Victor Pickard, who co-directs Penn Annenberg’s Media, Inequality & Change Center, wrote this in February as a way to make sense of a breakdown that resists synthesis: the gutting of the Washington Post, the rightward lurch of CBS, journalists arrested, regulatory agencies turned into political weapons, ownership consolidating into a few billionaires. His claim is that this isn’t one collapse but cascading layers of media capture — and each layer needs a different intervention.

Three layers, in his ordering:

  • Capitalist capture, the foundation. Newspapers commercialised in the late 1800s on advertising revenue; policymakers in the early 1930s privatised the public airwaves instead of building public media; television then repeated the model with the same corporations. The public broadcasting system that finally arrived in the late 1960s was chronically underfunded by international standards, and Congress rescinded even that support last year. The NSF-funded internet was privatised in the 1990s with little public debate, and AI is now following the same path.
  • Oligarchic capture, the predictable result of treating media as private commodities in a country where billionaires hold disproportionate power. Bezos bought the Post for less than half the price of his superyacht and is dismantling it while courting Trump. Murdoch and Ellison own empires; Musk’s X amplifies and suppresses political speech at will; Meta blocks news in Canada rather than pay for it; TikTok’s new owners are already accused of censoring political expression.
  • Authoritarian capture, the Orbán model. Autocrats don’t need to seize newsrooms at gunpoint when friendly oligarchs will police media for them. Pickard’s exhibit is FCC chair Brendan Carr, who told Congress the FCC is not an independent agency — then proved it: using merger approvals as leverage to extort favourable coverage, threatening licenses over Jimmy Kimmel, and moving to apply the “equal time” rule to late-night shows that had been exempt from it.

The stacking is the argument. Authoritarian encroachment is only cheap because the media was already commercialised and concentrated — and none of it is natural. Broadcast privatisation was a policy choice, so was the 1996 Telecommunications Act, so were two rounds of Trump-era deregulation. That cuts both ways: human-made structures can be unbuilt.

On remedies, Pickard is blunt about what won’t do the job. Public interest regulation has been hollowed out by regulatory capture, and new federal policy is a nonstarter while anti-democratic tendencies are entrenched — though state and local work may still be viable. Breaking up conglomerates matters, and the antimonopoly movement around Lina Khan has shown the politics can resonate, but competition policy presupposes that smaller profit-driven outlets behave better. News deserts, surveillance advertising, and unaffordable broadband are capitalism problems, not just monopoly problems.

Which is why he reaches for the public utility tradition — robust oversight through to municipal and public ownership — and then past it:

  • Take media out of the market and build public alternatives.
  • Aim for “democratic capture” of media institutions, so they serve everyone rather than the wealthiest few.
  • Plan a Project 2050 for structural media reform now, in the dark, instead of settling for a Project 2029.

His closing move is to refuse inevitability, which is the point of the whole schematic: the institutions that produced this polycrisis were legislated into being, and can be legislated out of it.