Victor Pickard returns to Money on the Left six years after his first appearance on the show to discuss the state of the U.S. media system under Trump 2.0. Pickard is C. Edwin Baker Professor of Media Policy and Political Economy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication and Co-Director at the Media, Inequality & Change Center. Placing current developments in broad historical context, Pickard situates today’s media crisis within a century-long struggle to establish and maintain genuine public media against the overpowering dominance and relentless pushback of private corporate media.
Drawing on his recent writing and policy interventions, Pickard breaks down three distinct layers of media capture: capitalistic, oligarchic, and authoritarian. Crucially, our conversation stresses how the foundational layer—the capitalistic privatization of news and communication as market commodities rather than vital public goods—directly conditions and enables the other two. As long as media institutions remain captured by capitalist imperatives, treating political information as a vehicle for private control and exploitation, attempts to counter oligarchic consolidation or authoritarian coercion will fail to address the root causes of our institutional breakdown.
During our discussion, we explore the history of the struggle to build public media in the United States, from early twentieth-century regulatory choices that privatized the public airwaves to the gradual weakening of public-interest protections and the chronic underfunding of public broadcasting. Against this hyper-commercialized landscape, we insist upon the necessity of fighting for democratic, diverse, and locally sensitive public media infrastructures. Rather than relying on broken advertising models or corporate philanthropy, we explore what it would mean to construct non-capitalist, community-governed media systems designed from the bottom up to serve local publics.
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Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com
Transcript forthcoming …
* Thank you to Zachary Nosbisch for the episode graphic, Nahneen Kula for the theme tune, and Thomas Chaplin for the transcript.
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