Awaiting the Media Phoenix.

The larger media and entertainment landscape seems to be crumbling. The owners of Columbia Broadcasting System Broadcasting Incorporated (CBS) have been bending over frontwards, backwards, and sideways to try to get their big ugly payday approved, including by paying off a racket of a lawsuit brought by Donald John Trump, which they would have won. Late night is reeling, with their best-performing act (The Late Show With Stephen Colbert) getting the Vaudville hook, which multiple witnesses said was wielded by a pair of tiny hands. The administration’s strong-arm enforcement wing (helmed by Donald John Trump, known for small hands) has issued multiple other lawsuits and threats, including against the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), which also paid the protection money. At the same time, The Washington Post op-ed page is being melted down and recast as a monument to God-knows-what, but it ain’t free markets and it isn’t personal liberty. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting has been defunded. The United States Agency for Global Media has—also—been defunded, though the courts have kept trying to order those funds be paid out to Radio Free Europe.

At the same time, more people than ever are having their brains sucked out of their skulls via TikTok, Facebook, X.com (fascists), and the like. The new trend is to let a small mechanical gerbil loose inside their sconces and let it redecorate the place with hallucinated content—called slop—in an at-home procedure known as gee-peeting. Dozens to hundreds of thousands have reported side-effects including falling in love with robots, getting face tattoos, and buying cryptocurrency.

What in the world!

One of this blog’s unenforced rules is that when I write something like those paragraphs above, I’m supposed to suggest alternatives and solutions. Not because my ideas will be good, but because balance is necessary when we peek over the edge, to avoid falling into that pit of despair. The media fails to understand that when it covers a rescission package without mentioning that the Republicans could have cut half of CPB’s budget, or a quarter, or staggered it out over a year, but decided to cut it all at once. Nuance matters, possible worlds matter.

For one, I doubt I’ll be watching much CBS or ABC. Why start watching a show if they might cancel it because of pressure from the government? Why spend time or money with businesses that don’t uphold decent values? If I were college-aged and smart enough to attend Columbia, I would be thinking twice. So goes it for my media consumption.

But unfortunately most of the solutions to media die-offs are patience and looking for startups (or other revitalized offerings) worth reading or watching. That’s how the capitalist system is supposed to work: damage to industry is met with new growth as various interests seek to capitalize and build out new markets or transform old ones.

Our system isn’t built to support that capitalist ideal. Once incumbents are established, the trend is toward consolidation despite its costs. There is no expected boom of new broadcast towers. But the hope is that some of the new-media sites will perform well enough to mature into broadsheets.

The library stacks are littered with defunct magazines. We live in a post-Gutenberg world where publishing is more accessible than ever. Making that into a thriving business free of the fetters of authoritarianism isn’t as easy as posting on a blog, but it’s also not impossible, so while the moment may feel fraught I see no reason to expect it to stay that way.