 David Dayan is a reporter for The Intercept, The Nation, and countless other magazines. You're a pretty great writer, and you have a couple of pieces in The Nation that I want to talk to you about. One is about Sinclair Media. They're a conservative TV network. They own all the local stations, and I guess the FCC is going to allow them to purchase Tribune. Tribune Media, which once held the LA Times in Chicago Tribune, but then sort of split off the newspaper business from their television business, that's company that owns WGN, and I believe PIX in New York and KTLA out here in Los Angeles, and about 42 stations all across the country. These are big stations. Big stations in the biggest media markets. Sinclair owns far more stations. Sinclair actually owns 173 television stations. Most of them in small and mid-sized markets, so they're a bit under the radar. And this acquisition would give them a foothold in 70% of the country, and we're talking about local television stations, all of which produce local news broadcasts. You talk about local news, and people think, well, nobody outside of their people in their 80s listen to watch local news. It's not true. It remains the number one source for people to get their news. You don't think about it too much, but particularly in areas where this is kind of the only game in town, local news remains an important source of information for people. That might be scary to say, but it's true. And Sinclair has a pension for using this power to present a significantly biased set of opinions, biased in the conservative direction. Like back in 2004. That's right. So, a couple things came up back in 2004. First, Sinclair, their affiliates of all sorts of television stations from ABC to CBS to NBC. Sinclair's ABC stations refused to air an episode of Nightline that merely listed the names of Iraqi war debt. That was seen as too controversial for Sinclair-owned stations. Then, during the election campaign between John Kerry and George W. Bush, Sinclair said that they were going to air a two-hour documentary presented, produced by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth that called into question John Kerry's military service. And they were going to force it on all of their stations without commercial interruption and in prime time, two weeks before the election. I mean, this is clear electioneering on the part of Sinclair on behalf of George W. But what are the laws about that? Well, there was tremendous outcry. We didn't really get to the laws because there was such public outcry and in fact, concerted effort to tank the Sinclair stock that they backed off and they only ran portions of this documentary along with sort of a broader discussion. Although it wasn't that much broader because there was about 30 minutes of the Kerry documentary and about three minutes on George W. Bush's service with the Texas Air National Guard. There aren't really too many laws to answer your question about this anymore, not since the disappearance of the Fairness Doctrine, which was a previous law that forced some manner of equality in public affairs programming in terms of opinions. But that is no longer with us. And so you have Sinclair that's able to very quietly put together a very conservative news source. Now, you know how local news works is these are cash strap stations. They're always starred for content. And Sinclair produces content and basically tells its affiliates to run it all over the country. So it's the effect of a national news network, a box news, but it's being done at the local news level where people don't really have that thinking that there's some sort of bias to their local news program. Don't they have a corporate executive at Sinclair who delivers editorials right now? That's correct. That's correct. And they must run, right? They're must run. Their chief Washington political analyst actually served in the Trump administration for a little while. He got named Boris Epstein. He was a surrogate for the Trump campaign. And yes, their vice president, I believe delivers editorials that it must run. Even if these weren't must run their content, you know, it's like free content for these news stations. They're going to take it. So, you know, it creates this situation where all over the country, people are watching their local news, not expecting to be sort of indoctrinated in any way. And they're getting all this very one sided set of news and information. And that went right down to the Trump Clinton general election where Sinclair reportedly made a deal with Jared Kushner to get expanded access for the Trump campaign on these local news stations that were owned by Sinclair. And Sinclair said, you let us interview the president or the presidential candidate at that time, Trump, or your top advisors, and we'll just run it. And we won't give any commentary whatsoever. This was sort of an unmediated filter directly into these local news stations, which, as I said, is a key source of news and might even have more credibility than a national news source, which, you know, there's all these accusations of bias on Fox News or even on the other side. But, you know, this was a way to get these things on the local news, which just isn't seen that way. And it was obviously pretty successful. I believe the CEO of Sinclair Broadcasting rode in the presidential inaugural parade. So there's clearly a close relationship here. And what's important to understand is that Sinclair, just a few months ago, would not have been able to make this deal with Tribune that gives them this 70% footprint over the country's news viewers. And the reason is that laws were changed at the Federal Communications Commission, which had previously clamped down on the amount of stations one company could own or the amount of stations one company could own. We're getting ahead of ourselves for one second because I do want to talk about the FCC. But I want to get back to what I would assume you would call the astroturf of local news in that Sinclair is presenting what appears to be a grassroots opinion in a small town market, but it's secretly being dictated by a corporate overlord in Baltimore. Just think about it, David. I mean, when you're watching ABC and Lincoln, Nebraska, you have no idea that that is a station that's owned by Sinclair Broadcasting. You just know it's ABC. There's no recognition of this link between this right-wing propagandist and the local news that you're watching on your television. If anything, you think you're watching ABC News. That's correct. And that credibility is sort of lent over to that local news outlet. So the prestidigitation that's going on and the brainwashing that is going on is you live in Lincoln, Nebraska. You're watching a local television station that's owned by Sinclair, but it identifies itself as an ABC affiliate. It's running ABC content all day. Yep. So you think, oh, it's part of the liberal media, but it's owned by Sinclair, which has nothing to do with ABC. So they're running ABC Network News, but they're using their local news to push their conservative agenda, making it look like it's homegrown. Right. And now when some people looked at this Sinclair purchase of Tribune and all of these additional stations, they thought, oh, here we go. Sinclair is going to create their answer to Fox News. They're going to create a more conservative network and pick up Bill O'Reilly or they're going to do something like that. The truth is they don't need to. They've got the perfect thing going right now because it's just as you described. They borrow the credibility of these broadcast networks. They run their affiliate local news. They pipe in all of this very slanted programming into the news product that goes next to your local sports and weather. And they benefit from having this sort of unfiltered pipeline that doesn't have this any kind of understanding or recognition of bias on the part of the viewer that's able to put this agenda forward. It's really quite ingenious. It's scary because we are a nation incapable of critical thinking. Right. I don't mean to sound condescending, but it's true. You said two things and they don't make sense. You say that these local stations are cash strapped, but they're owned by Sinclair. Right. Well, the news budgets are. I mean, you have the local thing though, right? Absolutely. Certainly, they could raise the product of the news value on those stations. But in the modern era, news has to bring a profit in the previous era. News didn't have to be a cash cow for any network. So, you know, most local news budgets, they don't have the budget to go out and have their own reporter in Washington, for example. They don't have the budget to have an international bureau. No local news program has that sort of budget. So that's kind of what I mean by cash strapped. So they are pleased to have a corporate partner that's able to give them that level of news programming and, you know, decently produce packages that they can just roll into their news, 11 o'clock news, and eat up that two to three minutes of time. I mean, this is really helpful for a local news station that has to be mindful of cost because it's simply the case that their budgets do not allow them to do massive amounts of national broadcasting and news gathering. Earlier you said Sinclair was publicly traded. It is, yeah. And do we know if it's profitable? It's wildly profitable. You're talking about a company that owns and operates hundreds of these television stations, you know, which are able to bring in all kinds of ad revenue. And, you know, think of how many television stations there are in a community. I'm talking about local television stations. I mean, it's not like there's a lot of choice there, right? So whoever it is that owns them has the ability to really put a big mark, you know, upon that market. And in some places, they have more than one station in a given market. Now, there was a time when that was not allowed by the FCC. You weren't allowed to own two stations. Let me tell you- Now, you can own two, but not more than two. However, all of this could change with our new great and glorious Trump era. Let me filter it through something I experienced when I was young and TV was black and white. When I moved to San Francisco, I worked for K-R-O-N, which was at the time the NBC affiliate. And it was pretty much one of their flagship stations. It wasn't owned and operated by NBC, but they were very proud of their news organization because it was owned by the Chronicle family, the San Francisco Chronicle. Something happened. I don't remember what it was, but the Chronicle had to sell K-R-O-N because they weren't allowed to own- This is why Tribune broke up. You weren't allowed to own a television station and a newspaper in the same market, I think is the deal. And it was because they didn't want one family influencing a municipality. Which is public policy? There was a time when foreigners could not own a TV station. It was the great Senator Ted Kennedy who was instrumental in lifting the ban on foreigners owning a TV station so that Rupert Murdoch could buy it Fox Television, right? Interestingly, Fox was the other bidder in this process for Tribune media. They lost to Sinclair. And what is the thinking? We don't allow foreign governments to contribute to the Trump campaign, supposedly. And there was a time when we didn't want foreign governments owning television and radio stations. What were they afraid of? Well, I think basically the government has walked off the field with respect to all of these things, particularly antitrust concerns and concerns of foreign ownership. Look, in the Constitution, the president can't be born in a foreign country. There was long-standing suspicion and you could even say xenophobia over these kinds of matters. My personal view is not that foreign ownership necessarily represents something that should be feared and should give us concern. It's the concentration of power, in my view, that is a far more important issue at this point. And this is the area where Trump's FCC is operating to try to concentrate and consolidate media ownership more than we've seen in generations. I want to get to the FCC in a second, but I want to get back to cash-strapped newsrooms across America because journalism is a sacred trust. We can't have a democracy with a well-informed electorate. We no longer have a well-informed electorate. The Russians are able to hack the DNC and spread disinformation because, as I said earlier, we are incapable of critical thinking. We can't tell what's real and what's fake. The justification for firing people at newspapers and in local television newsrooms is we are cash-strapped. Our television newsrooms are local stations really cash-strapped and, for example, the Los Angeles Times, which was owned by Mr. Zell from the Tribune, they were told were cash-strapped. But wasn't it really the... Yeah, I mean you're talking about a few different things there. If you're talking about newspapers and journalism, print journalism, it is the case that print journalism advertising has reduced significantly over the last 20 years and it's concurrent with the rise of the internet and the changes in that advertising. And that is a monopoly problem as well, something we're going to get into later, I think, in the show about the fact that Google and Facebook have cornered the advertising markets online and about 88% of them are in the hands of those two companies and they can dictate what the actual producers of journalism can receive in terms of advertising. And this has significantly constrained the ability of these newsrooms to survive with the same number of journalists they had in the past and to do the kind of very expensive enterprise reporting that they had been their hallmark in the past. That's true to a lesser extent with television news, particularly at the broadcast level. I mean you see less and less international bureaus, less and less long-form 60-minute style kind of enterprise reporting out of those outlets as well. It's a different, I think it's a different dynamic in the television space. It was more about how television news used to be a lost leader and the entertainment programming is what made the money and the television news outlet was the prestige part of that equation. And also it satisfied FCC requirements for public interest programming and public affairs programming and things like that. But those rules were relaxed. They were able to be fulfilled by other means. And over time the owners of television news decided well the news has to pull its weight along with the entertainment programming. And that's just asking too much of television news, which if you want to do it right is also very expensive to produce. But it's certainly easier to throw up three talking heads and have them shouted each other. And that doesn't cost very much money at all except for the camera and the microphone. So that really is how that all about then sort of the rise of cable news as a competitor to drive that you know drove the conversation which much much cheaper product. I think it was in the 80s where CBS got bought out I think it was Tish some tobacco magnate who said okay news has to make a profit. As I understood it he said that because they discovered that news could make a profit that 60 minutes was number one that there was money to be made with good solid journalism. Right. And that was certainly true in the case of 60 minutes. I think what happened concurrently was sort of the rise of CNN which had an international footprint but also had a 24-hour news cycle to fill and that became you know sort of a less sustainable scenario. And then it was about the nightly news trying to compete with the 24-hour news that was on all the time and figuring out how to do that the best. 60 minutes was obviously you know something that like you said was was number one for a long time and commanded huge athletes. But that was almost lightning in a bottle wouldn't you say. I mean nobody else really found that formula whether it was you know 2020 or some of these other programs to to really make that happen in such a way. And of course what other what other news outlets could not do that 60 minutes sort of as a legacy was allowed to do was really challenge corporate power to really challenge the forces that shape our lives and too much of programming news programming got influence whether directly or indirectly by advertisers. You know if you look at the nightly news you'll you'll see two major industries represented at pharmaceuticals or the defense industry because it's more about influencing what goes on the news than attracting you know eyeballs to the advertising. This is like it always amuses me when I walk through DC and you just see all entirely different kind of billboard advertising about you know niche bills it's just intended to to to attract the eyes of the staffs of congressional representatives rather than any normal human being. And I think that's a lot what happened with with television news. If the Justice Department enforced I guess it's the Sherman Act anti-trust laws yeah if the Justice Department protected communities from Wall Street all radio stations or most and most television stations would be locally owned and as I recall before they relaxed these ownership rules I think it was a telecommunications act of 96 or 97 there was a time when if you owned a radio station a television station locally and even a newspaper because they were enforcing anti-trust laws right it was a cash cow it was an absolute cash cow. What role does debt play in the decimation of the newsroom? The Los Angeles Times was a cash cow but this guy Zell bought it and racked up all this debt. Right well I was almost a private equity play yeah I mean that that's kind of what they do they take these companies private they saddle them down with debt and they use that as a means to extract value out of the the corporation that's because debt is preferred in the tax code of equity and there are whole variety of reasons oh yeah absolutely there are a variety of reasons why private equity works you just changed that that that wasn't preferred in the tax code a lot of the financial engineering uh that we see at the private equity firms would go away I'm sorry I didn't know this so if I'm a private equity firm I'm going to take a publicly held company right you're going to buy it out buy it out I'm going to have to do we're going to use debt to buy that out and then you're going to place that debt upon the company not upon your balance sheet but upon the company's balance sheet so the company then has to figure a way to dig out of that and meanwhile private equity takes its management fees from its private investors it takes all these tax credits that you can get when you're using debt because you can deduct interest and you can do all sorts of of debt plays it you know can can sell the real estate underpinning the corporation and then lease it back to the cut to the uh the particular corporation and and make them pay rent on this thing that they used to own uh there are all sorts of schemes that a private equity company can use uh that are are just ways to leak profits out of a corporation in the name of efficiency in the name of uh you know uh taking a failing company so so-called and and nursing it back to health what they're really doing is is field stripping that company for assets and uh yeah I think I think you saw that you know with respect to the LA Times with respect to what sam depp is always doing uh one thing I would add though is that there is a there is a culprit for this you know lack of enforcement of antitrust and it goes back to the 1980s actually goes back to man named robert bork who uh we dodged a bullet with him not being a supreme court justice which he almost was he was nominated for that position by president reagan uh however before that in the 1970s he became the most consequential figure in antitrust law in american history because without changing a word of the sherman antitrust act robert bork reinterpreted its meaning before robert bork uh the idea behind the sherman antitrust act was thought to be to prevent large companies from growing in size and dominating a particular field and what robert bork did it said nope nope nope don't have to worry about size don't have to worry about bigness you don't have to worry about uh individuals who want to uh display their talents not having any company other than the main company that that dominates a a particular space uh to to to work for all you have to worry about is consumer welfare as long as prices go down there is no problem with any company merging with any other company wow so as long as the prices fall uh that's all you have to think about and that has that simple idea which is not part of the sherman antitrust act has dominated the thinking around antitrust for the next 35 years wow how did he do what was he doing at the time he was teaching at Yale law school in fact the day the day after the election this year i was at the Yale law school giving a speech on my uh book and which is not how i looked yeah i looked up in the room and robert bork was looking back at me that was the room i was i was giving this uh talking um and there was a picture of him there was a picture giant giant portrait um he wrote a book called the antitrust paradox uh in the 1970s and this re invented uh what we know about antitrust law and then the Reagan administration in the 1980s um they they changed the guidance the official guidance in the justice department for how to look at antitrust cases at largely adopting robert bork's view of the case and that that essentially took uh the antitrust enforcement off off the the beat uh and and the country has really never been the same wow because i it almost has become doctrine that you always hear while the merger was approved because the the consumer will benefit from a real benefit right they talk about efficiency and consumer welfare and that is not what what john sherman uh actually put in his law as as what he wanted to safeguard against what was he trying to safeguard he was he was trying to stop bigness he was trying to stop the domination of sectors by certain individuals uh and and and corporations and trusts that would uh have consequential outcomes for uh income and wealth concentration which he talked about uh personal liberty and the ability to uh you know be an entrepreneur the ability to if you want to take your your your use your particular skills that you can do that in an industry that isn't dominated by someone else so you have a barrier to entry um there were all these other facets of uh the the sherman antitrust act that are not reflected in robert bork's interpretation because what he did was he turned it from a legal case to an economic case because you can always find an economist to make the case that there is a consumer welfare benefit to a particular merger and it's just math that they do and and and you can always sort of twist the statistics to make that case now interestingly there's some work that's been done recently that that actually does a retrospective look at a lot of mergers and finds that prices actually do go up of course these mergers happen of course so the entire even on robert bork's own terms uh this consumer welfare idea is ridiculous but it's especially ridiculous because he reinterpreted at a hundred year old law without changing a word of it legislatively just through interpretive guidance uh literally changed legal history as i see mergers and acquisitions i can't compete with you you're a threat to me you're going to put me out of business i'm going to buy you and then fire everybody and i'll take that's the efficiency right yeah that that's what's considered the efficiency um and and you're absolutely right and and we have seen this now in sector after sector of our economy uh in places you don't even think about you go into a supermarket and you look down the aisle and there seems to be all these choices in front of you and yet it's a handful of companies that own every one of those brands most of the toothpaste in this country comes from two brands all of the eyeglasses in this country are made by one company uh who's the company boss there are an italian company called luxatica and and and they not only own the brands of eyeglasses but they own the stores in which they're sold um you know i could go on and on and on about this about the the increasing market concentration and we're finally starting to see a little pushback to bork and what is called the chicago school the the economist at the university of chicago that that really took up these ideas and adopted them um i was at a conference in chicago at the university of chicago in march uh where it was a real consequential challenge to this notion of consumer welfare to this notion that we don't have a problem uh with these large concentrations of wealth and power that we're seeing all throughout every economic sector and so things are starting to change a little bit but it's going to take uh you know a good amount of time and obviously what we're seeing right now with the administration uh the trump administration has come in is is a sliding back in the chicago school was hayek milton friedman strouse these were people who digler who who came up with the idea of regulatory capture uh and they believe they gave us the shock doctrine and they also gave us this belief in the free market that there actually is a free market and it's pure we know otherwise are among the other things they did is they adopted wholesale uh bork's ideas about uh market concentration and market power are they funded by corporate interests well it's almost that do they need to be i mean uh at the time you know i mean the universe chicago had its large endowment and they attracted all these scholars uh certainly you know i mean milton friedman uh worked in in all these all these different countries worked in chile and and and all over the world practically uh preaching this gospel which you know fit very well with uh the you know newly active ideas around uh corporations uh you know you think about the lewis powell memo in the 1970s and uh the idea that the corporation needed to exert its power in the political realm uh milton friedman of course was a favorite of uh the reagan administration so uh you know i think there was a synergy there i mean i i don't think you have to necessarily talk about funding colleges and universities get their funding from a variety of sources but uh there was certainly a lot of back and forth a lot of borrowing of ideas a lot of use of academics which we see to this day use of academics through funding uh to write reports favorable to business uh and and then you know it's just a very cozy relationship i know this sounds paranoid but if you do read the the powell memo lewis powell wrote this memo for the chamber of commerce going after ralph nader and young kids and telling corporations to fund think tanks and create pro business propaganda when you hear that there are tax advantages i didn't know this but that you just told me that there are tax advantages for somebody to take a publicly held newspaper take it private and then gut it when i read that clear channel buys up all another roll up there's another uh uh large concentrated uh media company that was at one point owned by romney's bane capital right and they have dumbed down the country while racking up debt well while not turning a profit but they succeed in making the country dumber i'm not paranoid but i do think people are out to get me but you describe local tv news as the number one source of news for most americans is it conceivable that the republicans are so terrified that people are going to be informed that they've all chipped in to destroy our ability to learn well i mean uh you know i by way of answering the question let me just give this very interesting instructive example that we're seeing here in real time because it disrupts the notion that uh that these corporations are just out to make a profit in their ruthless and and and you know and and uh all they care about is that last dollar and that protects us the public because they'll compete against one another et cetera et cetera so you know what's going on at ns nbc right well tell me so msnbc uh we know under the bush administration keith oberman uh became uh almost by accident became this sort of celebrated figure on the left uh they built up their uh their roster of left-leaning commentators and and news people uh and they continued that through some of the obama administration and now it's the trump administration and they have a new person in charge this guy andy lack who uh is an executive who um he he seems incredibly disinterested in uh maintaining msnbc's position sort of on the ideological spectrum as sort of left counterweight to uh fox news so you know over the last several months they have fired several hosts who were sort of left-leaning contributors to the network they've hired Hugh shewitt so they it looks like they're going to put him in a a show a weekly show to host they've hired george will they've hired uh they've played given a show to nicole wallace uh who is uh was was served uh and on the communication staff with sarah paleon um they have uh sought to rebrand and move to the right uh uh or at least to the center and the the the problem with this is that if you look at msnbc's ratings they are outpacing fox in the coveted 25 to 54 demographic among their remaining left-leaning hosts rachel maddow chris haze laurence or donnell those hosts are doing extremely well in the trump era as one would expect given you know the sort of uh feeling in the air and and and how how trump you know sort of brings these headlines um but andy lack is going against the very uh ideas that that the network should go with what is doing well in fact laurence or donnell's contract is up in like three weeks and he has not even been talked to about renewing that contract he's the number two uh person in cable news right now and and it looks like they're going to let him go we remember that during uh the early days of the bush administration before keith olmerman stumbled upon this formula phil donahue was the number one host at msnbc and he got fired for talking about the iraq war two didn't rosy have a show too i think she might have so and they did point is that if it was corporations only sir look out for their self-interest and if something is making money for them that's what they're going to do then you would see uh the building up of uh hosts in similar uh uh uh ideological uh interest as rachel maddow chris haze or so donnell you think the exact opposite at msnbc and and and it shows that it's not just about this corporate driver profit it's that there's a corporate class right and uh it's more important to be beholden to that corporate class and to be you know show fealty to that corporate class at least in the the business of television news then it is to make money is it just the corporate class or is it about making money one will facilitate the other i mean you might give up what uh a couple ratings points here but maybe your advertisers will come aboard to uh decide you know that you're you know fighting the good fight by getting rid of those left wingers off the television dial uh or maybe it's just that you'd rather put out news into the world that helps the cause of getting some large tax cut down the road so your personal interests outweigh the interest of uh the corporation in this case so i just think it's a really instructive kind of uh example uh of of how this this this idea and you know this is part of the board guide is that you know corporations are ruthless they'll go for their profit and we don't have to worry about them you know jacking up prices are doing all of these things because they they will they will compete uh because the free market the invisible hand of the free market will will will surely uh spread these benefits to everybody but it's not true yeah i was listening to bernie talk the other day i don't know what your politics are i suspect they're similar to mine and everything bernie says is spot on and i thought hmm here he is on meet the press the only way bernie would ever be allowed on meet the press is almost becoming president he was so undeniable that they had to put him on and when they put him on they couldn't shut him up because he almost became president and bernie sanders had a 25 year career prior to running for president where he probably appeared on on a sunday morning show uh two times right in that 25 years so uh that sort of answers your question is it the fairness doctrine that needs to be brought back or with with that fix it i doubt it right yeah i don't know if it's the fairness doctrine but it is about you know and look at the cinclair case for example so um like i said they wouldn't have been able to buy tribune if it weren't for uh changes in fcc law the already rolled back media ownership rules say that no company can own more than 39 percent can own uh stations nationwide that that broadcast the 39 percent of the country but then they came up with this thing that they called the u h f discount and the u h f discount was rolled back a long time ago and what it said was is that well if you have a u h f station you know what you remember u h f that was the the high stations on the dial that in tennessee well yeah in over the air television if you had a u h f station you could you can only count you can count half of the u h f stations you have towards this 39 percent number so the new fcc under trump's a handpicked chairman adjud pi reinstated the u h f discount in a time where practically everyone gets their television through a cable signal and there's no such thing as a u h f station that is high on the dial and inaccessible and and you know it it's ridiculous to bring back the u h f discount in this day and a but what that did for cinclair was it immediately brought their calculation of how much of the nation they cover from 39 percent to 25 percent so it immediately gave them more headroom to buy more stations and that's exactly what they did uh... first buying some stations in new york and then buying tribute now the assumption is now they've gotten so many stations that they're going to have to divest of some of them uh... however adjud pi is talking about relaxing media ownership rules even further the u h f discount was just the beginning of what he wants to do and uh... i suspect that that by the time the cinclair tribune deal closes that they won't have to divest of any of these stations they will come up with some other reason why uh... they can hold on to all of them and you just see the concentration happen further and further and further and further and further and when you put that into the perspective of cinclair made these deals to help trump get elected and now uh... trumps fcc is making policy to help cinclair buy more stations and concentrate their control over the television industry uh... you you begin to to understand why this is is so troubling and even a week last week where you know you had the firing of james comey and all of these uh... uh... you know human cry about uh... the office of the presidency and what's what's you know what's become of it i really thought the cinclair deal was was the the the the most ominous thing that we saw last week even more so than that fire you said the uh... c of cinclair road in the presidential motorcade and it reminds me of clear channel under the george w bush administration they're from san antonio and they were in bed with the bush administration thirty nine percent of the market share they have to have certain of yeah of households there's a percent of all households and is that the households that are available to watch television so i'd say let's say there are a hundred million households in the country they could only broadcast the areas where thirty nine million households could access them in theory but because of this u h f discount that changes that you know the calculation is is this sort of customized calculation that only they have to deal with right one of the things they do is they'll buy a couple of stations and run one to the ground they'll just turn it into a shell right to save money and because when fewer stations compete against these are owned by the american people well the airwaves are sure and and we we sell those airwaves and spectrum options all the time and that money goes into the u.s treasury but but we don't we don't put as many conditions on that purchase as we used to and and and you know the the idea that these stations operate in the public interest they're supposed to provide public sources of information part of the fourth estate part of you know creating a well-informed citizenry all of those things have have really gone out the window and and the public interest has been subsumed you know purely by commerce and uh... that that is a tremendous change that we've seen in this country over the last you know thirty forty years uh... and uh... you know look look who we've gotten from a public policy standpoint uh... after after that uh... change was made in the nation you have a piece about jonathan taplin's new book move fast and break things how facebook google and amazon cornered culture and undermine democracy mm-hmm do we need to break up facebook google and amazon i mean when you look at the i believe so yeah i i i do believe so and uh... you know google has has sort of reoriented themselves an hour called alphabet right and they have all these separate business lines under alphabet and so it's almost that alphabet has given us the tool by which to break up google into all these different business lines and i think the first thing you have to do with respect to google is sever the relationship between the search engine and the advertising outlet when google bought double click which was a big advertise online advertising uh... company uh... that was the beginning of the end right there because now you have a company where they control the platform they're a uh... what is known as a platform monopoly they control the platform for search engines virtually all search happens through google and they control the advertising so uh... if people are searching for a product or searching for for an entertainment option and the same company where they're searching you know the same storefront also manages as a gatekeeper who can advertise to those people uh... this is why the profits of google uh... in in terms of gross revenue have gone up uh... in a straight line year after year and and now are over seventy four billion dollars uh... they obviously have this massive concentration they they buy a a a company of week uh... uh... if they don't have it in house they they they purchase it uh... you see a company like amazon they also have our platform monopoly for e-commerce uh... they invite all these other companies to sell things on their platform in their store and these other companies have no other choice to reach people than to go on amazon and amazon collects all the data that is uh... uh... in terms of what people are purchasing on their website and they use that data to build competitors to these very people who are uh... coming on their platform to sell products uh... the same with google collecting the data of all of their customers and using that to sell it to advertisers that's that's actually as much as it is the advertising itself that's the source of the revenue is to sell these customized ads uh... based on everything you do online that and and facebook does this as well uh... to you know give premium uh... spots for advertisers that are dynamic that are based on they can be based on where you are walking in the in the neighborhood uh... that you live in and they can say hey there's here's a coupon for a pizza shop that you're about to hit in ten seconds because i know where you are because of your geolocation data on your google phone this is where we're getting to uh... and uh... you know what tafflin's book is really talking about is cultural he was the manager tour manager for the band uh... in the nineteen late nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies uh... he then became an executive uh... he worked with sony uh... he he's he's done he's produced films for people like martin scorsese and win-winters he has an insight into what happened in the music and movie business uh... in terms of when the google's and the facebook's and the amazon's of the world came in and what they've done to the ability for non superstar artists to make a living and he tells the story about leave on helm who was the great drummer for the band and how at the end of his life he had to give concerts at his house to pay for his medical bills uh... while you know corporate executives were making untold amounts of money off songs from the band so is that because what they do is they change the technology well he he describes a number of factors number one obviously is uh... you know uh... file sharing and apster and things like that uh... but it's also the fact that uh... google's youtube for example uh... uh... you know practically every song known to existence is streamable to touch of a button with uh... youtube and royalties from uh... this was an amazing statistic i can believe it in 2015 royalties from vinyl were higher as overall number than royalties from streaming uh... on places like youtube what do you mean by that i mean that that an artist that artists in the aggregate received more money as a percentage of vinyl record sales in twenty fifteen then they did from streaming streaming on youtube represents fifty two percent of all streaming uh... of music that is done and something like four or ten percent of the of the profits from streaming uh... they google has this tremendous power to digitize all of this information and then not pay the artist back even though uh... they're attaching ads to these uh... these pieces of music for example or or or you know movies or whatever uh... and and so the put the changes in technology as you describe it is is is exactly it but the the money does not flow through to the artists in streaming whether you're talking about spotify or whether you're talking about youtube or whether you're talking about uh... any of these sort of uh... next level kind of sources of income uh... and superstar artists can handle it they can make their own deals they can uh... come up with uh... ways innovative ways to uh... uh... make sure they're getting paid but below that level it becomes almost impossible to survive as an artist uh... in this day and age and uh... you know if you basically have we've returned to sort of a traveling troubadour kind of lifestyle where the only way that you can really uh... keep keep that living going is by playing endless gigs and uh... the the money if somebody is making money off of this music that's playing out there in the world it's just not the artists is there any way to audit google and find out what they're making off a leave on helm song well i mean we know that they're making little to nothing and and if you ask them uh... they'll say well this is what the market will bear and and uh... you know it's it the problem is that whereas you know tower records had a thousand cd's or something let's let's just use a round number well google has everything ever been digitized or ever been ever been put to down on a tape and so they don't have to take more than a tiny portion of each song and still make billions millions of dollars but you know for that artist out there that's competing with every other song in the known universe they're simply not going to make that kind of value it's spread out over everybody you know so what is tapplin what does he say has to be done i he talks about using the antitrust laws to break up these companies uh... to to make sure that your data uh... which is so lucrative i mean these are these he called these uh... resource extraction companies and it's it's not oil it data that's that's what they're making their money from and he says that that that should be able to be either freed or that should be uh... there should be opt-outs uh... people to not give up their privacy i i i know i've taken up a lot of your time but very quickly what is like i always hear about they're getting consumer data that's worth a fortune what do they have on me that would be worth anything they have every email you've ever typed they have every website you've ever visited they have every google search you've ever made your more you're more intimate with your computer that you are with anyone in your life you will tell you will ask to search for things on your your your google search that you would never say out loud they have a tremendous amount of information on you and what is that can be used for what you format for a particular advertiser that's looking for a particular type of person uh... to to you know move this particular message and marketing tour so uh... it's tremendously lucrative on the part of uh... these platform monopolies and let me just say one more thing that that tapplin points out and i think it's really really important he says that the patent that uh... uh... google has or facebook has for all of these different innovations should the weight bell labs was in the nineteen fifties uh... there was a famous court case in nineteen fifties uh... uh... eighteen t was a monopoly uh... they they ran all the phone service throughout the country and the justice department said all right well you can do that but you have this arm called bell labs where you're coming up with new innovations and ideas all the time all of the patents for bell labs what you're coming up with need to be able to be licensed by any company for a nominal fate and what this did was create the electronics industry in america it created uh... what eventually led to the internet in america it created all sorts of positive uh... benefits for society and it created the very competition that uh... inevitably led to uh... uh... you know what we see today and in many of these markets so if google if you did the same thing to google so they're trying to make these self-driving cars all right well the patents for that now can be licensed to any company and every company can have this self-driving car technology and they can uh... build a market and they can they can they can compete with one another on price and quality and and and quality of service and uh... google doesn't yet get to just hold on to that that is one of the key recommendations that tappan makes and i think it's a very important one well i'm kind of all over the map about the future my new hope is we have a guaranteed income and all of us are given a robot who goes out and does something makes a little money for us and then whatever the robot can't do the government fills in the gap and then the rest of us spend our waking hours consuming for the corporations instead of working for the corporations our job is to consume buy things eat things and convince ourselves that we're artists right i think uh... there there are there's almost two strains of thought on this there's the idea of a universal basic income and then there's the idea of a job guarantee and i guess what i've gone back to is what's the first thing we say to a child when you meet a child you say what do you want to be when you grow up i think there's an inherent value still in this in this country to the value of the work that you would have to get over in order to really reorient society in the way that you're talking about i also think that there's a lot of work to do you know the idea that robots are going to come on board and and you know this place all of the jobs in in the country is number one not born out by experience i mean we went from punch cards to the personal computer and somehow we still have these tremendous needs within the country we have infrastructure that's absolutely falling apart we have if you're going to put together self-driving cars you are going to have to engage in the biggest road project in the history of mankind to fix every road in america to make sure that it's available for use for a self-driving car because they're simply too haphazard we have we have roads that don't have the the lines painted on them we have we have you know in some more rural areas dirt roads gravel roads you're going to need to to you know make some of the infrastructure uniform in order to to ensure self-driving cars can actually operate and and if you do that you're talking about the largest infrastructure project in the history of mankind so i just don't believe that there's nothing left to do or that there will be nothing left to do in the next century let's say uh maybe after that we we can talk but i i just don't think that uh i i think that the a better idea is to say if you need a job the government is willing and able to step in to give you that job and that job and and and whatever you're going to be working toward will benefit the public at large uh whether it's a you know wpa style uh... uh... the kinds of things that we saw civilian conservation core and the new deal uh... war it's you know these construction and road projects that need to be done uh... to ensure that we have uh... you know are available to move around i agree with you a hundred percent and i blame the republicans they just refuse to invest properly in our economy it's a sickness their justification is rooted in fallacy that being said i do believe that a hundred years from now we will talk about america's puritanical sloth ethic and that we will celebrate doing nothing that people i i i'm all for it because it's it's a lot of what i do in my personal life but i'm i'm not sure that i mean look at it this way the the uh... one area of the country where you see uh... a lot of sloth and a lot of uh... uh... you know inability to uh... have a job is is in is in these areas that have this terrible opioid crisis and it creates this despair um... you know obviously if you're getting a universal basic income maybe that that you know that those idle hands don't necessarily go toward you know this this very tragic situation but i i fear that it does i fear that there's this need uh... in human nature and it's really a question about human nature right uh... for you know some project of self-worth to to point to and be able to say that that you are making a contribution and uh... if we get away from that uh... i'm i'm concerned about what that unleashes well you're a writer and nobody has a greater work ethic than a writer a writer is haunted every second of the day i should be right now i should be writing i should be productive should be writing i'm not writing i'm right but most people most people are very comfortable lying on their back playing a video game watching television thinking about food thinking about shopping i genuinely believe that jobs and the idea of work is a new idea it's maybe it's a couple hundred years old most americans given the choice will easily i i'd say most people i know would say if i had to go to work or if i had a sit and binge watch netflix i'll choose netflix that's what's being offered and we're getting into inception territory where people will take the drug or the the video but see i think that's a problem i do too but most people don't right well anyway you've been this is great this has been so much fun david dayan writes for two of my favorite periodicals the nation which you need to subscribe to and donate money to it and the intercept glenn greenwald's magnificent internet news gathering operation they do real investigative journalism real investigative journalism it's a great resource for just figuring out what's going on and david dayan you could not have been more generous with your time please come back absolutely thank you thank you