Who Will Stand Up to Trump’s Broligarchs?

Elon Musk’s raised-arm salute to Donald Trump drew more attention, but for those concerned about media freedom, another image from Inauguration Day seemed just as chilling. In the front row of the Capitol rotunda, a who’s who of tech billionaires — Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Musk himself — lined up to cheer in the new commander-in-chief.

Also showing their support, seated a bit farther back, were Apple CEO Tim Cook, Sam Altman of OpenAI and TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew (later on Jan. 20, Trump issued an executive order delaying a federal ban on the Chinese-owned social media platform).

“Big Tech billionaires have a front row seat at Trump’s inauguration. They have even better seats than Trump’s own cabinet picks. That says it all,” noted Massachusetts Sen. Elisabeth Warren on Musk’s X, suggesting we were watching what Joe Biden, in his final Oval Office speech on Jan. 15, had warned of: “An oligarchy” of the “tech industrial complex” whose “extreme wealth, power, and influence … threatens our entire democracy.”

Talk of a tech oligarchy running the entire U.S. economy may be overblown, even if it may not feel that way at the moment. The combined economic might of the Bezos/Zuckerberg/Musk empires account for less than 2 percent of total American GDP, per a tally from The Economist. Add in Apple and Alphabet, and that rises to 3.1 percent — hardly a controlling share. When it comes to Big Media’s battle with tech for influence, however, it’s hard to be so sanguine. In the eight years since Trump first swore to “protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,” the strength and reach of legacy outlets has fallen while the power of platforms has surged in comparison.

“In the U.S. and in Europe, too, we have allowed an acute concentration of control over the media infrastructure to evolve,” says Johnny Ryan, director of Enforce, a civil liberties group based in Ireland. “Because of that error, we have allowed the emergence of oligarchs who have an enormous influence in how we all view the world, because they decide what our feeds look like. And they are now, it appears, servants of the incoming administration.”

Many of the same tech moguls crowding the rotunda, once vocal critics of Trump, are now keen to toe the MAGA line, hoping to shore up government contracts, benefit from a low-tax, low-regulation regime, and avoid being targeted by Trump for punishment. Over the course of a few days, Zuckerberg shelved Meta’s once-lauded fact-checking program; named prominent Republican Joel Kaplan chief global affairs officer, replacing liberal-leaning British ex-politico Nick Clegg; promoted UFC boss and Trump whisperer Dana White to Meta’s board; and scrapped DEI initiatives so despised by the conservative faithful. Bezos’ Washington Post robustly held Trump’s feet to the fire during his first term, cataloging all 30,573 of the false or misleading claims he made during his presidency, then shied away from a presidential endorsement of Kamala Harris at the last minute of the campaign. 

What’s left of the legacy media appears cowed by economic uncertainty — revenue slumps and accompanying job cuts mean fewer resources to throw at the resistance fight — and by years of intimation by Trump and his followers. In December, instead of fighting, ABC News opted to quickly settle a defamation lawsuit brought by Trump over anchor George Stephanopoulos’ on-air assertion that the president-elect had been found civilly liable for raping writer E. Jean Carroll. ABC agreed to pay $15 million toward Trump’s yet-to-be-built presidential library and cover Trump’s legal costs, supposedly another $1 million. Earlier this month, in a separate defamation case, CNN was ordered to pay $5 million for defaming a private security contractor in a five-minute segment that ran on the network in 2021. The CNN case did not involve Trump but is a further indication of how public opinion has turned sharply against mainstream news organizations, just as financial constraints have made it harder for outlets to fend off lawsuits.

A bipartisan piece of legislation, the Protect Reporters From Exploitative State Spying Act, or PRESS Act, would have expanded press protections against government spying and the seizure of reporting materials, making it harder for a vengeful executive branch to crack down on reporting it doesn’t agree with. It passed the House unanimously but, after Trump urged Republicans in Congress to “kill” it, was DOA on the Senate floor in December.

Then there’s the FCC, now headed by Trump ally Brendan Carr. In his first week as FCC chair, Carr has revived complaints against ABC, NBC and CBS, again singing from Trump’s hymn book, alleging liberal bias at the national networks. The complaints — one accusing NBC of violating federal fairness rules by featuring Harris in an SNL sketch four days before the election, one concerning ABC News’ handling of the September Trump-Harris debate, and one involving a CBS edit of a Harris interview for 60 Minutes — were all dismissed by former Democratic FCC chair Jessica Rosenworcel. (NBC tried to blunt Trump’s fury over Harris’ SNL appearance by giving him free airtime during a NASCAR race to talk to voters.) Rosenworcel also dismissed a fourth complaint, filed against Fox Corp’s Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan, which argued, that after Fox News spread lies about the use of Dominion Voting Systems machines to “steal” the 2020 election for Biden, the Murdochs lacked the moral character needed to hold broadcast licenses. Carr agreed with that decision and did not revive the Fox complaint.

It’s unclear if the complaints against the networks will move forward and, despite his saber-rattling during the campaign, if Trump would even be able to weaponize the FCC to revoke licenses from broadcasters that displease him. The fear of retribution alone, however, may be enough to silence Trump’s critics. In November, Trump filed a $10 billion lawsuit against CBS claiming “unlawful acts of election and voter interference” in its editing of Harris’ 60 Minutes clip. Whatever the merits of the suit — legal experts have called it “frivolous and dangerous” — for CBS parent, Paramount, which is seeking federal approval for its $8 billion takeover by David Ellison’s Skydance Media, it might be less hassle to settle than to fight and risk a Trump government blocking the merger. (On Trump’s first full day in office, David’s father, Larry Ellison, joined the president to unveil a $500 billion AI initiative, sparking speculation about how the elder Ellison could smooth things over for his son’s media deal.) 

More worrying still, for those concerned about a Trump-Big Tech alliance, is the lack of legal guardrails governing social media in the U.S. America is still largely working off Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which gives owners broad legal immunity from what goes up on their platforms.

Barring strong political opposition within the U.S., the best hope for resistance to the broligarchs could come from Europe. Over the past decade, the European Union has been active in setting up a legislative framework of laws designed to regulate and control online platforms that has given even Musk and Zuckerberg some pause with how they handle data. That legislative framework is an acronymic forest of laws including the Digital Services Act (DSA), the Digital Markets Act (DMA), the General Data Protection Regulation, and the Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD).

“Europe has the most developed approach to platform regulation,” says Lucas Graves, a professor of media and communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “What’s not clear is if Europe has the political will to enforce the existing rules, especially given the rise of the same sort of Trumpist sentiments across much of the E.U.”

This story first appeared in the Jan. 29 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.