Rodney Benson

And it seems clear that the reason he's favoring them is because they want to include CNN in the package.

And they've also reportedly said that they're willing to make changes at CNN to make it more sympathetic to the Trump administration.

Well, it's really interesting.

If you look at who is capitulating to the Trump administration, who is being captured in a sense, it's not random.

The outlets that are vulnerable to this tend to be stock market traded companies, and they have a pressure to maximize profits in order to keep increasing their stock pressures or stock prices, and that encourages them

to seek economies of scale through these mergers and acquisitions and more and more consolidation.

So they're stock market traded companies.

They're also conglomerates.

And so in other words, they're involved in multiple industries outside of the news business.

And so that makes them uniquely vulnerable to the Trump administration pressure.

They have business with the government or they're regulated by the government.

And so if you look at ABC owned by Disney,

CBS, Washington Post, and the LA Times, where they've modified their editorial page line and the kind of politics of that.

These are all owners that have business contracts with the government or that are regulated by the government.

And in the case of these legacy TV networks, they're also regulated by the FCC.

So their ownership structure makes them vulnerable.

That is definitely a classic example of media capture in a democracy where there's been democratic backsliding over the past 15 years.

Viktor Orban is the prime minister there, and he has gradually taken over most of the media in Hungary.

So first of all, controlling public broadcasting in a very direct way.

where it becomes state TV, not public service broadcasting like with the BBC.