In our most recent Bluegrass Blues Podcast (Episode 33), Amy and I talked about the takeover of our news media by billionaire-owned corporations.

But this isn’t a new development. “Saturday Night Live” ran the following “Schoolhouse Rock” parody, not this year, not 10 years ago, not two decades ago, but way back in in the last century (the 1990s).

After it ran, it was never seen again on television. The corporate owners didn’t want people to know the news and information they were getting was controlled by big business, and our corporate overlords didn’t want to expose anything that would take away from their bottom line.

That was more than 30 years ago. Since then, it’s gotten worse with fewer billionaires in charge of more media outlets.

And this isn’t just at television stations.

Margaret Sullivan, who was the media columnist at The Washington Post when I was an editor there (no I never edited her stories, because she was in editorial, and I was in news), wrote this recently in her Substack:

The deep cutbacks at the media chain McClatchy were another blow to local news in many regions of the country. The company owns the Kansas City Star, the Charlotte Observer, the Sacramento Bee, the News & Observer in Raleigh, and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, among many others. 

The Miami Herald, which has done such important reporting on Jeffrey Epstein and his victims, is one of the hardest hit, as the bestselling author Carl Hiassen put it: “This is a death blow to the already skeletonized Miami Herald, once one of the country’s top newspapers.” The paper, according to the Times, cut more than 30 newsroom staff, more than a third of the editorial staff.

You can’t cover regional news without sufficient reporters, editors and visual journalists. This has happened almost everywhere and it is tragic, including for our democracy.

Now for people here in Kentucky, this may not seem to affect their lives, but we recently posted a piece on this blog on how McClatchy, which is owned by a hedge fund, has decimated the staff at the Lexington Herald Leader at a time when more … not less … news coverage is needed. The image at the top of this post is the Kentucky AFL-CIO’s response to the cutbacks.

We have elections coming up in November that will determine whether we survive as a democracy. But, as we are consistently reminded, many superrich media owners care more about profit than democracy and the First Amendment.