has caused generational and potentially irreversible damage to public safety and corporate oversight. The establishment press, with scattered exception, couldn't care less.

For several years Substack has been accused of coddling white supremacy and fascist ideology for cash. And despite several major scandals and a mass defection of ethical authors, there's little serious indication that's going to change.

America's richest assholes have a very unsubtle plan: they want to buy up what's left of major media companies, create a massive safe space for the extraction class, then befuddle and divide the electorate with race-baiting agitprop.

As a telecom policy reporter for many years, I've seen this cycle play out many times: a politician calls for deregulation, claiming it will result in vast innovative utopias. The reality is often quite different...