Talking Points Memo

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Current FCC Chair Brendan Carr is your typical Trumpland figure in that he is an intellectual pissant who thinks assuming a hyper-aggressive and truculent tone will mask the vacuous nature of his ideas. He's a sycophant and a fraud. 

Unfortunately, he also has real power. This week he took to Twitter/X/whatever to performatively make his Boss happy: "The law is clear. Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will lose their licenses if they do not," he said

This follows Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth daydreaming in public about a day when CNN as we know it no longer exists to ask him why our wars make no sense. "The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better," he said.

Then you have Free Press-CBS being run/destroyed by Bari Weiss. Jeff Bezos, the fourth-richest man in the world, wants to use the Washington Post to whine about free markets that I guess are not free enough, or he'd be higher in the rankings.

The point is this: The news is being co-opted by rich people and their stooges to serve their needs. We're at the stage of things where the government is openly saying, tell the stories we want you to tell, or else. 

When you support TPM, you are supporting independent voices who cannot be muzzled by Trump or whoever else. 

It's not lost on us that this may be an increasingly common pitch. But it's also an increasingly urgent pitch. Independent newsrooms like ours know what we're up against. Against a state-friendly media with more or less unlimited resources, we turn to our readers and listeners and viewers who we know value important journalism. You wouldn't have found us otherwise.

When we launched our membership program, we emphasized independence because we think independence is required to produce the highest quality journalism. We still think that. But now, independence is becoming existential. It's necessary. We hope you agree, and will consider supporting us.