Ronan Farrow

That reshapes the balance of power in the world that hands over like the equivalent of nuclear weapons in a whole new context to autocrats.

You make the right point.

That is the wider story of so many American industries right now.

I'm a lawyer by training.

The law firms have in a situation where they could actually be a really important bulwark right through impact litigation against the erosion of democratic values.

They bent the knee so quickly, starting with Paul Weiss, if anyone followed that story.

Hollywood, media, the consolidation of platforms where there can be this kind of accountability reporting is real.

There are not a lot of places that will give the resources for a reporter like me to work on something like this for a year and a half and get all these documents.

um and and we don't meanwhile have that kind of independent oversight happening through regulation and legislation um there is a huge proliferation of money from ai in politics as i mentioned before you know this is a moment where if you're running for office in america right now you are really having to contend with a ton of the money coming from ai

because a ton of the economy is propped up on AI.

And there's just very little way to push back on that.

I do, though, believe that if readers see this, they look at this piece, they care.

You can encourage independent oversight in journalism by subscribing to places that do it.

Maybe that's the New Yorker.

Maybe you believe in what we've done with this piece and you think we need more of that.

Please subscribe.

And maybe it's ProPublica.

There are places doing meaningful work in a shrinking space.

A funny example of this is actually as we were closing this piece and we're in deep conversations that are, as you mentioned, very combative with Sam Altman and others at OpenAI, they announced they were acquiring TBPN, this tech podcast.

So it's just a little microcosm for how the whole media landscape is now being gobbled up by these tycoons that we're talking about.