Transcription
Ranking Member Booker, Ranking Member Booker, and the senators that are here, thank you for the invitation to testify today about the impending merger between Paramount Sky Dance and Warner Brothers Discovery and the threat this mega transaction poses to American democracy.
My name is Katie Fang. I'm a trial lawyer, an independent journalist, and a media commentator with extensive experience covering the intersection of law, media, politics, and democratic accountability. I'm here today not as a partisan advocate, but as someone who spent her career both inside the courtrooms and inside the newsrooms, and as someone who understands what this kind of consolidation does to journalism and to the public's ability to hold power to account.
This proposed merger is one of the most consequential media consolidations in decades. This hearing must examine it closely because the stakes extend far beyond shareholder returns and content libraries. This merger will reshape the information landscape that hundreds of millions of Americans depend upon to understand their world, their government, and their rights for generations to come.
I am privileged to appear before you today as a senior adviser for democracy defenders action. I am free to speak my mind without worrying about that the federal government and its corporate oligarch allies will threaten my livelihood should I report critically on their activities. I'm also acutely aware of how many of my former colleagues in mainstream media do not share the freedom to express their honest assessments about this administration and the behavior of convicted felon Donald Trump.
When a handful of billionaires and giant corporations control what Americans watch, hear, read, and ultimately discuss, when they exert undue influence on where those discussions are steered, that is when freedom of speech becomes something closer to a branding exercise than a constitutional guarantee. That is the danger of media consolidation.
Our founding fathers did not put freedom of the press in the First Amendment because they thought journalism would be profitable. They didn't enshrine the right to freedom of speech because they assumed everybody would be polite, rational, or even truthful. They did it because they understood something essential and sacriinct. Democracy cannot survive if powerful people get to decide which facts are allowed to exist and what version of the truth they want to pedal for profits.
I have worked for years in legacy media as a legal correspondent, legal analyst, and as an anchor and host at then MSNBC. I've witnessed the chilling effects that consolidation exerts on editorial independence. When executives fear that aggressive reporting might antagonize a parent company's business partners, stories disappear or are rewritten to soften the edges. When newsrooms shrink under cost cutting mandates driven by corporate restructurings and merger debt loads, investigative units, the ones that hold government and corporations accountable, they are the first to go. I don't speak from theory. I speak from experience.
I left MSNBC on May 1st of 2025, not because of a specific on-air incident, but because I understood that democracy was facing an existential threat of unprecedented proportions, and that free speech was going to be one of the most effective weapons against autocracy. But that free speech was especially under attack by a presidential administration led by a vindictive bully who didn't hesitate for a second to target the media and call them enemies of the people simply because he didn't like their reporting.
To add insult to injury, the broader corporate environment had rapidly begun to evolve into one where media executives were acutely sensitive to tone and content in the wake of Trump's return to power. That sensitivity was not accidental. FCC chairman Willing Trump lackey Brendan Carr just weeks after Trump was sworn into office the second time sent threatening letters to NBC, ABC, CBS and their parent companies Comcast, Paramount and Disney demanding detailed disclosures about those corporations quote promotion of invidious forms of discrimination and violation of FCC regulations and civil rights laws through their DEI and diversity policies and programming. The message was painfully clear. You either bend the knee or face regulatory consequences and the networks capitulated.
Corporate leadership operating under that constant drum beatat of regulatory pressure becomes riskadverse in ways that are invisible to the public but felt immediately by the journalists. I could not on a legacy media platform say what I freely say today. That some of Trump's executive orders pursue the ethnic cleansing of this country while prioritizing a white Christian nationalist agenda. That a convicted felon whose name appears more than 38,000 times in counting in the Epstein files is unfit physically and mentally for the Oval Office. These hard and truthful things must be said loudly and without apology. But the voices willing to do so in legacy media are increasingly being cowed into silence as corporate executives grow more and more fearful of the Trump administration's wrath.
It is this experience that compels me to urge this body to scrutinize this paramount Warner Brothers merger with the rigor that the American public deserves. We don't need to speculate about what an Ellison controlled news looks like. We're living it in real time at CBS. Since the Ellison's installed Bari Weiss as a network's editorial leader, they have explicitly steered the network toward a more conservative editorial line. For instance, 60 Minutes, one of the gold standards of American investigative journalism, temporarily sheld a segment on the SECOT detention facility in El Salvador, where the Trump administration has been deporting immigrants.
The Supreme Court recognized in 1945 in Associated Press versus United States that the First Amendment's guarantee of a free press means nothing if private concentrations of power can achieve the same suppressive effect as government censorship. What we face today is precisely that convergence. a federal government using its regulatory leverage through FCC license threats, merger approval authority, and multi-million dollar legal settlements to steer media ownership towards families it trusts and away from editorial voices it does not. When the government shapes who owns the press and the press shapes what the public knows, then the First Amendment has been has not been violated in form. The First Amendment has been gutted in fact.
When too few companies own too much of the media, editorial independence becomes fragile. News divisions that once had the independence to challenge power become subsidiaries buried under entertainment conglomerates that care more about quarterly earnings than constitutional values. Maybe no executive ever says that quiet part out loud. Maybe there's no smoking gun email that says, "Kill the story." But human beings are more subtle than that, right? careers are made and destroyed through suggestion, through silence, through many a raised eyebrow. And so that result is journalists and they start asking themselves questions they should never have to ask. Can I report aggressively on this company if our parent corporation has a business relationship with them? Can I criticize this politician if the CEO is looking for access to the White House? Can I pursue this story if it's going to upset our shareholders?
Those are not hypothetical concerns. We already have a realworld example of Paramount and the Ellison's willingness to attack journalists who criticized them. Just yesterday, Paramount pulled all of its advertising from the ankler simply because its editorial director and chief columnist, Richard Rushfield, carried a bag of buttons in support of the block the merger campaign. Those are the corrosive realities of consolidation.
I have reported on first amendment law for years. I have covered the cases. I've interviewed the litigants. I've explained that doctrine to millions of viewers and I can tell you that the framers designed the free press clause precisely because that they understood that a concentrated power whether held by a king, a parliament or a corporation acting in coordination with a government poses an existential threat to self-governance. What this merger enables is not a hypothetical version of that threat. It's an operational one.
Every time we permit a major media consolidation to proceed without genuine safeguards, we shrink the universe of independent editorial voices. We reduce the number of institutions that are capable of holding power to account. We make the information ecosystem more fragile, more susceptible to top- down pressure, and more vulnerable to the kind of political capture that ends careers and kills stories.
In conclusion, the First Amendment doesn't exist to make life easier for med media executives that are trying to squeeze another few cents out of a stock price. It exists to protect the messy, noisy, frustrating, essential business of self-government. It exists to protect dissent and to protect criticism. It exists to protect the ability of ordinary people to challenge the powerful.
This body has an opportunity and I would submit the obligation to ensure that the Paramount Sky Dance Warner Brothers Discovery merger does not proceed without robust enforcable conditions that protect the public interest, preserve local news, safeguard independent filmmakers and creative workers and defend the independence of journalists who serve the American people each and every day. This is no time to bow down to a tyrant. Do not give into the lies. Don't give into the fear. Hold on to the truth.
And because I am a journalist, I'm gonna break news. An American jury has just returned a verdict, finding that ticket master live nation illegally monopolized the ticketing market. That is the American people that are speaking out that they don't want mega companies having a strangle hold on industry spaces. It has been a privilege to testify today and I look forward to answering any questions that you may have.