The Orbanization of the American press
"The really unnerving thing is Trump using state power to influence who a company gets sold to," Matt Gertz tells us.
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Today, as a bonus for subscribers, we’re publishing a new interview with one of the most astute observers of the rightward drift of corporate media in the age of Trump, Media Matters senior fellow Matthew Gertz.
Gertz recently wrote a piece about the “Orbanization process” evident in Bari Weiss’s rise to editor in chief of CBS.
“Trump is patently uninterested in ‘a free and open and good press.’ He wants media institutions to be more like Fox News, supporting his interests, protecting him from negative stories, and praising his every action as a historic success,” Gertz wrote. “And he believes that goal is served via a CBS News run by [David] Ellison — the son of his close friend and political supporter Larry Ellison, who is the founder of Oracle and one of the richest people on the planet — and Weiss, whose Free Press outlet functions as a permission structure that moves centrists into his coalition.”
In our conversation, Gertz detailed how CBS’s new direction is likely a sign of things to come as Trump brazenly threatens outlets he doesn’t like and interferes in corporate mergers to make sure media outlets are in the hands of loyalists.
“The really unnerving thing about this is Trump using state power to influence who a company gets sold to,” Gertz told us. “Everyone just kind of accepts that of course the FCC will only allow a merger if it goes to the person that Trump wants to own it. That’s a very precipitous decline in our broad public assumptions of how government power is supposed to be wielded.”
The full conversation between Gertz and Public Notice contributor Thor Benson, lightly edited for clarity, follows. If you’d like to read the whole thing but aren’t yet a paid subscriber, please click the button below and sign up. Public Notice is entirely funded by readers, and without paid subscribers this work wouldn’t be possible.
Thor Benson
Tell me about the “Orbanization effect” and why it’s important for understanding what’s going on in American media.
Matt Gertz
In October of last year, I wrote a piece about the authoritarian playbook Donald Trump planned to use against the free press if he was able to return to the White House. He takes as his model Viktor Orban, the autocratic leader of Hungary. Orban is someone who repeatedly deployed state power as a way to cudgel news outlets into his corner, get them sold to more pliant ownership, and in various ways keep them in line and make them more supportive of his regime. Trump tried similar things during his first administration. He tried to pressure CNN and the Washington Post through their ownership.
The second point I made in that piece was that the future of the free press was going to come down not to decisions necessarily made by journalists, but to ones by media moguls and corporate leaders who Donald Trump would put to the test. He’d try to pressure those people through their broader business interests, get them to not care that much about their media outlets, and shift them in a more propagandistic direction.
We’re 10 months into the Trump administration and I think he’s been quite successful.