How Trump is Capturing America’s Media – Without a Coup

Summary

Podcast Summary: “How Trump is Capturing America’s Media – Without a Coup”

Question Everything with Brian Reed
Date: October 30, 2025

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Main Theme & Purpose

In this episode, Brian Reed examines the accelerating process of media capture in the United States under the Trump administration, exploring how government influence, billionaire allies, and Silicon Valley have coalesced to control and distort the information environment—not through a coup, but via takeovers, fear, and the manipulation of noise. Reed's central guest is journalist Natalia Antelova, who offers deep, global insight into media capture and its warning signs, drawing on her reporting in countries where the press has already been suppressed.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Bari Weiss / CBS News Uproar: A Symptom, Not the Disease

[01:14–03:24]

• Background: Paramount (run by David and Larry Ellison—Trump allies) buys Warner Bros Discovery and installs Bari Weiss at CBS News, sparking panic among media insiders.
• Why the fuss: Weiss, known for her opinionated writing and anti-“woke” stance, lacks reporting or broadcast background.
• Bigger issue: The panic over Weiss is “a symptom and far from the worst symptom…of a much deeper problem. The Trump administration is co-opting the media fast.” (Brian Reed [03:09])
• The Ellisons' increasing consolidation of media power signals stage four media capture: “having rich allies of the leader buy up private media companies.” (Brian Reed [04:27])

2. Understanding “Media Capture”

[04:27–06:28]

• Media capture, per global researchers, happens in four stages—now reaching its final, most dangerous phase in the U.S. much sooner than expected.
• Reed: “Are we as bad as Hungary, as Russia, as Turkey?”
• Reed meets Natalia Antelova, who reframes the central question:

  “Maybe the best indicator of whether our media is captured is how often you find yourself asking the question in the first place.” (Brian Reed [05:59])

3. On-the-Ground Perspective: Natalia Antelova

[08:04–16:48]

• Context: Antelova has reported from Russia, Georgia, Syria, Lebanon, and other nations with captured media.
• She identifies a vital early warning of capture:

  “I think one of these signs is self-censorship.” (Natalia Antelova [08:53])

• It's often individual and internal:

  “You slowly make choices that you can live with.” (Antelova [06:28], repeated [20:30])

• She recounts a scene from Crimea, 2014, where a Russian TV correspondent privately admits the truth (“They’re our boys!”) but publicly follows the Kremlin’s false messaging out of fear of losing his job or worse:

  “In Putin’s Russia...stick to it or you’re going to fall out of a window. Because that’s the kind of regime it is. Right? They kill you.” (Antelova [15:14])

• Reed: While U.S. journalists aren’t pushed out of windows, there’s growing legal and physical risk, making the comparison less and less far-fetched.

4. Manipulation, Not Censorship: Noise as the New Control

[23:21–25:53]

• Antelova’s core theory:

  “Instead of censorship, what authoritarian regimes use the world over is noise. And I think noise has become the new censorship.” (Antelova [23:21])

• In the Soviet Union, people sought “the signal” through scarce outside broadcasts; in America, information overload with conflicting messages buries the truth instead:

  “If that pipe is full of sewage, a little bit of clean drinking water is not gonna make any difference.” (Antelova [23:33])

• Reed links this to public exhaustion and confusion: “Nobody knows what’s true. Nobody knows what to believe.”

5. Silicon Valley’s Complicity

[25:53–31:59]

• Tech platforms boost the spread of noise, making it “easier for those with resources and power to manipulate certain narratives.”
• “Silicon Valley...created the information architecture that allows for this. The zone is being flooded constantly, all the time.” (Antelova [25:53])
• Trump’s team intentionally “floods the zone”—a well-known Steve Bannon strategy, itself copied from Putin.
• Reed and Antelova discuss how Facebook, Google, and others heavily influenced (and sometimes directly funded) U.S. newsrooms, reorienting them around their platforms’ needs—a process now repeating with AI.

6. Tech Companies, Authoritarian Regimes, and Collateral Damage

[32:27–36:03]

• Antelova: Tech workers acknowledge global harm as “collateral damage” in their push for a “bright, beautiful future.”
• Example: Google and Apple obliging Russian demands to remove opposition apps—directly aiding repressive governments.

  “Silicon Valley very much aligned itself with the Russian government in that case, as they have with many others. These dots all connect.” (Antelova [35:37])

• Parallels in the U.S.: Under Trump, Apple and Meta complied with administration requests to limit apps and groups tracking ICE; YouTube settled with Trump and reinstated his and allies’ accounts after the Jan 6 riot.

7. The First Amendment as a Tool of Tech Industry Power

[37:48–39:44]

• Antelova:

  “The way that the big tech [industry] weaponized the First Amendment is very similar to the way the gun lobby weaponized the Second.” (Antelova [38:08])

• Arguments about speech freedom have been used to deflect or delay safety regulation—“there hasn’t been a political will, and the tech lobby has very successfully made sure through incredible lobbying efforts to contain all the conversations about regulation around publication, free speech arguments.” (Antelova [38:48])
• She urges reframing the conversation around tech as a product with real-world harms, not just as speech.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “The conniption over Bari Weiss distracts from the bigger concern. Weiss’s new gig is a symptom and far from the worst symptom, I think, of a much deeper problem. The Trump administration is co-opting the media fast.”
  — Brian Reed [03:09]

• “Maybe the best indicator of whether our media is captured is how often you find yourself asking the question in the first place.”
  — Brian Reed [05:59]

• “It creeps up on you. And I have watched it creep up on people, brave, principled people. Because you slowly make choices that you can live with.”
  — Natalia Antelova [06:28], echoed with variation [20:30]

• “Instead of censorship, what authoritarian regimes use the world over is noise. And I think noise has become the new censorship.”
  — Natalia Antelova [23:21]

• “We all are drinking that water...that’s the thing. We’re all drinking that water.”
  — Natalia Antelova [25:11]

• “Silicon Valley...created the information architecture that allows for this. The zone is being flooded constantly, all the time.”
  — Natalia Antelova [25:53]

• “In Putin’s Russia...stick to it or you’re going to fall out of a window. Because that’s the kind of regime it is. Right? They kill you.”
  — Natalia Antelova [15:14]

• “The way that the big tech [industry] weaponized the First Amendment is very similar to the way the gun lobby weaponized the Second.”
  — Natalia Antelova [38:08]

• “That’s part of the capture.”
  — Natalia Antelova [40:01]

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Important Timestamps

• [01:14–03:24]: The Bari Weiss / CBS News takeover & why it matters
• [04:27–05:46]: Stages of media capture; the Ellison family’s media consolidation
• [08:04–09:08]: Natalia lists countries she’s reported in with captured media
• [09:08–10:23]: Self-censorship described—how choices get “boiled”
• [12:08–14:33]: Crimea anecdote—Russian correspondent’s personal crisis
• [15:14]: Consequences for journalists in captured regimes
• [23:21–25:53]: “Noise is the new censorship”—Antelova’s theory
• [25:53–26:52]: “Flooding the zone” & Bannon/Putin strategy
• [35:18–35:44]: Example of Silicon Valley complying with Russian censorship
• [38:08–39:44]: Tech and the First Amendment—regulation as a reframed debate
• [40:01]: “That’s part of the capture.”

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Flow & Takeaways

The episode dives deep into the evolving, subtle ways the U.S. media environment is being manipulated and hollowed out—not overtly, but through buyouts, compromised tech platforms, and shifting newsroom practices. Media capture, Antelova argues, is not a switch that flips, but a slow and insidious process marked by noise, confusion, and internalized censorship. Silicon Valley plays a central role by enabling the “flooding of the zone” and profiting from confusion. Even well-meaning journalists are not immune, as the terms of the regulatory debate are set by industries keen to avoid accountability. The consequences for democracy, Antelova warns, could be dire—and there may be more stories to come.

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This summary covers all major content topics and notable moments from the podcast, attributing key ideas and direct quotations to their speakers and linking relevant timestamps.

Transcript

[Brian Reed]

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[Brian Reed]

Today. Some new details right now about Paramount's offer to buy Warner Brothers Discovery. It first offered $19, then raised that to 22. Why? This seemingly boring business story from last week is freaking me the fuck out.

I know some of you listening to this show are deep in media news, but others are not. Bless you. And for that group, let me fill you in quickly on one of the big media industry controversies of the last few weeks, which is Bari Weiss being put in charge of CBS News.

Bari Weiss was an opinion writer at the New York Times who quit dramatically in 2020. She felt the paper was too lefty, the staff too enamored with social justice. She then founded an outlet called the Free Press, which would take on the left. It's very pro Israel, very anti identity politics, anti woke, as people put it. Then a couple weeks ago, David Ellison, the son of billionaire Larry Ellison, one of the two richest men on earth, bought the Free Press for $150 million and installed Bari Weiss as editor in chief of CBS News. David Ellison was able to do this because he just bought CBS News parent company Paramount this summer with his dad's money. Bari Weiss has never worked in broadcast news or even been a news reporter. She's an opinion journalist with Very clear political alignments and views. Now she's in charge of not only the nightly news at CBS, but also 60 Minutes Face the Nation. So people at the network are panicking. Plus, yesterday Paramount started laying off a thousand workers. John Oliver devoted an entire episode to Barry Weiss's CBS takeover. It is pretty hard to claim you've got punk energy when you essentially spout conservative talking points while dressed like the front desk manager at a Courtyard Marriott. But I think the conniption over Bari Weiss distracts from the bigger concern. Weiss's new gig is a symptom and far from the worst symptom, I think, of a much deeper problem. The Trump administration is co opting the media fast.

The Ellison family now controls one of the most powerful legacy news organizations in the country. Not to mention all sorts of other TV movie and streaming companies that are under the Paramount umbrella. Larry Ellison is a big donor and friend of Donald Trump's.

[Donald Trump]

It's got great potential. CBS has great potential. Larry Ellison is great and his son David is great. They're friends of mine.

[Brian Reed]

Big.

[Donald Trump]

They're big supporters of mine and they'll do the right thing.

[Brian Reed]

Sure, Donald Trump or his family don't run Paramount or CBS News, but maybe they don't have to to get CBS to do things they want. There's stuff like this going on across the media industry every week now where the administration is gaining power over the levers of US media and squeezing out independent and dissenting voices. The Pentagon's press office trying to bring.

[Natalia Antelova]

In MAGA media influencers of election deniers.

[Akilah Hughes]

And pro Trump propagandists handpicked to amplify.

[Brian Reed]

For a second day. The White House has barred the Associated.

[Elizabeth Warren]

Press today, the corporation.

[Brian Reed]

There's a name for what's happening. It's called media capture. It's when a government or authoritarian leader effectively controls the media and gets it to serve as a megaphone for their agenda. For a long time, US journalists have looked to other countries to try and measure. Are we there yet? Is the American media captured? Are we as bad as Hungary, As Russia? As Turkey? Researchers have come up with models for media capture. Some break it down into four stages. Stage one, taking over the broadcast regulator here, that's the fcc. Stage two, going after public media. Stage three, using government money to influence the press in other ways. And then stage four, having rich allies of the leader buy up private media companies. This is normally the hardest and most complicated steps. But the fact that it's already happening pretty rapidly, not even 10 months into Trump's second term, this is why I'm freaking the fuck out over this Ellison takeover of CBS and Paramount. And now, just weeks later, the Ellisons have been putting in offers to snatch up another huge media Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns hbo, a big movie studio, and cnn.

If the Ellisons make this happen, they this one family, these big supporters and friends of the President, as he himself puts it, will control a huge share of the U.S. media and news coverage.

All year, I've been asking, are we there yet? What does this latest media news mean? Are we captured or are we still okay? And then about three weeks ago, I met someone who helped me realize that I've been thinking about this all wrong. She makes the best argument. I've heard that are we there yet? Is not the right question. Maybe the best indicator of whether our media is captured. Is how often you find yourself asking the question in the first place.

[Natalia Antelova]

It creeps up on you. And I have watched it creep up on people, brave, principled people. Because you slowly make choices that you can live with.

[Brian Reed]

From KCRW and Placement Theory, I'm Brian Reed. This is Question Everything. Today I talk to somebody who's reported in countries around the world whose media has been captured. She's actually from one now. She's come here to the US to cover this topic. And I was surprised, though I should not have been, that the place she wanted to station herself to understand media capture wasn't Washington, wasn't New York, but Silicon Valley.

Stick around.

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Can you list all the countries that you've worked in whose media was captured?

[Natalia Antelova]

Russia, Georgia, Syria, Lebanon. Thinking whether Iraq fits the bill. Like Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Burma. I can keep going. Actually.

[Brian Reed]

Natalia Antilova has spent 15 plus years as a foreign correspondent. She's reported for the BBC, CNN, the New Yorker, from all the countries she listed and more. She's from Georgia, the country, as she's constantly clarifying, which was part of the Soviet Union when she was growing up. Now Natalia runs a newsroom called Coda Story, which covers the erosion of democracy around the world and the corruption of the free press. This is Natalia's beat, which is why I went to her to find out, has it happened yet? Is the US Captured? How would we know if the US media is captured?

[Natalia Antelova]

I think one of these signs is self censorship.

[Brian Reed]

But from the start, Natalia didn't talk about it that way. She kept gently but firmly tried trying to redirect my framing. She was describing something slipperier and frankly scarier than that.

[Natalia Antelova]

I think when you find yourself in a situation when journalists question themselves and what they're willing and not willing to say, where your editorial decisions become part of the bigger calculation of, like, how is that going to affect my life? Am I going to get fired or am I going to get deported or am I going to go to prison? And the stakes get higher and higher and. But it can start with a very simple, am I going to get in trouble? Like, is this a story that's worth doing? And I think that's part of the reason why the threshold is so difficult to identify, because I think it happens on an individual level for many, many people in silence. It's almost internal. I mean, then there are like much more obvious signs. Takeovers of businesses, suspicious mergers, departures of big stars from television shows, that sort of like, silencing of voices that has, you know, business excuse that looks completely legitimate, you know, on CBS is interesting. Like, we genuinely don't know what's going to happen with the CBS takeover. But like, the ducks align, right?

[Brian Reed]

This is what's so tricky and insidious about media capture. There always seems to be an excuse or a reason to explain something away. Like when CBS canceled Stephen Colbert as they were trying to get the Trump administration to approve their merger with David Ellison's company, did that mean we're captured or did it just mean late night shows are losing money? Probably both. But the money thing muddies the claim of capture. How about Jeff Bezos overhauling his Washington Post's opinion section to be more conservative? Is that capture creeping in? Or just the personal political preferences of a billionaire businessman? How about the editor at a national magazine I was chatting with telling me he's noticed them assigning fewer Stories about people of color or about women or conservation, how they're reorganizing their story list to delay pieces that deal with identity capture or just a publication reflecting the Zeitgeist.

[Natalia Antelova]

It's subtle shifts in the environment that are very easy to justify as the water in which you're boiling gets hotter and hotter.

[Brian Reed]

But do you feel there is a threshold when a country goes from the media is not captured to we are in capture?

[Natalia Antelova]

I think it's very easy to see it in hindsight rather than when it's happening in real life. I remember in 2014 covering the annexation of Crimea and we were seeing all this Russian troops coming in and taking over.

[Brian Reed]

This was in February of 2014. Russia invaded this part of Ukraine, Crimea and ultimately annexed it, made it part of Russia. Natalia was there on the ground watching as troops streamed in, trapped in the.

[Natalia Antelova]

Middle of a battle between Kremlin backed rebels and Ukrainian troops. I was doing a live for the BBC and next to me was a Russian television correspondent who was going on air and, and the dynamic on the ground was that there were all these Russian troops, but they had no insignia. So you kind of couldn't tell whose troops they were. And Putin kept insisting day after day after day that there were no Russian troops in Crimea.

[Brian Reed]

Putin was insisting these soldiers were local Ukrainian militias. Not true. They were Russian troops, as the Ukrainians were claiming from the start.

[Natalia Antelova]

And I'm standing on the ground in Crimea, I'm about to do a live hit. I'm standing next to the, and we had like a little patch and a Russian television correspondent was next to me and I'm listening in and he talks about the fact that these troops are self defense battalions who are, you know, in Crimea and they're like local Ukrainian Crimeans who are defending. And then the line cuts like he's done and then he starts shouting and screaming into the microphone because he's gone back to his producer swearing and saying like, I can't do this anymore. This is a total lie. You know it's a lie. You're making me say these things. This is such bullshit. They're our boys. They're our boys. When are we gonna say that they're our boys?

And I remember going up to him later that night. We were in the same hotel and we ended up, you know, chatting for quite a while. He was, you know, a nice, intelligent man who was basically saying, I don't know what to do, I can't quit, I have no other skill. I have a family to support. I can't get out of Russia. I spent my whole career working for this station. Like, what? Do it. But I also can't do that anymore, you know, and he was dealing with this like enormous, like personal dilemma. But everyone working for Russian TV knew that the official line was, these are self defense battalions indigenous to Crimea. These are not Russian troops. And this is what we're doubling down on. And that's what he had. He knew he had to double down and.

[Brian Reed]

Or what had he not?

[Natalia Antelova]

Oh, he'd be fired. He said he'd be fired. He was told that he'd be fired. We know that the core messaging is decided in the Kremlin and then passed out to the editors in chief of the main stations in Russia. And then things can be massaged around the core messaging. But there are some messages that they have to stick to that they absolutely have to stick to. And the order was to stick to the line that this were not Russian troops.

[Brian Reed]

Stick to it or what? And I understand the consequence for that. Individual journalist, if he had on live TV said the truth, said something different, he would have been fired. But in terms of the kind of top down chain of command you're describing.

[Natalia Antelova]

In Putin's Russia, stick to it or you're going to fall out of a window. Because that's the kind of regime it is. Right? They kill you.

[Brian Reed]

Right. I'm generally wary of comparing Russia's treatment of the press to the us. I've always worried about overblowing it. The real threat of violence seemed to put Russia in another category. But it is true that more and more journalists in America are getting tear gassed by law enforcement, assaulted, locked up. One was just deported after covering ice. And Natalia, who has reported in Russia, who grew up in the Soviet Union, she is not hesitant to compare there to here.

[Natalia Antelova]

I don't know how helpful it is to make a distinction between capture and repression, because repression is capture. Obviously. It's a completely different environment. The power dynamics are different. I see the pattern that is the same. One of the things that I've noticed is the centralization of the message. I think this administration is very disciplined and very good at putting certain messages out and making sure that they're widely picked up in slightly different iterations by so many actors that it, you know, it just becomes the narrative when it comes to narratives. I think there's so many that have become embraced in the U.S. i mean, something as simple as, you know, librarians are the enemy, like the war on librarians in the U.S. the president fired.

[Brian Reed]

The librarian of Congress Why did he choose to do that?

[Natalia Antelova]

We felt she did not fit the deans of the American people. There were quite concerning things that she had had done at the Library of Congress in the pursuit of dei. Well, like slavery wasn't really a thing in the US that backtracking like that. It happens in a very similar way in other authoritarian environments as well.

[Brian Reed]

Listening to Natalia, I started thinking about Donald Trump's big lie. The lie about him having won the 2020 election and how that proliferated, how an autocrat doesn't need to use actual state violence against journalists to get what he wants. The big guy starts shouting the message from the top.

[Donald Trump]

This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country.

We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election.

[Brian Reed]

That message shoots out like from a splatter gun into the media ecosystem, boosted along by podcasters and weird fake news Facebook pages and memes. Audiences start buying it. The big right wing broadcasters take it up. Talk radio, Fox News, we don't know how many votes were stolen on Tuesday night. We don't know anything about the software that many say was rigged. We don't know. We ought to find out. I love these legal challenges because we.

[Natalia Antelova]

Have to get to the bottom of all this and expose fraud where it occurred.

[Brian Reed]

They concoct all sorts of tall tales that support this fake narrative about phony ballots on planes and corrupted voting machines. Right now, Joe Biden is pretending to be the President elect. They know they haven't won this thing fair and square. A third of the country comes to believe this damaging fake story that the election wasn't legitimate. The lie inspires an insurrection attempt. And when Trump comes back into office, he makes denying the results of the 2020 election a cornerstone of his administration. It becomes a loyalty test for people in the MAGA world. Here's Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren last month trying to get Trump's nominee for the Federal Reserve Board, Stephen Myron, to crack and simply state the truth.

[Elizabeth Warren]

Easy. Yes or no, did Donald Trump lose the 2020 presidential election?

[Brian Reed]

Joe Biden was certified by Congress as the President of the United States.

[Elizabeth Warren]

Right. So did Donald Trump lose that election?

[Brian Reed]

As I said, Joe Biden was certified by Donald Trump.

[Elizabeth Warren]

Lose that election. Can you say the words, Donald Trump lost that election? Are you independent enough to say that.

[Brian Reed]

The Congress certified Joe Biden as President?

[Elizabeth Warren]

All right, so that was one. Let's try another.

[Natalia Antelova]

Obviously, the White House is not sending directives to, you know, heads of ABC and so on, but yet do we now live in the world where they don't need to, because they create the mood music so effectively with that like centralized messaging. They push it out to their sympathizers, the movements, and they just create this mood music. And then mood music is very much part of and that's what creates the narrative. And then with just a little bit of fear and a little bit of self censorship, it's easier and it's safer in the time of great uncertainty just to be on the safe side, to just follow the mood music. And that's how everyone gets co opted into it. Capture works in much more subtle ways than we imagine. It creeps up on you, and I have watched it creep up on people, brave, principled people, because you slowly make choices that you can live with.

[Brian Reed]

After a quick break, Natalia explains a grand unified theme theory she's come up with for how censorship works in the modern age. And she points at an important culprit.

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[Akilah Hughes]

Isn't it about time we stand up to the grifters who say they have all the answers with their apps and their bots, their meme coins, their quote unquote policies. So now that they've had their chance, it's time someone asks, how is this Better? I'm Akilah Hughes, host of How Is this Better? If you've looked around and wondered how we ended up on the dumbest timeline, this is the show for you. Follow how is this Better on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts?

[Brian Reed]

Welcome back. If you've been listening to our show recently, you know I'm wrestling with the question of what can be done about lies that are overwhelming us online and how to hold tech companies more accountable for their role in this. I've honed in on this policy change, reforming a law called Section 230 to allow people to sue Internet companies when they algorithmically boost posts that are defamatory. As Natalia has studied the way that repressive regimes are operating in recent years, including regimes she's reported under. As she's documented the methods they've devised to stamp out narratives they don't like, she's come up with a theory, one that's specifically about what I've gotten focused on, too. The Internet and social media and the way strongmen leaders are using it.

[Natalia Antelova]

Instead of censorship, what authoritarian regimes use the world over is noise. And I think noise has become the new censorship.

As a child, I was born in the Soviet Union, and I remember my early childhood memories as, you know, my mom listening to shortwave radio to the Voice of America or the BBC, because she knew that all the information we got at home was fake. And you had to find a signal that came from the outside to give yourself understanding of what really was happening. Right? And you had to, like, interpret it. And that's how you try to make sense of the world and figured out how to navigate it. I think what has happened since is that we no longer have censorship the way we had it. Like that doesn't exist anymore. And I don't think it's coming back on a big scale. I don't think it's going to come to America in the way that it happened in the Soviet Union. You no longer need to censor a single voice. You put out so much noise, that truth gets lost and it becomes impossible to figure out who is saying what. Endless theories and rumors and fake news and pieces of information, you know, and some of it is truthful information, too. But if it's all going into the same pipe, and if that pipe is full of sewage, you know, a little bit of clean drinking water is not gonna make any difference. And that archaeologist.

[Brian Reed]

I'm not drinking that water.

[Natalia Antelova]

Yeah, you're right, but. No, but you are. Water. We're all drinking that water. That's the thing. We're all drinking that water.

[Brian Reed]

This made me think back to my trip this summer to the Iowa State Fair, where I asked people how they were feeling about the state of things in the country and with the media and just the exhaustion they expressed. Personally, I feel like it's hard to know who to trust in the Press to get a straight answer on things. It's exhausting. Every time you turn around, nobody knows what's true. Nobody knows what to believe. How do you know what's real and what's fake? Sometimes you know, because sometimes you get these fake news articles that'll report this and people will go, oh, yeah, that's real. So let's all believe it and spread it out there. Natalia says, what I was hearing people say in Iowa, that's evidence of media capture.

[Natalia Antelova]

I think that's the big picture to media capture, because media capture is happening in that bigger environment that is so noisy, that is so overwhelming, that is so hard to punch through that it becomes much easier for those with resources and power to manipulate certain narratives and to make sure that they go the way they want. Silicon Valley has become the perfect accomplice to people like Vladimir Putin because they're the ones who created the information architecture that allows for this. The zone is being flooded constantly, all the time.

[Brian Reed]

Flood the zone is the Trump team's actual strategy. Trump advisor Steve Bannon brags about it. Keep driving it.

[Donald Trump]

Flood the zone.

[Brian Reed]

Overwhelm them. It gets to be a psychological thing. They're overwhelmed.

[Donald Trump]

They don't know where to turn.

[Brian Reed]

But Bannon and Trump, they copied this from Putin.

[Natalia Antelova]

You know, he was really good at putting out another scandal. He puts out Kremlin, puts out, like, hundred conflicting, contradictory theories. You know, when I covered the downing of MH17, the Boeing over Ukraine, that was shut down by the Russian troops, the Malaysian flight, the Malaysian flight, it was shot down by the Russian missile over Ukraine. And it was incredible to see. Like, you were standing there in those fields, surrounded by bodies that have fallen out from this plane. Everyone had died. 298 passengers.

[Brian Reed]

You were in the field.

[Natalia Antelova]

80 children. I was there, yeah. And I arrived early. And Moscow pumping the propaganda and conflicting theories on contradictory hypothesis on who shut down the plane. And you could see them spreading across the Internet. It was the Ukrainian jet, It was a Western conspiracy. It was the CIA, it was this, it was that. It was like endless, endless conspiracy theories.

[Brian Reed]

That were like, scrolling on Twitter online, seeing this.

[Natalia Antelova]

And then the local people right in those fields are repeating these things back to you. And that's, you know, that environment is created where people like the agency is taken away because it feels like it's impossible to find the truth.

[Brian Reed]

What I hear you saying is that I kind of maybe came to this conversation with, like, a more simplistic view of capture or a cruder view of it, like, why capture matters is that the public can't access reliable information to stay informed and to connect with what's happening. And so whether it's happening through this process of the government co opting the independent press or some other more diffuse means in our information ecosystem, it doesn't, it doesn't matter.

[Natalia Antelova]

That's right, yeah. Ultimately the result of media capture is people not getting the information they need or the understanding that they need to navigate the world. Instead, they're getting the narrative that serves someone else's agenda. People are being cope have elected governments that are taking over things that people value like their independent media.

And all of that happens through manipulation of narratives basically. And the Silicon Valley has built a business model on, you know, they, they essentially profit from the abundance of information. And I think the news industry in particular is very guilty and has a lot of responsibility for the world that we live in because I think we failed at our pretty basic function which is to hold powerful to account when it comes to Silicon Valley and when it comes to tech bros who are now pretty much running the world and are shaping the world to their liking.

[Brian Reed]

Natalia moved to Silicon Valley for a year to do a fellowship at Stanford where she worked on this theory a about noise being the new censorship, largely because she wanted to be in that world developing sources, seeing how people who work in tech think.

[Natalia Antelova]

You know, these are a handful of men whose fortunes make them bigger than sovereign nation states. And there are a handful of men who don't believe in sovereignty of nation states.

[Brian Reed]

It was all there for reporters to cover and raise the alarm on for years.

[Natalia Antelova]

And we failed to tell the story. And I think part of the reason we failed to tell the story is because we drank the Kool Aid, because Silicon Valley was very good. They made fantastic shiny products that made our lives easier. And they were also kind of cool. You know, everyone wanted to be part of it. And I think when it comes to just pure accountability reporting, you know, it didn't happen. I went to my first journalist conference, I don't know, 2016, 2015 maybe, when I was setting up Coda. And I remember Facebook was like a tiny booth right on the vendor floor. Within two years, Facebook was the keynote speech. Facebook was a keynote speaker at all journalism conferences. They bankrolled journalist conferences along with Google, along with, you know, other tech companies. They ran labs and gave out grants. And then they told the newsrooms that they, everyone should pivot to doing instant articles. Facebook would pivot to doing more video. And then all the newsrooms would be like, now we need to do more video. We kind of adopted as the industry, we adopted their business model which is all around clicks and traffic. And in that adoption and in taking money from them and building our distribution.

[Brian Reed]

To be so very reliant on them.

[Natalia Antelova]

That's right. And in just simply in drinking their Kool Aid, we kind of forgot what we are for. We got ourselves into a giant mess. Sadly, I see the pattern totally repeating itself now with AI. You know, Facebook has long pulled out. Google is not that interested anymore. But you know, Microsoft is now at the journalism conferences serving champagne at receptions, Ops champagne.

[Brian Reed]

What conferences are you going to?

[Natalia Antelova]

I remember having a conversation with a guy at Google. It was just like friendly drinks. And I was, we were talking about some of these things and I was talking to him about, you know, trying to connect this dots between some of the decisions made in the Valley and how they play out like in far away places and of how a certain, like tweak to an algorithm enables Russians to go down and hunt down a Ukrainian or makes it impossible for an Afghan exiled journalist to reach his community back in Afghanistan. And his reaction was basically, it's collateral damage. He's like, yeah, we know this happens. It's not that we don't know, but it's collateral damage that they are collateral damage.

[Brian Reed]

In service of what?

[Natalia Antelova]

In service of the bright, beautiful future that many of the people I met really believe in. And everything that happens in the meantime, you know, like, that stands in the way Will, you know, that's too bad. But like the cause is fantastic and great and that's where we're headed. And we just have to put up. To me, that's how like Joseph Stalin treated, you know, people he sent to the Gulags.

[Brian Reed]

Or Machiavelli.

[Natalia Antelova]

Or Machiavelli or any high rant, you know. And that's why I think of the Valley as like a place of this like authoritarian kind of ethos in some way, because they're so sure in what they're building and what they're creating is there.

[Brian Reed]

When you think back to the last 10, 15 years, is there a story or a moment where you're like, oh, that's where we as reporters and journalists should have done something different, covered it differently, positioned ourselves differently, you know, like.

[Natalia Antelova]

For example, like we. One of the most underreported stories in the West. The West. There was plenty of coverage of Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader who was killed in prison by Putin. But what didn't get any coverage was that Navalny came up with an absolutely fascinating way of going around really, really harsh restrictions around elections in Russia. And if it had worked, and we're talking 2018, 2019, if it had worked, it could have become a really interesting blueprint for any opposition party fighting in elections anywhere in the world. So he comes up with a way of participating in the democratic process, even though he's technically banned from it. And it's basically an app where any Russian using their zip equivalent of a zip code can look up Navalny's recommendation for who to vote for. Super simple, but could have been incredibly effective and brought about the upset of Putin's party.

What happened was that the Russian government requested that Apple, Google take down the app from their stores, take down the instructions that were on Google Docs and take down all the videos about it from YouTube. And they obliged.

[Brian Reed]

And that killed it, basically.

[Natalia Antelova]

It killed it. It killed it. And I think eventually it killed Navalny. Well, Putin killed Navalny, but you know, he didn't have a fair chance of a fight to begin with. And Silicon Valley very much aligned itself with the Russian government in that case, as they have with many others. These dots all connect.

[Brian Reed]

In the last few weeks. The Trump administration told Apple to take down apps from its store that allow people to document and share videos of ICE doing public raids. Apple did it. The administration asked Meta to get rid of a Facebook group used by nearly 80,000 people to track ICE agents in Chicago. Meta did it. Also, Donald Trump sued YouTube for suspending his account after the January 6 riot. And instead of using Section 230, the special immunity, Internet platforms get to block the lawsuit, which YouTube totally could have used and they have used in many other cases where non presidents were suing them. YouTube instead settled with Donald Trump, agreeing to pay the president $22 million, which will go towards building the new White House ballroom. The company also reinstated Trump's account and a bunch of other accounts supporting the president that they had previously deemed harmful enough to ban. And now the president's buddy, Larry Ellison, whose son owns Paramount and CBS and is trying to buy Warner Bros. And cnn along along with Trump's other buddy, Rupert Murdoch. They are part of a group of investors purchasing the fastest growing social app in America, TikTok, a deal the Trump administration arranged.

Before I left Natalia, she had one more turn of the screw for me, one more facet of media capture that I truly never considered. Something she says has taken place in my own mind. Natalia was talking about how she thinks we need more straight up regulation of social media and tech companies. These platforms are products she Says like cars or planes or cement, we require safety measures for those and we need the same for social media.

The idea of active regulation, that's not something I've been so into. My knee jerk reaction is that's the government regulating speech and I feel allergic to that. But Natalia believes I only feel that way because the tech industry has exploited my and other journalists weakness, our love of the First Amendment.

[Natalia Antelova]

I mean I always think of the way that the big tech weaponized the First Amendment is very similar to the way the gun lobby weaponized the second amendment.

[Brian Reed]

Yeah. Like all the, all the industries you're mentioning where they have been subjected over time to regulations and safety measures to rein in the harms of their products. So auto industry with seat belts, cement with regulations, they're not tied up with a constitutional amendment. It does feel like social media is a speech product in a lot of ways. And so it's been tied up in the First Amendment and that's why it's avoided.

[Natalia Antelova]

But broadcasters are regulated and publishers are regulated. That's also tied with the First Amendment. So there are ways. There hasn't been a political will and the tech lobby has very successfully made sure through incredible lobbying efforts to contain all the conversations about regulation around publication, free speech arguments, conversations that we aren't having are the safety conversations to reframe it around.

[Brian Reed]

This is a product and it's dangerous and it's harming people to reframe the counter narrative to these products to not make it about whether or not you're regulating speech.

[Natalia Antelova]

Yeah, absolutely.

Because it suits them just fine for us to be engaged in the endless debate on whether or not we're regulating speech. So I think, I know it makes.

[Brian Reed]

Me tough, it's made it tough for me to engage in it just as a journalist because.

It'S interesting for you to put it this way, I never thought that were setting the terms of that debate in such a way that it made it hard for me and other journalists, I think to come out on an adversarial side.

[Natalia Antelova]

That's part of the capture.

[Brian Reed]

That's part of the capture, yeah.

I don't know. I gotta sit with this one. I think social media regulations are tricky in practice, but also politically tricky. They're divisive. That's why I like reforming section 230. Making it so people can sue tech companies and hold them accountable. In at least certain cases there's bipartisan political will to do it. And the way I look at it, it's the opposite of regulation. We would be rolling back a law about speech rather than adding in a bunch more.

But there are lots of people who hate that idea too. People who I respect and have been yelling at me online since I came came out as an advocate for it. So the next time we pick up this thread, that's what we'll get into. The reason section 230 exists and the bad things that could happen if we change or get rid of it. Though I still think we should.

Seems like a good time to point out that Question everything. We are independent media. We're funded by listener supported public radio. We are not trying to do a big merger, not donating money to anyone's ballroom project. We call things like we see them. And right now, if you're looking for that kind of voice, a great way to support us is just by sharing the show with a friend or with five friends. Text this episode along Spread the Word.

Today's episode was produced by our Managing editor Kevin Sullivan, with help from Associate Producer Kevin Sheppard. Robin Semion and I are the executive producers of Question Everything. Our team includes producers Sophie Kazis and Zach St. Louis, and contributing editors Neil Drumming and Jen Kinney. This episode was fact checked by Annika Robbins and mixed in sound design by Brendan Baker. Our music is by Matt McGinley. Our partners at KCRW include Arnie Seiple, Tejal Jumeirah, Natalie Hill and Jennifer Farrow. Next week on Question Everything, Ira Glass sits down with a whistleblower who spent years in prison for leaking documents to a news outlet. More time than any other source the government's ever gone after.

[Natalia Antelova]

And one of the things I didn't.

[Brian Reed]

Know until I read your book is just how many people see classified documents. It's like over a million people have access, right?

[Natalia Antelova]

A million of us saw that document and like a million of us were waiting for that one to get leaked.

[Brian Reed]

We'll see you next time.

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