Don’t Let Independent Media Die

Katie Couric, the former Today and CBS Evening News anchor from the glory days of network news, recently declared 2025 “the year the media died.” Maybe an obituary is a bit premature, but on the current course, the end is coming for meaningful freedom of speech and of the press in the United States. At the Washington Monthly, we’re fighting back.  

These threats include, of course, the unprecedented attacks launched by Donald Trump’s administration and its cronies against once mighty media institutions. There are the spurious defamation cases Trump brought against ABC News and CBS News, which their parent corporations settled for multimillion-dollar payouts rather than risk weaponized regulatory and antitrust prosecution by Trump’s Federal Communications Commission. And the Trump-aligned oligarchs are competing for the remnants of once independent media empires such as Time Warner and turning them into far-right propaganda organs.  

These threats, in many ways, are the consequence of structural forces that have long eroded the economic foundations of a free press. They have gone into hyperdrive over the last few years, including failing to regulate internet platforms like Google and Facebook and subjecting them to traditional antitrust and liability standards.  

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More recently, the titans of Artificial Intelligence have run amok, training their algorithms using content stolen from news organizations. This year, media outlets, already reeling from the loss of digital advertising dollars due to Google and Facebook’s monopolization of the digital ad market, have seen a 15-40 percent decline in traffic from search engine referrals, driven by internet platforms posting AI-generated articles in search results.  

The Washington Monthly has long been at the forefront of reporting and explaining the policy failures that endanger the free press and, by extension, democracy. In 2020, for example, we were among the first to show how Google’s monopolization of digital advertising markets was “Starving the News” by siphoning off critical advertising revenue from legacy and new media alike, including highly innovative and popular online publications. Late last year, we again broke new ground by showing how journalists and other content creators can and must stand up to AI goliaths.  

We have achieved notable successes. The Justice Department adopted our theory of the case when it successfully argued that Google had illegally monopolized the digital advertising market for search engine results. More generally, both policymakers and journalists are slowly becoming attuned to how fighting monopoly can save journalism, using tools such as corporate governance reform, market regulation, and antitrust enforcement. But the fight is far from won, and the hour is late.  

Since its founding by Charlie Peters in 1969, this small but influential magazine has always lived hand to mouth. To keep the lights on, Peters mortgaged his own house and sometimes paid printers with unsigned checks to buy time, while somehow attracting generations of talented young journalists to live on penurious wages. When Paul Glastris took over in 2001, he went a year without pay as he turned the Monthly into a nonprofit and started attracting donors—some wealthy, most just regular Americans like you—to give the magazine a new lease on life. But now we need your support more than ever. If you think the Monthly’s brand of solutions-based policy-focused journalism is essential, there’s something you can do: Donate. In fact, do it right now. Your contribution is entirely tax-deductible, and just $50 gets you an annual subscription to our print edition. 

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