Big Tech Regulator Lina Khan, out with the good air, in with the bad
The year in the media, both in the streaming business and in broadcasting as a whole, saw and will continue to see wholescale changes, many of them negative, some positive. The main story in streaming and in television is the new preponderance of Artificial Intelligence, as its use by the film and television industry threatens not only employees but also the older established moguls and brands’ control of the industry.
The attempt to regulate these behemoths now seems sidetracked, as the only progressive appointment made by Joe Biden, that of Lina Kahn as head of the Federal Trade Commission which resulted in lawsuits attempting to break up the monopoly dominance of Google, Amazon, Meta, etc., will now be overthrown. The opposite under the Trump-Musk administration is likely to occur, that is more monopoly and a wave of mergers and acquisitions. None of these will benefit American and now global viewers and consumers.
Some genuinely left anti-genocide voices?
However, the hopeful aspect of the coming Trump era, a development that helped shape the 2024 presidential election, is the rise of social and alternative media and the further decline of mainstream, corporate media. The Democrats and their corporate allies’ attempt to censor speech is likely to end, and in place of that will be a more wide-open media landscape. Yes, more fringe right voices will be heard, but also more genuinely left voices to counter the pro-war, pro-genocide, so-called “liberal,” elite.
Their demise can already be seen in the decision of Comcast, owners of Peacock and NBC, to spin off the now less than profitable CNBC and MSNBC. Along with CNN these platforms have ratings so low that they are now being challenged at least globally for audience attention by Rumble, and by YouTubers like the always rebellious, Shakespearean-tongued George Galloway, whose Mother of All Talk Shows outdraws their ratings by a factor of 3 to 1.
In 2025 we are likely then to see both a more open space in terms of social media and a more closed and conservative one, due to deregulation and conglomeration, in corporate media and streaming. The counter to streamer agglomeration will be Global Television which, as I indicated in my survey of the Best Series of 2024, still manages to produce socially relevant series but which increasingly is under pressure to fold itself into the streaming giants (Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Disney +, Max) on whose platforms these series appear as they circulate around the world.
Here Come the Machines and the Mergers, There Go The Jobs
The conglomerate streamers used the 2023 writers’ and actors’ strikes as an excuse for further cutbacks, already underway in a streaming industry which lost its lustre the year before as Wall Street became aware that profitable subscribers weren’t unlimited, with even mighty Netflix reporting a quarter in which it had a loss of earnings.
Netflix at least retained its production budget (of $17 billion) for the year, but the others cut back drastically, not only cancelling series but also shortening both seasons and episodes.
The consolidation that had begun earlier, highlighted by Rupert Murdoch selling much of his 21st Century Fox label to Disney, also resulted in drastic job losses as the majors, rather than creating relevant series that dealt with social problems that would attract viewers, both retrenched and cancelled series and, following the streaming leader Netflix’ dictum that “we’re not in the truth to power business, we’re in the entertainment business,” further embraced mindless, time-wasting series.
At the beginning of the fall, Paramount, whose streamer has yet to gain much recognition, announced it was closing its landmark Paramount Television Studio, as a first blow in laying off 2000 workers, 15 percent of its workforce, by the end of the year. In terms of consolidation, which is beginning in the deteriorating cable field, DirectTV offered to buy its competitor Dish Networks, in a deal that was later rescinded, for one dollar.
Sam Altman and OpenAI’s plan to un-employ the world
The other major cost-cutting device, besides layoffs and cutbacks, while also a reason why layoffs and cutbacks can occur, is the always encroaching threat of AI. One of the reasons the actors and writers went on strike in 2023 was to halt this encroachment, but the major AI companies, led by ultimate cutthroat capitalist Sam Altman’s OpenAI, continues apace to outflank any restrictions.
Altman is on record as favoring privatizing AI and its source code and overthrowing the tenets of the founders of his own company, as the race is on for what is called Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), defined by the company as a “highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work.” In other words, an instrument for un-employing the most workers in the least time.
Writers and actors have long feared that parts of that work will include the creation of scripts and the plastic fashioning of characters on the screen, drawn from bits and pieces of actors’ work. Under those circumstances the recent Tom Hanks/Robin Wright film Here, a supposedly tender recounting of the history of one home, uses “digital de-aging” to show the couple at various phases of their lives while readying the audiences for more plastic, less real, versions of the actors.
For writers the main fear was that AI, which can already generate barely literate scripts, might soon be able to generate mediocre ones that the writer, instead of being the creator, would then be called in, at a much lower price, to edit. The writers’ strike for the moment abolished this possibility by defining any AI-created script as not original. The way around this though, which the producers now seek, is to continue training AI on old scripts, a concession the producers won in the strike. At some point if enough scripts are fed in, AI may be able to create a script that writers could not determine the machine had created.
The other key goal here is one the studios have long sought and that is for them to have complete ownership of the script, so that not the writer but the studio is emphasized, a return to the days of the classic studio system where the studio brand was more important than the writer or the director. For this purpose, the studios are now developing their own versions of AI.
At the moment AI is being used primarily in production, resulting not only in cost-cutting in terms of not shooting on location but also in job-saving since these shortcuts can do what before was the work of many employees – not only graphics workers and editors but also stunt workers. Look at the current Christmas blockbuster (along with Wicked) Gladiator II and its construction of the key set, the Coliseum. The original used the computer graphics (CGI) techniques such that every shot in the film was in some way doctored. For the sequel the director Ridley Scott, at first opposed to AI, used it – and the reason? Its “potential to reduce production costs” with the other reason, its opening “new creative possibilities,” coming in a distant second.
Rome wasn’t built in a day but this version, done with far fewer workers, was and that may not bode well for the rest of the industry.
The Demise of Corporate Media: Good Riddance to Propagandistic Rubbish
The positive news is the exposing of the fact that mainstream, corporate media is utterly out of touch with ordinary people and the sentiments of the electorate which is far more progressive and rebellious than either of the major parties. This year’s Gallup Poll on trustworthy institutions in the U.S. held firm with last year’s finding that almost 70 percent of Americans have little or no trust in corporate media.
The presidential election for the first time was largely fought out on social media, with the largest media event being Joe Rogan’s three-hour interview with Donald Trump and Kamala Harris’ refusal to go on the show and beyond the friendly, already tailored, confines of CNN. Rogan’s podcast is the number one of its kind in the world and Trump’s appearance on it coincided with his refusal to perform a presidential candidate right-of-passage, an appearance on CBS’ 60 Minutes.
Voters, hurting economically, also rejected Hollywood and celebrity culture with endorsements by Taylor Swift and Beyonce, and cultivation of black voters by the Obamas ,largely falling on deaf ears.
The media also showed its tone-deafness in, for example, numerous articles in the The New York Times and The Washington Post, some featuring the neoliberal apologist Paul Krugman, claiming that Americans were “uninformed” about how wonderful the economy was. The number of Americans living “paycheck to paycheck,” that is, one major bill away from momentous debt, is, in some polls, now 47 percent and that figure this year has reached as high as 66 percent. The actual “uninformed” are the media elites who are closer in both salary and sentiment to the 10 percent of Americans who own the majority of stocks and for whom indeed times have never been better.
The institutional violence of corporate capitalism
The distance between both the owners and corporate media propagandists can also be seen in the contemporary coverage of the shooter of the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. The assassination, with the bullets marked “delay, deny, defend,” language used to cancel insurance claims, was clearly a pointed assault on a company that is the leader in denials, refusing to pay on 37 percent of all claims. The institutional violence of the company, whose denials have resulted in deaths, was skipped over in the mainstream press by the breathlessness of the hunt for the suspect.
The Financial Times in its article on the shooting focused on how security is now being heightened for such corporate criminals as the heads of Big Pharma Pfizer and Moderna, BlackRock which is buying up mortgages to throw people out of their homes, and Facebook which continues to censor information even as it sells its users’ data. The article simply described United as “a blue-chip company that provides healthcare and insurance for tens of millions of Americans,” eliding its role as mercenary and unnecessary middle-man in propagating and profiting from a deteriorating healthcare system.
On the internet there was widespread support for the fugitive as Americans have watched corporate heads either go free or pay a minimum fine for offences that damage the country, with only a few outliers and scapegoats ever going to jail. In a country that supposedly abroad supports a “rules-based order,” those rules seemingly do not apply to corporate malfeasance at home.
The China Report counters Western warmongering
Meanwhile, the best reporting on Israel and the Middle East is being done not by the corporate media, which are always biased in favour of Isreal and the West, but by The Grey Zone. Max Blumenthal was one of the first to expose the fact that many of the casualties on October 7 were the result not of Hamas’ attempt at taking hostages but of the Israeli Defense Force’s employment of the Hannibal Directive which said that no Israeli hostage should be taken alive.
New social media springs up
The most level-headed assessments of the war in Ukraine and the constant drive for war and global domination of Bush-era neocons are being lodged again on YouTube and Rumble by insiders like the ex-intelligence analyst and weapons inspector Scott Ritter and retired Colonel Douglas Macgregor.
In a similar vein, the attempt to coerce China into a war for the purpose of halting its Belt and Road Initiative to help bring many of the countries of the developing world out of poverty is being countered by Breakthrough News’ “China Report” with Amanda Yie and Kayjay Noh. On a recent episode the duo exposed the Shun Yun dance company, the darling, if the ads are to be believed, of the bourgeoisie—the show “transmits this energy, this instinct for life”—instead as a group of reactionary fanatics that engage in human trafficking and violate child labour laws.
A word of caution is that many of these voices are prominent on YouTube, owned by Google, whose Cloud software powers the Defense Department and which can censor any of them at will. However, new social media always springs up when silenced and the voices simply migrate to a less influential platform and rebuild popularity – or they demand to be reinstated and because of their popularity their demand is met.
These voices and opinions, of course, are nowhere on mainstream media but in the year to come they, along of course with a far-right lunatic fringe, will highlight a battle for hearts and minds as corporate media begins to shed ratings, profits and influence and as social media begins to overthrow the dominance of an institution judged by many as an ever more obvious shill for ever-greedier corporate interests.
Dennis Broe is a television critic whose books include Birth of the Binge: Serial TV and The End of Leisure, and a novelist whose latest novel The Dark Ages is about McCarthyite repression in Los Angeles in the 1950s.
