Government Power, Media Empires, and the Fight for an Informed Public - Episode 679 of the Community Broadband Bits Podcast

Christopher Mitchell (00:12)
Welcome to another episode of the Community Broadband Bits podcast. Karl Bode's with us. I'm going to do a little bit of a different intro. We're getting ready to change gears a little bit here. So this is one of the ⁓ last episodes of Community Broadband Bits. The new show will actually be pretty similar to what we've been doing, which is to say that...

Community Broadband Bits is the subject of the show, but Karl, every time you come on, it feels like we talk about different things anyway. So we're going to change the name of the show to fit more of the content that we've been doing while still having a heavy focus on Internet access and in particular, know, municipal networks wherever we can.

Karl (00:42)
Yeah.

Right on, hello, I appreciate that. Yeah, and it's good to broaden our horizons, given how much is going on in ⁓ automation, data centers, and everything else. makes perfect sense.

Christopher Mitchell (01:03)
Yeah. And what we're talking about today, government power and media. So this is, I'll actually, I'm going to ground this back in some municipal broadband stuff, but, Karl, you've been writing about this stuff forever. If people aren't familiar with you, they should check out a social media somewhere where, you have millions of adoring fans.

Karl (01:23)
Yeah,

all adoring. Definitely. Yeah. Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (01:25)
so when I was starting on municipal broadband back in 2007, I was hired at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance and I knew a bit about networking. I'd done a lot of personal like home networking stuff. I didn't know what a C-Lac was. know what NILAC was. And, I had a mentor that started bringing me up to speed on that stuff. but one of the first things I did was I wrote a long case study about Burlington Telecom.

you remember what one of the flashpoints of Burlington Telecom was before Tim Nolte left and then it kind of like went downhill with mismanagement?

Karl (01:59)
I don't actually, you'll have to refresh my memory.

Christopher Mitchell (02:01)
So Burlington Telecom was a municipally owned fiber optic network in Burlington, Vermont. And Burlington is a very progressive place. And they basically said, we have this fiber optic system. We have an unlimited number of channels we can send into people's homes on a linear cable television package. And they said, if you want to make your own channel, we'll get you online and put you up there. along the way, Al Jazeera said, we got a channel.

I'll just hear English specifically. It's a network that's still around, but it was much more controversial during the global war on terror. ⁓ And there was a big fight about whether or not that was appropriate. And it was the first time that I dealt with sort of local governments and this question of the Internet and how to think about government power and freedom of speech and ⁓ content that might not be super popular.

and the other thing is, Karl, you probably know this, but what is the number one thing that when the municipalities were doing cable systems, which now mostly they're not offering linear cable packages, but what do think was the channel that gave them the biggest headaches for like public meetings and things like that?

Karl (03:09)
at Al Jazeera.

Christopher Mitchell (03:11)
No, no, no. No. like that's so yes, in Burlington, but it was one of only two markets in the entire United States where you could watch it on your cable package. ⁓

Karl (03:18)
Okay.

No, I remember distinctly when the phone companies got into the ⁓ cable TV business, how they wanted to derelate states, but I don't, I can't actually remember what the flash point was. Of course. course. Yep. Yep.

Christopher Mitchell (03:27)
The Playboy channel. The Playboy channel is a really big deal for people because

Playboy channel brought in money for the cable operators. ⁓ It's a high revenue channel to have, like a lot of people wanted to be upset that there was nudity on a publicly owned system and it was inappropriate. They were worried about kids getting access to it and stuff like that. ⁓ this is...

Karl (03:43)
Yep.

Arnold's

Arnold Schwarzenegger movies 24 hours a day is fine though with know limbs being blown off every five seconds that's okay.

Christopher Mitchell (03:55)
yes. And kindergarten cop, think they got that ratio down some, was better for the family. ⁓ so at any rate, this issue of like government and how it interacts with the media, feel like this goes back to the founding, right? media is intertwined with, ⁓ telecommunications, in a variety of ways. In fact, a lot of the people that we hang out with the telecommunications act is very unpopular because of what it did to set off, ⁓ you know, this massive concentration in media ownership.

Karl (03:58)
Right, right, right.

Christopher Mitchell (04:21)
However, I think we're better off with telecommunications having been revised in 96. Not ideal, but the Telecommunications Act has been very good for competition in telephone and not so great for Internet access in the home, I mean for competitive high quality access. anyway, Karl, it feels like there's been a lot of stuff in the news. So what do you want to, where do you want to start with how

government power has interacted with media recently.

Karl (04:50)
You know, I have to go back to when I was helping build DSL reports and I was watching these cable companies kind of create their little regional monopolies and then realize that they had saturated their subscriber growth and to really make money, they had to bridge into media and acquire media companies get bigger. And I started noticing how government really was not enforcing media consolidation limits. They weren't enforcing, you know, media diversity ownership limits, which ensures that like a minority black community has equal.

ownership stakes in the local press, you so I just started seeing things get more and more homogenized over time as these telecom companies got bigger, their media arms got bigger. They'd merge in these giant pointless deals that serve no function in the public interest. They exist exclusively to pretty much goose quarterly earnings and create tax breaks and make executives have, you know, savvy deal maker on their resume somewhere, but they don't serve the public interest at all.

And so like, you saw last week that culminated in, think the fourth acquisition of Warner Brothers in the last 20 years by, ⁓ yeah, that's what I was, I took the, I took the long road there, but like the Warner Warner Brothers has been subjected to these weird deals every five years or so, somebody will acquire them with the idea that they're going to dominate media and create a juggernaut. AT&T thought they were going to do it. AOL thought they were going to do it. Discovery bought it from AT&T and now Larry Ellison and his son.

Christopher Mitchell (05:47)
I wouldn't ask you that was what you were thinking of. It was AT&T.

Karl (06:08)
David Ellison, who just bought CBS, basically he's gifting his son with a, not one, but two Hollywood studios. So they're now going to be under one gigantic roof with a massive amount of debt. So this new company would include CBS, ⁓ CNN, Comedy Central, all the cable channels, Discovery channels, HBO. It's massive. And I don't think the folks that are in charge are any more competent than the last

few gaggles of folks that thought they could do this. And the debt acquired by both the CBS acquisition and the CNN acquisition is so massive that I think their immediate response is going to be to lay off half of the staff across these studios. So it's going to be disastrous. And we don't, I noticed this my whole career is we don't learn, we're not financially incentivized to learn anything from experience on this front. We just keep making these same shitty deals over and over.

The outcome is always terrible for the public interest and for equality journalism and even like an informed public. We really just don't.

Christopher Mitchell (07:08)
Why do you care?

Like, I mean, people have Netflix, can, they can stream, you know, the Burlington's vision for the future, where you would have all of these different channels to choose from. People can, you know, tune into MSNBC. They can tune in, or sorry, there doesn't exist anymore, MSNOW or whatever it is. They can, but they could also tune into like any number of online shows. The Bulwark is building this incredible, ⁓ you know, this incredible joggernaut basically. Does it matter that the Ellison is sinking a bunch of money into?

Karl (07:24)
Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (07:37)
this foolish enterprise.

Karl (07:38)
I think it does because he's not just acquiring these traditional media outlets that have still some functional journalists there. He's acquiring a part of TikTok. It's clear to me he wants to, you know, buy old and new media like Elon Musk did with Twitter. So they're not just targeting these dated relics, you know, they're not just building the putting together, cobbling together gigantic relics. They are integrating modern social media. They're dominating the entirety of media.

Christopher Mitchell (07:55)
Mm-hmm.

Karl (08:04)
And when you have media owned by a handful of billionaires and corporations, I think everybody can pretty clearly see with their own eyes that it skews towards the right, towards corporatism, away from progressive reform. ⁓ I think a lot of these corporatist outlets genuinely see progressive reform a bigger threat than they do fascism. And I don't think it's subtle in their news coverage. I think there used to be debates about this and people used to look at me like I had an extra head when I brought it up.

You know, but now I think it's been so obvious and ham-fisted during the Trump era that people are really kind of waking back up to the fact that, it would be nice if we had, you know, at least some media consolidation limits, maybe impose some media diversity ownership requirements, do some brief.

Christopher Mitchell (08:44)
Yeah,

we have, we have diversity, right? I mean, I think, ⁓ we have the world's richest man owns one media center. The second richest man owns a different one. The third richest man owns a third one. ⁓ actually I saw a list that went down through the six richest people in the world. All men have different massive media ownership stakes at this point, influencing mass culture, which like you said, it's not just CBS and like the octogenarians that tune into it on the regular. It's.

Karl (09:05)
Yeah. Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (09:13)
TikTok and, and TikTok is owned by Larry Ellison now because of the United States government, not just Trump who, who steered in that direction, but I mean, the entire United States government deserves some blame for heading down this direction, which I'll still say, ⁓ you and I disagreed on this. I've always thought the United States government should have pushed hard to, force TikTok, not to be controlled by, ⁓ the government of China. I've always had concerns about.

the crossing interests there and like the way that that influences US culture and the threat that I think it could represent. So I'm going to own my position. You and I don't see eye to eye on all of these things, but like it is remarkable how the things that you were claiming could happen six, seven years ago have all happened.

Karl (09:56)
Yeah, it is. mean, and it's not just me, it's anybody that criticizes these media mergers or the telecom mergers. You know, the complaints before the Sprint T-Mobile merger was that it was going to result in 10,000 plus layoffs. It was going to make wireless more expensive. Everybody that criticized that deal was right. The complaints before the AT&T Time Warner merger was that the debt was going to cause a lot of layoffs. AT&T executives wouldn't know what they were doing. It would just, you know, they waste all this money and there would be, you know, the quality of the programming would deteriorate. And that's all true. I mean, it's not.

There's 50 years of history stretching back over the horizon, documenting exactly what this does and what it looks like. It's not, doesn't take Nostradamus to figure out that's going to keep happening until we have a little more, you know, most of the media reform efforts I've seen, especially from the Democratic party have been nonexistent. They've been just as happy to rubber stamp a lot of problematic mergers. ⁓ and I do agree that there is a foundation of concern about the TikTok Chinese ownership, but that was mostly being exploited as we saw with this final deal they struck. They,

They use national security fields to basically offload that company to Trump's friends. And there's still a giant Chinese ownership stake in the company. They didn't actually fix anything. They didn't pass, like, for example, functional privacy safeguards that protect us from all surveillance and all, you know, they did. So it was was kind of my concern with that whole TikTok thing was that it was it was kind of performative. ⁓ It's mostly done in the self-interest. wasn't these aren't people that actually cared about propaganda or, you know,

consumer privacy. were mostly looking to, they were angry that Chinese people had out innovated them on this short form video space and they took action to basically take the company from them under the.

Christopher Mitchell (11:33)
Okay, but

let me come back to why does it matter? Fierce rivalry is fierce, right? People love the show, came out of nowhere, came out of Canada, made by the people who did Letter Kenny and possibly the best television ever created, Shoresy, which I'll say ⁓ is not for everyone, but if you love great filmmaking and don't mind some crass comments, ⁓ Shoresy is freaking brilliant. So we still have the content bubbling up. The Internet routes around this corruption and censorship. ⁓

What does it matter?

Karl (12:03)
It matters because informed consensus is being eroded still. You've lost like the pillars of informed consensus. You've lost like trustworthy news organizations. Now you just have blasted with an ocean of content that basically operates under the premise that if people click on this it must be good and we need a lot more of it. So that's the entire apparatus across new and old

Christopher Mitchell (12:22)
I want to just emphasize that, right? Like, this isn't just like someone who's solely like, I'm just going to blast propaganda out. This is like, there's a machine aspect of this that is concerning, which is just if people watch it, we need more of it.

Karl (12:37)
Yeah, yeah. And people often don't watch important informed news. And that's its own cultural conversation we can have about why maybe they weren't trained to. We don't have great media literacy training in our education system. So people don't really know where to turn for decent news. So I hear the argument that, OK, we have all this content for people to turn to and inform themselves. But the average American consumer is not very good at discerning noise from bullshit, as we've seen over the last five years, especially. They're more likely to consume like a

far right wing extreme influencer who splatters a little white supremacy in between his engagement bits as they are like an actual beat reporter who has 20 years experience talking about subject matter. So that is a problem. think it erodes the foundational girders of informed consensus in a society. And I don't think that's accidental. think these billionaires that are acquiring these outlets, that's an intentional goal. I think they look to Viktor Orbán's Hungary where...

The media giants are all bought up by autocratic allies. And then the government slowly kind of strangles independent truth to power reporting right off frame outside of the view of the camera. I think that's their goal. I don't know if they'll be successful because if you look at the kind of people that they're bringing in to run CBS and CNN, they're not what I would call competent. And you also have the past precedent of all this debt

sustainability problems. One thing I think is curious is we heard during that TikTok fight about how Chinese investment in US media is a big problem, right, Saudi investment. But this paramount deal is bankrolled with about $24 billion in Saudi cash. And I saw that Tencent, a Chinese company, is about to throw another, you know, three, $400 million into it. And all those concerns I heard during the TikTok fracas from the Republican Party about how we can't have, you know, overseas influence, our media has evaporated very quickly.

Christopher Mitchell (14:23)
one of the things, uh, as you were saying that, that I was thinking about was, um, Sarah Longwell does, uh, she's publisher of The Bulwark and I'm, I'm a huge follower. I find that her and JVL have their finger on the pulse a lot more than a lot of other people do, uh, in the media sphere. And she does all these, uh, she's famous for doing these focus groups with people, you know, Trump voters, people who voted for Trump and then didn't people who didn't vote for Trump and then did people who, know, like have this hobby and are supporting Trump. Like it's just like.

just focus group after focus group. And she says, one of the things that she hears a lot is, just don't know what to believe. so you have people electing Trump because they didn't want to foreign wars. And many of those people then go on to support, I mean, what's interesting is seeing how the numbers shift as we are involved in this war in Iran now. And there's definitely the sense from people of, don't know what to believe.

And I feel like libertarians would say, well, that will sort itself out. and I can respect that because I do think it will sort itself out, but like everything sorts itself out. Like at an atomic level, if you recognize like, you know, entropy and the laws of thermodynamics, it doesn't give me comfort. So the question is what are we doing in the meantime?

Karl (15:22)
You

Yeah, right. Yeah.

Yeah. I think that I'm glad to hear she's doing that because the thing that bothers me is I can pick any of a thousand political polling stories off of the newswire that tried to understand how voters are thinking, what's shaping their thinking. You you saw after the election, there was so many of these stories about how, you know, the voters just have really deep thoughts about immigration and the economy and stuff. And not a single one of those stories can mention that the average American's news and information diet is pretty much

garbage, know, it's infotainment. ⁓

Christopher Mitchell (15:57)
Right, right, those people had, they

had very intense feelings about immigration and caravans when all they saw on television was stories about immigration and caravans. Suddenly, six months later, there are still caravans, but people don't care about them anymore when they're not on television. Isn't that curious, Karl?

Karl (16:04)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

It frustrates me that propaganda isn't mentioned in these articles about the polling electorate's thinking or that our news deserts, know, the fact that most rural Americans don't really have diversity in news, real local news. So yeah, they're blasted by all this infotainment and influencer culture on the federal level, but locally the newspaper is dead. The local TV station has been taken over by Sinclair broadcasting. The AM radio waves are full of conservative right-wing stuff.

⁓ Local news is really, really strained and dying. Victor Pickard at UPenn, you probably know him, he's done a lot of interesting research on this. There really is a dearth of local quality, local journalism, and it matters. That means less people covering school board elections. It means less people sitting there digging into local corruption. And there's only really one group of people that services, and it's certainly not the general public.

Christopher Mitchell (17:02)
And that's the issue that I have. It's not that people agree with my politics, but one of the things you talked about was expertise. And there's a real death of expertise, right? We substitute people who appear confident and can speak on something for 30 to 60 seconds and look good looking into the camera while doing it, ⁓ rather than people that know what they're talking about.

Karl (17:23)
And that's kind of hand in hand with the war on journalism. know, like ⁓ these media companies that want to pay off their debt, the first thing they do is fire all the old beat reporters because they don't want to have to pay for their health insurance. So you wind up with like AI quick, quick hit news synopsises and a bunch of interns that have been on the beat for three years and don't recognize the historical context of the story they're covering. Right. These valued reporters have been axed because we, you know, we're a country that really has kind of become obsessed with artifice. And I think it's kind of

devouring us alive and it's represented by our immediate as functions.

Christopher Mitchell (17:56)
And so it's interesting to me that we are here and I think a natural reaction to this is what does government have to do with it? To which I would say, and I'm not at all an expert on this, people at free press, the organization that's been around fighting for a free press, not the group that is ⁓ operating now as the free press, like which publishes a bunch of crap. ⁓ And I just say that because they have some good writers, but they also have the people that do telecom are awful.

Truly, they're the three, the people that you're talking about that have less than three years of experience and just parrot whatever line comes up. ⁓

Karl (18:31)
And the person that

runs that website now runs CBS News, just as it is.

Christopher Mitchell (18:34)
Right.

And I've forgotten her name, Barry Weiss. ⁓ so, ⁓ yeah, and like this is the issue though, is like the free press organization out of Washington DC that is focused on having a vibrant press. Whenever I have engaged with them, I get a sense they go back to the founding, right? And the fact that the founders recognized that we had to have a free press in order to succeed, right? It's in the First Amendment

Karl (18:36)
Very wise.

Christopher Mitchell (18:56)
Thomas Jefferson said that if he had to choose between like basically elections and newspapers, he'd take newspapers, presumably accurate ones. Although like this is not to say that those are great newspapers at the time. They were the blogs of their time, right? They were like scurrilous, they made stuff up, but like they had different opinions and they could defend them. And it wasn't just for the clicks, right? I mean, it really is. There were some differences, but not as many as people might think.

Karl (19:12)
Yeah. Yeah.

And there was a thirst for informed consensus. You would have town hall gatherings where Mark Twain would go talk for three, four, five, six hours and people would go and they would listen. They would pay attention. There was a thirst for connection and knowledge. And now we're just blasted by this bullhorn of advertisement based infotainment. And I think there's something that's been lost in translation. So I come back a lot to those people that say, yes, we have more choices than ever, but do we really, and do consumers really know how to discern the wheat from the chaff for their own?

best self-interest and I'm not so sure.

Christopher Mitchell (19:52)
We justified government intervention. First of all, government intervention back then was that the government post office vastly subsidized getting information out to people, right? Like made it very cheap for newspapers and later other forms of media to be distributed. That is a form of government policy that was aimed at what I would say local self-reliance, ⁓ but putting their thumb on the scale for an informed public and open society and that sort of a thing. Even though people could mail things that were, you know, that were

calling for an end to that, right? I mean, like you can have the difference of opinion. The government wasn't choosing, ⁓ you know, what to subsidize. It was saying media was subsidized. More recently, government put its thumb on the scale when we had scarce broadcast licenses because of the technology of the day. There were certain commitments that had to be honored and the Federal Communications Commission exists ⁓ in part to manage the airwaves on behalf of the public, including that which is used for audio and video.

But the question is, I think we're heading into, Karl, is what do we do now that we can't justify that, right? I think we have to like sneak some sort of media support, smart government policy past a Supreme Court that doesn't want to hear it. And we can't just say, well, the airwaves are scarce because I don't think that's such a great argument anymore.

Karl (21:08)
Yeah. Well, one of the first problems you run into is that a lot of the solutions just trample the First Amendment. People who want the government to get too involved in speech, obviously that creates all kinds of problems where the government could just hijack media. But they're doing that anyway under deregulated capitalism. there are things you could, you know, I think, I think something that's appealing to both sides of the political spectrum is meaningful antitrust reform. So I like the folks that keep the eyeball focused on, you know, trust busting.

because people really don't like enshittification and giant corporations dominating everything. mean, that has bipartisan appeal. see MAGA people approve that. You see Elizabeth Warren fans and AOC fans approve that. So I think if we can keep the focus on antitrust enforcement and restoring that and breaking up some of these media giants, I think that's an effective policy platform that doesn't wander into free speech issues. think you can, know, in Finland,

You can have localized education reforms in Finland. teach ⁓ kids as young as three years old to recognize propaganda blasting at them across the border from Russia. They teach them to recognize unreliable narrators and untrustworthy figures. think that's a policy arena that could be explored. diversity, ownership requirements, which I know Gigi Sohn has ⁓ pushed for a lot. think that's an excellent avenue of exploration. So there's a lot of...

Christopher Mitchell (22:27)
What does that mean

exactly?

Karl (22:28)
That means basically just mandates that, you know, ownership can't be white, male and rich all the time. You know, you just have to, you have to look at that when you're weighing the impacts of a merger and you're saying, you know, this company is acquiring all these local TV or news or even Internet companies is the ownership representative of the public interest in any sort of adversity way. And then the Trump administration has managed to create a wedge issue out of that by calling any equality DEI and demonizing it.

So that's a problematic arena, but I still think it's a path ⁓ that really could pay some dividends, at least in terms of a more representative media.

Christopher Mitchell (23:03)
Right. I would really like to see local broadcast to the extent we still have broadcast, but over time I would like to see, you know, incentives for locally based content. The, we have this, right? mean, there's Sinclair and others have bumped up against the ownership rules, which was, I mean, on the order of like 30%, no one company I think could own more than 30%. I think they've, they violated that in a number of ways in the spirit, if not the actual letter of the law.

And then we see what happens, right? Where like they draft content that happens to be right wing in this case, but it would be just as odious if it was the left wing. That was saying basically every station gets to hear the same, you know, talking points laid out the same way rather than being reflective of the local audience. ⁓ You know, I just, feel like this is one of those issues where having local control, it doesn't solve everything, right? Cause like, that's not like, that's not like a rich local person and necessarily.

is like, I might even disagree more with a rich local person than like a national George Soros type, know, like, who knows?

Karl (24:00)
Yep.

Well, that's how Roger

Ailes got to start being a local guy doing exactly that with his wife.

Christopher Mitchell (24:07)
Yeah, I mean, but the point is, that like, there's more dynamism, I think, and there's more of an opportunity for different opinions to come up. And, ⁓ and it's just important in a, in a country of 350, 360 million people that we have dispersed different forms of information. We are social creatures that like, you know, we make up the, we make up in our brains, like how to relate to each other and like what we think of the people on the other side of the hill. And frankly, it is really dangerous to have.

A few people, you know, being the ones that are deciding on the content and the direction of the content for how most of us are, ⁓ know, for the content that most of us are seeing that significantly impacts how we view the world.

Karl (24:49)
Yeah. It's funny that during the first Trump administration, if you remember Sinclair broadcasting was so full of shit in terms of their claims to regulators when they were trying, I think, to buy Tribune broadcasting, that they upset the first Trump administration, which, you know, told them they couldn't do it. Under the second Trump administration, they're just obliterating all, all local ownership rules. They're going to let the big four networks merge. They're going to let all these small local broadcasters merge. it's just, they've just taken the brakes off of this now.

And instead we're doing the at every step of the way we seem intent on doing the exact opposite of all the things that, you know, media scholars recommend we do to have a functional democracy at every step of the way. It's stunning.

Christopher Mitchell (25:28)
What do want to say about ⁓ the Federal Communications Commission? I feel like when Biden was unable to get Gigi Sohn ⁓ one of the things that Gigi wanted to do before she ⁓ was nominated there and when she was watching what the Trump administration was doing was that she wanted to defend why the FCC had to exist and why it was important.

And I have to say that after the past 18 months or so, and also watching as Gigi Sohn, a person who is as good of a consumer focused rights person as you could imagine, who does not have ⁓ conflicted corruption interests or things like that, she cannot be seated because of the Democrats, right? mean, Republicans were locked up against her, but enough of the Democrats lined up that they could not even seat her, even though Biden nominated her twice. ⁓

And like there's Democrats that I would have said, I'm not really so sorry about that, but like to not see Gigi Sohn I just feel like I'm done with the FCC. Like, don't, I don't understand why we should use our time to try to defend this agency. There are things that it does that are important, but I'm not sure that the things that it is damaging aren't outweighing the things that it's doing that are important.

Karl (26:37)
Yeah, well, I mean, the corruption runs so deep, right? As you said, you can't even get confirmed to a regulatory agency if you have any sort of progressive reform type bona fides. doesn't matter how, know, Gigi was one of the nicest, most popular people who were broadly across the aisle that I've ever seen run for that position. And she was just completely railroaded. ⁓

Christopher Mitchell (26:57)
Right. A lot of

conservative voices who might really dislike some of the politics that you and I have, Karl, they came out in favor of her because they are honest people who believe in rules and the rule of law. And they fought for her to be seated because they thought they want to live in a society where even if they're outnumbered, they want to have people in positions of power who are serious about the rule of law and having a society where we don't just have the most corrupt ruling over us from either side.

Karl (27:25)
Yeah,

and passionate people who will really fight. know, they're not just the FCC and all these agencies are stocked with a lot of careerists who kind of mute all their opinions down to like a blunt nub to be they don't you know, they're so afraid of rattling the boat or future career opportunities or future think tank gigs or whatever, that you kind of get this kind of this crew this bland careerism that permeates these agencies. But I mean, the other problem is that the Supreme Court keeps making these rulings that say

US federal regulators don't have autonomy. They don't have authority to make rulings or enforce rules or create new rules. So the federal government is paving a path to where the point where federal regulators are kind of irrelevant and all of these fights are now shifting to the state and local level. like, you can grab a topic, the environment, civil rights, telecom, media consolidation, all these fights are going to shift to the state and even smaller local level now because the federal government has abandoned

the public interest and though the press doesn't reflect this in its coverage, corruption has basically rotted federal governments from the inside out. It's downplayed. I don't see a lot of coverage that makes that point very clearly to people, which frustrates me, but I do think the federal government, it's going to take us some, a few decades or more ⁓ to rebuild federal governance back to the point where it can actually protect the public interest consistently.

Christopher Mitchell (28:46)
I agree. We have to wrap up here in a second. I want to ask you something that like, I feel like I have opinions about what the mass media is getting wrong, but I don't watch broadcast news. I don't even watch the cable channels. I advocate strongly that people, if they want to be informed, turn off the TV in general. ⁓ How do you stay up on what's actually happening out there? ⁓ And ⁓ you know, what is, what is your media diet that you don't have a sense, not just of, like what's really happening, but how

How much do you tune in to watch the cesspool? ⁓ You know, that is CBS News now, for instance, to get a sense of it.

Karl (29:20)
I don't

watch cable TV news at all. Every time I turn it on, it's so utopian and it's so packed with pharmaceutical ads and weird bland speculation by, you know, bobbleheads that I just don't, I don't find value in any of the cable news. Sometimes if there's an extreme event that's happening, I might throw, you know, on, but I just, don't think it has value anymore. I just, I grab a broad palette through social media, through, you know, reliable outlets like ProPublica, ⁓ through...

reliable newsletters for people that I have a history of trusting on issues. You know, that's how I built, not everybody is trained to do that. You know, I learned to do that through 20 years of studying media. Your average consumer who's 27 years old is not going to understand, you know, the ability or the need to curate their own inform, especially with AI entering the mix and, know, all these AI agents telling people what they want to hear all the time. I think we're at a real precipice here. So we're going to need some real reform movement.

⁓ to shake loose the foundations of this and really put things back in the right direction, assuming we can.

Christopher Mitchell (30:24)
Yeah, I think it's interesting because it is hard for me to get a sense of, that's a weird thing to say, but like when Sarah Longwell says people are like, I don't know what to believe. I'm like, I don't have that problem. I don't know. Like there's certainly topics where I'm like, oh, I'm not really sure. And I look at the expert over here and I look at the expert over there I'm like, ah, it seems like it's a little 40, 60, but I can't tell which direction, you know, like, so I mean that happens, but like when it comes down to like, I don't know, like bombing Iran, I know what I think.

Karl (30:37)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (30:49)
Like it doesn't take very much watching or listening to people, you know, and like, you know, I'll turn into like Edward Luce um, and like, and get a sense of what he's talking about. And a few other people have been writing about it for a long time, but you're right. Like, don't know how to communicate that to someone to basically tell you that like, you know, like there's, um, you know, some number of people that I will trust, but also I feel like if I watch a bunch of, clips on social media from CNN or others,

I feel like I can be fairly well informed from it just because of having a sense of the biases, what they're not saying, and you it's sort of like read between the lines at a certain point. I don't know how you teach that.

Karl (31:26)
No, I don't either. I think it starts, like I've said, with the Finland example. I think it starts with pointing out unreliable narrators and teaching kids how to recognize, because there are patterns in all these folks who are just chasing engagement, these engagement trolls who are misleading the public. There are patterns. There are tells. There are ways you could teach kids to recognize just bad faith narrators, people who are not operating or arguing in good faith, rhetorical tricks that they're using. There are ways to teach that when they're younger. think you can...

Christopher Mitchell (31:51)
That's right. Yeah.

Karl (31:54)
I think we desperately, we're a young country, know, and we just, the Internet just exploded before we even knew what was happening to us. And I think there's just a lot of reeling. like to think that maybe in a hundred years, we create kind of a cultural immune response to some of this stuff and begin to be a little more skeptical because you see right now, everything is financially incentivized towards sharing the most outrageous take, the most controversial take. Everything's based on ad engagement. You know, that's no way to live, I think. And I think over time, I'd like to see us.

develop an immune response to people that are kind of intentionally pissing us off for clicks. I just don't know how long that's going to take. And I think it's, I think it could take a long time. And I think it requires some education reform.

Christopher Mitchell (32:32)
Yeah, I mean, that's,

that's one of the things for me that I look for among people that I agree with. I will not spend a lot of time reading or listening on podcasts to people that I think are like, I'll just say, for example, I've abandoned The New Republic I used to read that on the regular. I think The New Republic is the most sensationalist trash. I don't think the reporting is necessarily bad, but like everything is to the level 11, where it's just like,

You know, if you listen to one of their podcasts, ⁓ you get the sense that clearly Trump is going to resign tomorrow because of the unpopularity of his actions. And like the whole world sees it and this and that. And I'm just like, I don't know, like I can't stand it. Cause like every day the most, the most horrible, terrible thing has happened, right? It's just like, can't be every day.

Karl (33:08)
deal.

Yeah.

And you'll notice there's a broad disinterest in platforming or covering people who are making interesting, complicated policy improvements or change. They don't want to talk about scientists doing interesting shit. They don't want to talk about innovators and policy creating, you know, new housing platform. You know, they want the dopamine. Even presumably left outlets, leftist outlets that are actually kind of serving, trying to serve the public interest, they get trapped into this wheelhouse of

engagement baiting, outrage, hyperbole, freak out sessions that I don't think necessarily serve anybody. And they tend to obfuscate real complicated policy solutions because those don't get clicks, right? An article about how you rebuild local media or as we know, rebuild local broadband, that's not going to get as much clicks as somebody who's screeching like a hyena from the treetops.

Christopher Mitchell (34:08)
And the thing is, is that like, if they're not screeching like a hyena, they might not be here tomorrow, right? Because like they're not controlling the algorithm. The algorithm is controlled by people that have their thumb on the scale and they're not interested solely in what drives people back. There are other interests that are like on the edges that then push it in certain directions ⁓ in terms of it being not, ⁓ you know, not being very hostile to corporate interests, for instance.

Karl (34:13)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And as we integrate

AI into this, all of this gets just immeasurably more complicated and you throw climate, throw climate change on the pile with all the, all of the strain that's going to be put on existing systems with the coming climate stuff. And it's just, it's a recipe for some really complicated growing pains. ⁓ so there's

Christopher Mitchell (34:39)
Yeah, that's the part that I just.

Yeah. And that's the thing

is I do feel like there's a, you know, if we're going to offer advice to people, do think like one of the things that I've wrestled with and I've talked to people about with our shows is that I want to have good faith people on who disagree. And it is hard because in 20 years I've said, this is a good faith person. That's not a good faith person. And then I found that I was wrong on both, you know, like, and, and it's, hard. can't always tell. ⁓ and so.

Karl (35:18)
Well,

that engagement pursuit, think we've seen this with several prominent people, I won't name any names, but once they fall into an audience capture, right, they get a little bit of popularity on the Internet and suddenly they're trying to, you're kind of pandering to the outrage that you see them kind of double down on the impulse to be inflammatory and do hyperbole. I think that's, you know, even our good journalists, you know, who have pivoted to newsletters, I think that's a real risk for people.

Christopher Mitchell (35:28)
Yes.

Karl (35:45)
Again, especially in the AI era where you have these AI agents trained to tell you that you're right all the time or that you're really making interesting points and that this is a good idea. So it gets really complicated. And I don't think there's a single silver bullet answer for any of it. And anybody who says there is, is not surveying the field accurately.

Christopher Mitchell (36:02)
Yeah. Well, I can say that, I am deeply sympathetic to those who are concerned that some of the policies that we are pushing could ultimately be counterproductive in terms of government having a role in media. But my view of all this is that it has to be iterative and we have to do some experiments. ⁓ and I just, as much as like, I mean, a lot of libertarian thought appeals to me and has influenced me greatly, but

The idea that we should just sit back and let a few of the six wealthiest people on the planet fight it out, you ⁓ know, with their vision and all of their vision being like just like slightly off from each other. It's not like it's not like any of them have the vision of like, let's figure out how to ensure individual rights for everyone.

Karl (36:41)
Yeah. Yep.

No,

absolutely not. No. Between Bezos and Twitter and Zuckerberg and you know, they're all basically pushing the same idea. They basically want people, they want infotainment. They don't want informed consensus and they don't want an informed electorate. They want people pushing buttons as rabidly and mindlessly as possible at impossible scales to make impossible sums of money so that they can get more votes and that's no way to run media.

Christopher Mitchell (36:54)
Yeah, and.

Yeah. So we are going to be back. ⁓ At some point, there's going to be a new name for the show, but we are going to continue down the same path of trying to have a combination of these conversations, like one-on-one or two-on-one, as well as panel shows, all under the same brand. ⁓ the goal is to have, you know, cover ⁓ telecommunications and Internet.

related stuff as well as some other tech, you know, with honest conversations with people and wherever we can to have people that disagree. So, you know, for people, love it. I know it's hard for me to say like, hey, you should reach out to me and get guests because people are sometimes frustrated and I've done this. You write to someone, you're like, you should have this guest on and for some reason they don't. And you're like, well, are you not listening to me? But like the more people, the more guests people suggest the better so we can try and track someone down and see if they work well with us. So.

But that's the direction we're going. ⁓ And if people have any thoughts on things we should include, they should let us know. But we're hoping to have Karl on here as a regular person. Not every week, but definitely hearing his voice at least once a month or so.

Karl (38:18)
I appreciate it. I really appreciate you having me.

Christopher Mitchell (38:20)
Thank you, Karl, and thank you all for listening. ⁓ Stay tuned. And, you know, I'll just I'll say that ⁓ it's a good time to tune in some basketball. Even if Duke women beat Louisville unfairly, ⁓ which happened yesterday, I hadn't watched basketball in long time. I finally watched the game and I was very frustrated. But like, I'm getting back into that, I hope a little bit and things are. ⁓

Karl (38:35)
You

Christopher Mitchell (38:47)
Things are returning to normal a little bit in Minnesota. ⁓ There's fewer people. There are still in the order of 20 abductions a day, it seems like, but the number of ICE agents is going down. I think the number of people who are being threatened is going down, but ⁓ my wife still patrols at the school and they still see agents coming by and basically like, I don't know how to describe it except for like attempting to be intimidating, like staring down.

the middle-aged women wearing vests who are out there to just try and keep an eye on things. You know, have these like government agents who are just driving by in their tinted vehicles, sort of like trying to menace these middle-aged women in their vests. ⁓ And so that's still happening. And we still got mutual aid who we're working on and trying to work through this all. ⁓ is a hard time, but I hope that people, know, I do want to bring this in, Karl. So I'll just end with this, cause we'll come back and deal with it. I think this is an opportunity to build community.

Right? Like we have national media that is tearing us apart. And frankly, like we need people to go out and talk to your neighbors and figure out how to coexist with them. Even if they have the wrong opinion on sports or the wrong opinion on politics, you got to talk to the people around you.

Karl (39:39)
Yes.

Yes.

Yeah.

I'm seeing it where you are. I'm seeing it here where I am in the Pacific Northwest. I'm seeing people build tendrils into the ground of reconnection with direct local connection. They're building alternative communication networks. They're building alternative emergency response networks. seeing an organic response to the autocratic behaviors of the federal government. I do get a lot of faith from that despite the grim headlines I see every day.

Christopher Mitchell (40:14)
Rebecca Solnit, Paradise Built in Hell or a Paradise in Hell, something like that, is a book about how human beings respond to natural disasters and it's way better than you would think. We are at our best when we are pushed to our limits, unfortunately, and that seems to be happening right now. ⁓ I wanna thank you all for listening again and this is the real end. We're gonna go to the outro now.