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The Digital Media Oligarchy: Who Owns Online News? 

When Ben Bagdikian, an esteemed journalist and early FAIR contributor, published his groundbreaking book The Media Monopoly in 1983, he painted a troubling picture of US media consolidation, reporting that 50 corporations controlled the media business. With each reprint, that number dwindled (FAIR.org, 6/1/87). When FAIR replicated his analysis in 2011 (Extra!, 10/11), it stood at 20.

Now, over 40 years after the initial release of The Monopoly Media, the media landscape has transformed drastically. Even Bagdikian’s later editions, written at the dawn of the internet, could not fully anticipate how profoundly digital technology would reconfigure the media oligarchy.

“News” is increasingly synonymous with online news. Over half the US public (56%) say that they “often” get news through their digital devices—compared to less than 1 in 3 (32%) who often get news from TV, 1 in 9 from radio and only 1 in 14 from print publications like newspapers or magazines (Pew, 9/25/25).

Which raises the question: Who owns the leading online news sites—and, by extension, largely shapes the ideas and information that reach millions of Americans?

Each month, Press Gazette, a London-based magazine for the journalism industry, ranks the top 50 news websites in the US in order of monthly visits, based on data from the marketing firm Similarweb. FAIR tallied Press Gazette’s results over a 12-month span, from December 2024 to November 2025, to get a figure for total US visits to major news sites over that period: 45.6 billion.

More than half of those visits, nearly 25.5 billion, went to news sites controlled by just seven families or corporate entities.

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Texas Democrat Running for U.S. Senate Under Fire for Allegedly Making Racist Comment About Black Colleague

James Talarico is a Democrat rep. in Texas who is running for U.S. Senate, but he is not the only one vying for that nomination.

Jasmine Crockett is running for it as well, and so is another black Democrat named Colin Allred.

Talarico may have already nuked his campaign, because he allegedly made some questionable comments about Allred. Isn’t it funny when Democrats succumb to their own attack tactics?

FOX 4 in Texas reports:

Colin Allred blasts Senate hopeful James Talarico over alleged ‘mediocre’ comment

A dispute over alleged racial comments could impact voter preferences in the upcoming Democratic Senate primary.

On Monday afternoon, former congressman Colin Allred blasted Senate candidate James Talarico for comments the senate hopeful reportedly said about his Black former political opponent.

“I understand that James Talarico had the temerity and audacity to say to a Black woman that he had signed up to run against a mediocre black man, meaning me,” Allred said in a social media video.

“This man should not be our nominee for Senate. I was not going to get involved in this race, but don’t come for me unless I send for you, OK James? And keep my name out of your mouth.”

“This man should not be our nominee for Senate. I was not going to get involved in this race, but don’t come for me unless I send for you, OK James? And keep my name out of your mouth.”

TikTok influencer Morgan Thompson laid out the claims from a private conversation she had with Talarico last month, saying he told her he signed up to run against “a mediocre Black man,” referring to Allred, and “not a formidable, intelligent Black woman” referring to his current opponent, Jasmine Crockett.

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Chuck Schumer Lambasted After Comparing the SAVE Act to Jim Crow

The modern American left has an ugly habit of reaching for the biggest historical trauma it can find when it wants to shut down a debate.

Slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, fascism — nothing is too grave or too blood-soaked to be repurposed as a rhetorical club.

This isn’t just asinine and lazy. It’s fundamentally corrosive to the republic.

Like, for instance, when leftist lawmakers treat colorblind, baseline election rules as moral equivalents of racial terror, they’re cheapening history and poisoning public trust. Worse, they teach voters that words like “oppression” and “racism” are just props in a hackneyed, partisan script, not descriptions of real and specific evils.

And yet the tactic persists, which tells you everything you need to know about the incentives at work. Outrage travels faster than argument, and historical guilt is easier to weaponize than facts.

That brings us to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who recently decided that the Safeguarding American Voter Eligibility Act belongs in the same moral category as Jim Crow. Seriously.

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America’s Vaunted “Experts”: Often Wrong but Never in Doubt?

In our time we’ve traded wise men for experts — Confucius for the credentialed, Aquinas for academicians, Democritus for the degreed. Consequently, we don’t make our ancestors’ bush-league mistakes, such as the Romans using lead pipes, drilling holes in people’s heads to treat mental derangement, or selling radium-laced candy and water.

We make different bush-league mistakes. In fact, says Rob Long, pondering all the recent decades’ blunders, “you might start to wonder if anyone knows anything.”

“Here’s what I mean,” explains Long, a television writer and producer opining at the Washington Examiner:

COVID masks, mortgage-backed securities, weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, carbs, red wine, voter turnout, lard, phonics, and Pluto. (Among others.) Smart people — and I knew some of the folks who were involved in the home finance catastrophe of 2007, and let me assure you that they were smart — seem to be making a lot of costly and dangerous mistakes. It often seems like we’re living through an Age of Blunder.

Here’s a noncontroversial example from history: say what you like about the brutal Stalinist regime of the (thankfully late) German Democratic Republic, but they were pretty good about spying on their own citizens. … They knew everything there was to know about the German Democratic Republic except that it was about to collapse. Which was the one thing they really needed to know. Talk about the Age of Blunder!

How Expert Are They?

After providing a few more examples, Long discussed the recent blizzard that struck New York and elsewhere. He said that he and some friends were discussing beforehand whether it would materialize. “Experts,” ya know? But they were right on this occasion, he stated.

Short-term weather, however, can be predicted with decent accuracy. But on a related note, there’s the following.

A generation ago, in 2000, climate scientist Dr. David Viner stated that within just a handful of years, snowfall will be “a very rare and exciting event. Children just aren’t going to know what snow is.”

Now, Viner was talking about Great Britain — which was hit by a “devastating snowstorm” just last year. But then there’s the reality here in the Colonies. Only a week ago, parts of my southern N.Y. county got buried under 17 inches of global warming.

Oh, and if you think nothing could be finer than poking fun at Viner, know that he’s hardly alone. The late Professor Walter E. Williams illustrated this beautifully in his 2017 piece “Environmentalists’ Wild Predictions.”

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France’s Raid on X Opens New Front in Europe’s War Over Online Speech

French prosecutors staged a morning raid at the Paris offices of social media platform X, part of a criminal investigation coordinated with Europol.

The operation, launched in 2025, targets allegations ranging from the alleged distribution of sexual deepfakes to algorithmic manipulation.

The cybercrime division in Paris is exploring whether X’s automated systems may have been used in an “organized structure” to distort data or suppress information.

The alleged offenses are as follows:

  • Denial of crimes against humanity (Holocaust denial)
  • Fraudulent extraction of data from an ⁠automated data processing system ​by an organized group
  • Falsification of the operation ‌of ‌an automated data processing system by an organized group
  • Defamation of a person’s image (deepfakes of ​sexual nature, including minors)
  • Operating of an illegal online platform by an organized group

Prosecutors have now summoned Elon Musk and former CEO Linda Yaccarino for questioning in April. “Summons for voluntary interviews on April 20, 2026, in Paris have been sent to Mr. Elon Musk and Ms. Linda Yaccarino, in their capacity as de facto and de jure managers of the X platform at the time of the events,” the office said.

Yaccarino, who left in mid-2025, might find herself reliving the company’s most volatile months, when X faced regulatory crossfire across the continent for refusing to comply with what it called political censorship demands.

The case actually began with two complaints in January 2025, including one from French lawmaker Eric Bothorel, who accused X of narrowing “diversity of voices and options” after Musk’s takeover.

Bothorel cited “personal interventions” in moderation decisions, a line that seemed more about ideology than algorithms.

As the investigation grew, prosecutors took interest in Grok, X’s AI system, which allegedly produced “Holocaust denial content” and “sexual deepfakes.” The Paris prosecutor’s office soon announced it was examining “biased algorithms.”

Musk called the whole affair a “politically-motivated criminal investigation,” and considering Europe’s recent appetite for speech regulation, it’s not a stretch to see why he’d think that.

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Chicago Nurse Fired After His Viral Video Appearing to Call on Fellow Nurses to Target ICE Agents, Let Them ‘Bleed Out’

Yet another nurse has taken to social media to wish harm on those they disagree with.

LibsofTikTok has been chronicling the disturbing trend by those who are supposed to be a source of comfort and care during life’s most vulnerable moments.

In the latest example, a nurse, identified as working in the Chicago area, took to social media to post a vile challenge to his fellow nurses to target ICE agents.  He also suggested that openly MAGA nurses should be fired and have their license revoked.

“Remember how much power nurses have in this country? One of our own was just murdered in the street. So we might be able to stop this somehow. Thoughts?”

He then shared a post of another user who said, “Good morning. Did you know most ICE agents don’t wear their plates properly? I’ve seen it.”

He responded to the comment with, “You know, the type of ICU nurse I was, I was a cardiac ICU nurse. And I did a lot A lot of time, lots of hours, holding on a groin that wouldn’t stop bleeding.”

“Let me tell you what, that femoral artery, those veins in the legs. I can’t remember. It’s late in my shift, okay? I know it. I’m tired. Anyway, the vasculature in the leg, it really bleeds. It bleeds well. Someone could bleed out very quickly from that. Probably a couple of minutes really.”

With absolutely no self-awareness or sense of irony, he then suggested MAGA nurses are unsafe to take care of people.

“I would really suggest to all the health care organizations out there that if you have knowingly MAGA employees, that you terminate them. They’re not safe people to take care of other people. You can’t have people who have open racism in the health care system. I mean, we already know that exists because if you’re a black woman in health care, you know. But if you’re openly MAGA at this point and you’re supporting the murdering of people, you don’t deserve to be in health care.”

“You should have your license removed. That’s so disappointing. I remember working with them. So annoying.”

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Pandemics for Profit: Jeffrey Epstein Was a Pandemic Power Broker

In the sordid underbelly of elite philanthropy, where altruism masks avarice and power brokers play god with global crises, the Jeffrey Epstein files have detonated a revelation that should outrage every thinking citizen. Buried amid the salacious headlines of Epstein’s depravity lies a damning blueprint: a two-decade financial colossus engineered to commodify pandemics, turning human suffering into a gilded revenue stream. Offshore vaccine slush funds, automated reinsurance payouts, and donor-advised facades masquerading as charity weren’t hasty reactions to COVID-19; they were premeditated mechanisms, forged in the fires of foresight by Bill Gates, JPMorgan Chase, and their convicted intermediary, the infamous Jeffrey Epstein. 

The DOJ’s release puts the smoking-gun documents in plain view, and they don’t whisper. They just scream complicity in a system where “preparedness” is just a polite word for predation.

This isn’t mere coincidence or benign planning, but a calculated hijacking of public health for private empire-building. As Sayer Ji meticulously dissects in his exhaustive Substack investigation, “The Epstein Files Illuminate a 20-Year ‘Architecture Behind Pandemics’” as a business model. With Bill Gates at the Centre of the network, the evidence paints a portrait of institutional rot. Ji’s piece, a forensic tour de force drawing on emails, agreements, and texts from 2011 to 2019, exposes how pandemics were pre-packaged as an asset class, with Gates’ fingerprints everywhere. For those unwilling or unable to plunge into the 5,000-plus words of granular detail, here’s the unvarnished truth: this was no noble quest to save humanity; it was a rigged game where the house, Gates and his cronies always win.

Let’s cut through the euphemisms. In 2011, JPMorgan’s top brass didn’t consult ethicists or public health experts for their Gates-tied donor-advised fund. Instead, they chose to grovel before Epstein, a registered sex offender fresh from his slap-on-the-wrist conviction. Emails reveal him dictating the architecture: “additional money for vaccines,” an “offshore arm, especially for vaccines,” and perpetual structures with arm’s-length profit laundering. Epstein wasn’t a bit player; he was the maestro, coaching executives on Gates’ “frustrations” and insisting vaccines be the seductive hook. Why? Because in this twisted calculus, vaccines aren’t lifesavers, they’re capital magnets, de-risked by philanthropic guarantees that socialise losses while privatising gains. The Global Health Investment Fund (GHIC), unveiled in 2013, promised 5-7% returns on drugs and vaccines, backed by Gates’ 60% principal shield. Public money absorbs the flops, and all that was left for the elites to do was to pocket the windfalls.

By 2017, the system had calcified. Internal emails reveal “pandemic” listed as a core category for Donor-Advised Funds (DAF), treated as a permanent, profit-generating vertical on par with energy. Epstein’s messages show him placing people into Gates’ inner office, Boris Nikolic’s venture fund Biomatics Capital, Merck’s vaccine operations, and Swiss Re’s pandemic reinsurance programs, where “parametric triggers” automatically pay out when a pandemic is declared. Simulation exercises were no civic duty—they were career currency, a credential in an insular, self-reinforcing network. Gates’ bgC3 office treated “strain pandemic simulation” alongside defense technology initiatives, while Epstein continued funnelling personnel and even offering connections to the incoming Trump administration. Meanwhile, the International Peace Institute’s 2015 pandemic convenings were formally coordinated with Gates but privately routed through Epstein’s social channels, including dinners with IPI’s president Rød-Larsen.

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Fraud as Policy: The Incentives of the Modern Welfare State

The scale of fraud uncovered in recent years has exposed how government transfer programs function, even as meaningful public or legislative reckoning remains largely absent. What began as a series of pandemic-related scandals has revealed something broader and more troubling: large-scale fraud is not an anomaly within the modern welfare state. The federal government, taxpayers, lose between $233 billion and $521 billion annually to fraud, based on data from 2018 to 2022.

It is a predictable outcome of systems that distribute vast sums of money without market discipline, rely on third-party payment structures, and diffuse responsibility across layers of bureaucracy. As Murray Rothbard argued, welfare gains can only be demonstrated through voluntary exchange, while state transfer programs necessarily rely on coercion and therefore cannot be said, in economic terms, to increase social welfare, only to redistribute resources while masking loss.

Minnesota provides one of the clearest illustrations of this dynamic, especially since a private reporter revealed massive fraud in the state at the end of last year. In the Feeding Our Future scandal, federal prosecutors alleged that more than $250 million intended for child nutrition was siphoned through non-profit organizations that billed the government for meals that were never served. A federal judge has since ordered the forfeiture of more than $52 million connected to the scheme, underscoring both the scale of the losses and the failure of oversight mechanisms designed to prevent them. The case involved federal funds administered by state agencies and distributed through private entities, with little meaningful verification before reimbursement.

This was not an isolated incident. Prosecutors in Minnesota have charged defendants in a wide range of fraud schemes involving pandemic unemployment benefits, economic injury disaster loans, autism-related health services, transportation programs, and other federally funded initiatives. These cases mirror prosecutions across the country. In Texas, defendants have been sentenced for multi-million-dollar disaster relief fraud. In Massachusetts, companies have paid millions to resolve allegations of PPP loan fraud and emergency rental assistance schemes. Similar cases appear regularly in Department of Justice press releases, spanning Medicare covid testing fraud, SNAP abuse, PPP and EIDL loan abuse, unemployment insurance fraud, and false claims against federal health care benefit programs.

Nationally, the numbers are staggering. Government watchdogs have estimated that fraud in pandemic unemployment programs alone may exceed $100 billion. Well over 200 billion was lost to fraudulent PPP and EIDL claims. Medicare billing schemes tied to covid testing generated billions in false claims. These figures do not represent marginal losses. They reflect a system operating at a scale where fraud becomes organized, repeatable, and profitable.

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Secret whistleblower complaint against Tulsi Gabbard finally shared after eight-month standoff

A secret whistleblower complaint against Tulsi Gabbard that had been held in a locked safe has finally been shared with Congress after an eight-month standoff. 

Inspector General Christopher Fox, the intelligence community watchdog, on Monday evening carried by hand the highly classified allegation to a select group of lawmakers, according to CBS News. 

The document was reviewed on a ‘read-and-return’ basis by members and staff of the Gang of Eight, the small bipartisan group who oversee America’s spy agencies. 

The whistleblower complaint filed against the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) by a staffer in May alleged that a highly classified report was deliberately suppressed for political reasons.

The complainant also claimed that an intelligence agency’s legal office failed to refer a potential crime to the Justice Department, also for political reasons.

No other details of the whistleblower complaint were made public as Fox stressed only one previous case required such tightly controlled disclosure to Congress.

Fox told lawmakers in a letter approved for public release on Tuesday that the complaint was ‘administratively closed’ by his predecessor in June and no further action was taken. 

‘If the same or similar matter came before me today, I would likely determine that the allegations do not meet the statutory definition of “urgent concern,”‘ Fox wrote.

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Ultra-powerful NYC lawyer grovels over appalling email he sent Jeffrey Epstein asking predator to get his nepo son work on Woody Allen movie

Brad Karp, chairman of major law firm Paul Weiss, said he regretted his interactions with Jeffrey Epstein after asking the disgraced financier to help get his son a job. 

Karp worked for private equity investor Leon Black for several years and negotiated a series of ‘dispute fees’ between Black and Epstein. 

The latest file drop from the Department of Justice featured dozens of emails between Karp and Epstein – including the lawyer asking Epstein for help getting his Cornell-graduate son an unpaid job working for Hollywood’s rich and famous. 

In June 2016, Karp pitched his son, David, to aid Woody Allen with an ‘upcoming film project.’ He wrote in the email, which was exposed in the Department of Justice’s files drop: ‘He certainly doesn’t need to be paid and he’s a really good, talented kid.’ 

‘I will ask, of course,’ Epstein responded. 

The powerful lawyer was invited to multiple dinners at Epstein’s New York City mansion – and gushed about how he had such a great time that ‘I’ll never forget.’ 

In a statement obtained by the New York Times, Paul Weiss issued an apology on Karp’s behalf. 

‘Mr. Karp attended two group dinners in New York City and had a small number of social interactions by email, all of which he regrets,’ it read. 

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