Have I mentioned lately that media consolidation is bad and people who care about an informed electorate and democratic integrity should fight to restore federal media consolidation limits illegally destroyed by the Trump administration and FCC boss Brendan Carr?
Anyway, there’s a new Alex Gibney documentary coming out about Elon Musk that takes him to task for being a white supremacist far right wing con man with a head full of conspiracy theories and recreational ketamine.
It purports to take a closer look at all of Musk’s greatest hits, whether it’s the rampant product misrepresentation resulting in mass human deaths, his tendency to take endless credit for the work of actual engineers, his descent into white supremacist madness, or his time at DOGE spent killing millions of people by destroying government programs he wasn’t empathic or smart enough to understand.
Obviously Elon Musk isn’t excited about this and despite endless claims that he’s a “free speech absolutist,” has already threatened Gibney with legal action. At the same time, it appears that Comcast NBC Universal executives are scared of upsetting Trump and Musk, and as a result are having second thoughts about releasing the documentary in the U.S. this fall:
“The company has not dated the movie, has not communicated with the filmmaking team about its plans, and generally appears to be rethinking the release of a project that it once showed high enthusiasm for but is now politically sensitive for parts of the Trump administration.
Two people with knowledge of the dynamic who were not authorized to speak publicly tell The Hollywood Reporter that while a final decision has not been made and that several outcomes were possible, they believed that Universal would ultimately decide against releasing the film and return rights to the movie to filmmakers.”
Very courageous. Did I mention that media consolidation is bad?
You’re seeing this kind of fecklessness all across our billionaire-owned consolidated corporate press. Jeff Bezos’ Amazon was happy to release low-quality agitprop about the president’s wife, but backed away from releasing the Sam Altman film Artificial shortly after it got into business with OpenAI. Larry Ellison is trying to buy CNN and CBS to push them toward even lazier, pro-oligarch propaganda.
Comcast/NBC/Universal has been lobbying the FCC for years to eliminate media consolidation limits preventing the big four major networks from merging. They’re also keen to get regulatory approval for what will likely be a major sale of some or all of its spun-off TV assets. And, of course, Comcast executives just generally love deregulation, tax cuts, and the steady evisceration of federal consumer protection.
This particular film will likely be fine. People increasingly despise Elon Musk and are eager to watch it. It will not only land somewhere else, it’s likely the filmmakers will be paid both a kill fee and a second time for distribution rights. But other, more challenging projects speaking truth to power might not have the same luck in an environment so overtly hostile to speaking truth to wealth and power.
Republicans and corporations are dead set on dominating what’s left of corporate media to wage a protracted propaganda war against informed consensus and democracy itself. Democrats, meanwhile, have proven too incompetent, captured, or feckless to have any sort of meaningful media reform strategy any time in the last quarter century (spoiler: it starts with consistently enforcing antitrust law).
That desperately needs to change or what’s left of the American experiment is cooked.