FTC Push for State Media Shows Progressives Need to Spend on Local Media

The head of the FTC is desperately trying to force major media and social media companies to be right wing state media. He has already launched investigations into several companies for the horrible, horrible crime of saying things that Dear Leader Trump does not like. Oh, there are pretexts, but essentially, the companies being investigated did not slat their coverage to favor Trump and so they must be punished. Now, he wants to punish social media companies who moderate.

Yep, don’t want your site overrun with Nazis? Too bad! Moderating right wing voices is bad and therefore illegal in Trump’s world. Everything must become the Nazi Bar!

I am not going to spend a lot of time on the stupidity of this. It is self-evidently legal and constitutional for private firms to moderate however they want. You cannot force a yarn social media site to become a Nazi social media site any more than you can force Twitter to allow “cisgender” on the site (Yeah, seriously, Musk hates his own transgender kid so much that he banned the word cisgender. We are ruled by the weakest, most pathetic people imaginable). And spare me the Section 230 cheerleading while we are here. Section 230’s problems have never been the moderation aspect but rather how it allows companies to get out of the product liability side of life, even though their algorithms and products are not speech. No, what is interesting here is the push to make everyone confirm to a state media bias.

It is very likely to work. Despite the fact that social media sites significantly favor right wing, even far right wing, voice, people like Zuckerberg think moderation and safety go too far (what’s a little genocide between friends, eh?). And since our media is owned either by people who already kowtow to Trump, or by companies who need to curry Trump’s favor to protect their other businesses, expect a fair amount of falling in line. Indeed, Time Warner has made noises about settling a suit they would clearly win just to buy off Trump and get him to leave their other businesses alone. ABC (Disney) and Meta already have paid similar bribe-like payouts. Do not expect the larger media or social media companies to resist this pressure to skew their content toward the voices that Trump favors.

Which is why progressive organizations should stop spending money on consultants and TV ads and start spending money on building up local news in pretty much all parts of the country. The money spent sending a newspaper to every house in a district or competing with right wing radio stations or supporting online voices is worth more than all the consultants and ad buys in the history of time. Trump did best in news desserts. Trump did worse where there was a combination of local news and aggressive campaigning by the Harris team. The largest problem that Democrats have is that they simply cannot be heard in most parts of the country. They don’t even need to build a Fox news equivalent. They merely need to fund straight news sources in a manner that keeps them from being bought by right wing billionaires, like the people who own Sinclair television stations. Facts, as they say, have a liberal bias.

The Dems spent a billion dollars on the Harris campaign. If it had spent that much money establishing an information environment focused on facts and countering the right-wing propaganda echo chamber, perhaps thigs would have been different. Right now, it is next to impossible for Dems to be heard in much of the country. And it is going to get worse as companies use the FTC crusade against honesty and facts to lean even harder to the right.

The Dems expect 2026 to be a good year for them, that the reality of the damage Trump is doing will work in their favor. Normally they would be correct. But if no one hears about the reality, is it really real? If the left wants to have any chance of restoring democracy to the country, they need to start, now, today, building a fact-based media to counter the propaganda based media that the right has already built and is intent on expanding.

You cannot convince people of anything if they cannot hear you.