So, This Is How a Free Press Dies in America?
PBS and NPR have announced they're beginning to shut down. History shows us that fascism always comes for the free press first.
They didn’t jail the anchors. They sued them, fined them, stripped their media licenses, and forced them to sign contracts that came with censors built in if they wanted to keep their station.
They didn’t storm the public media stations with guns. They rewrote the rules until NPR was silent and PBS couldn’t pay the light bill.
And they didn’t need to break down the newsroom doors because in 2025, police shot reporters in the face on live television with rubber bullets, and no one in power even flinched.
The Ministry of Truth 2.0
This is not a metaphor. It started with Executive Order 14149… Trump’s so-called “free speech” order. But what it really did was unleash a loyalty purge on the media. It told federal agencies they could no longer speak the truth, and told billionaires they were free to remake the media in his image. Within months, public broadcasting was gutted.
The Associated Press was banned from the White House for refusing to use Trump’s made-up names for international bodies of water.
ABC and NBC were investigated by the Federal Communications Commission for committing the cardinal sin of believing equity belonged in journalism.
And PBS? NPR? The programs that have educated generations of Americans for free? They are heading towards extinction.
Yes, I am sad to announce that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) announced today, August 1st, that they’re winding down operations after Congress and the Trump administration successfully eliminated its federal funding.
Public media gave us facts, empathy, and imagination. That’s the kind of things authoritarian regimes hate. That’s why they were targeted and now have been defunded.
This wasn’t censorship with jackboots. This was censorship in a tailored suit, brokered in boardrooms and sanctioned by the state. It was fascism rewritten as compliance. Sanitized. Monetized. Legalized.
And the worst part? Most Americans still think the news is free.
The Executive Order That Opened the Floodgates
Executive Order 14149 was framed as a defense of free speech. In reality, it tied the government’s hands while giving Trump’s allies a license to punish dissent.
Signed on day one of his second term, the order banned federal agencies from “censoring” speech but never defined what censorship actually meant.
It warned against efforts to combat “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and “malinformation,” casting doubt on the very tools used to fight propaganda.
Disinformation experts called it what it was: a muzzle. You are trying to prevent us from telling the world you’re lying.
It didn’t protect the First Amendment. It weakened public health messaging, discouraged truth-telling, and gave federal employees a reason to stay silent. It told foreign adversaries the U.S. wouldn’t push back, and it told agencies that pushing for facts might now be a political risk.
While 14149 didn’t mention Project 2025 by name, it didn’t need to, the goals were the exact same listed right in Chapter 28:
Dismantle diversity, equity, and inclusion
Gag the administrative state
And allow the federal government to lie
It didn't fire the journalists. Not yet. It made it easier to punish them if they spoke out against the regime’s narrative
Thanks….. Biden?
Brendan Carr didn’t come out of nowhere. He’s been inside the FCC for over a decade. First under Ajit Pai, cozying up to telecom giants, and rising through the ranks as the agency’s reliable deregulation guy. Trump appointed him to the Commission in 2017.
By 2025, he was Chair, with a mandate to remake the FCC into a weapon. And he was ready.
But here’s the part that should make every Democrat lose sleep… Biden helped put him there because he wanted to remain pragmatic.
Let this be a lesson: pragmatism has no place in the world when you’re enabling fascists. F*ck your quorum.
(Please excuse my language guys; I’m sorry).
This is what pragmatic centrism looks like in a burning democracy. You hand power to the people who want to crush civil liberties — and pretend it’s bipartisanship.
In 2023, President Joe Biden re-nominated Carr for another five-year term. Why? To avoid a partisan fight. To “govern responsibly.” To keep the FCC fully staffed. Carr sailed through confirmation. And then, like clockwork, turned around and used that authority to dismantle everything the FCC was built to protect.
And Carr didn’t waste the gift. He came out swinging.
He revived “news distortion” complaints that had been dismissed under the previous FCC Chair. He launched new investigations into legacy outlets like NBC, CBS, and ABC. He weaponized DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion programs) as proof of “ideological corruption.”
Ideological Corruption. Let that sit with you.
Now, television networks were forced to eliminate them or risk losing their licenses. Others were strong-armed into hiring “bias monitors” who report directly to corporate presidents about left-wing bias.
It’s not that Carr sees bias everywhere. It’s that he’s redefining the term to mean “anything that isn’t Trump-aligned.”
This is what happens when you give a movement committed to authoritarianism the keys to the regulatory state. This isn’t just about one commissioner. It’s about a system that empowered him. About a government that legitimized him about a party that knew better and confirmed him anyway.
Brendan Carr wrote the FCC chapter in Project 2025. No, literally. He was never hiding what he planned to do. He told us what he was going to do, and now he’s doing it.
The Billionaires Who Own the News and Why That’s Bad
The media crackdown didn’t come out of thin air. It was the result of a system already captured by billionaires who own the airwaves and shape the narrative.
Brian Roberts, worth $1.6 billion, runs Comcast, which controls NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, and Telemundo.
Rupert Murdoch, sitting on $23 billion, owns Fox News (trouble in paradise?), the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post. Donald Newhouse, worth $14.4 billion, controls Advance Publications parent of Condé Nast and part-owner of Reddit.
Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post, with a net worth over $230 billion.
Patrick Soon-Shiong holds the Los Angeles Times with his $11 billion fortune.
And then there’s David Ellison, son of Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison, who gained control of CBS through the Skydance–Paramount merger, blessed by Carr’s FCC only after they got rid of Colbert, and agreed to obey the regime.
These men didn’t buy media to support journalism. They bought it to protect their interests, control information, and ensure that any threat to their power and money could be neutralized. Like public media. Like independent journalists. Like NPR & PBS. Like me. Like anyone here on this platform.
For now, it’s PBS & NPR, but what makes you think they’ll stop there?
So, when Carr demanded compliance, these networks didn’t resist. They bent. PBS and NPR didn’t have billionaires behind them, so they were defunded instead. This wasn’t just political retaliation.
It was capitalism doing what it does best… selling out the truth for a seat at the table.
They Didn’t Just Silence the Press. They Shot It.
By summer 2025, the censorship wasn’t subtle anymore. It wasn’t just about pulling funding or yanking licenses. It was boots, batons, and bullets.
During the June immigration protests in Los Angeles, the government shot rubber bullets directly at the journalists causing severe injuries.
Over two dozen reporters were detained nationwide that month alone many without charges. The message was unmistakable.
If you film what we don’t want you to see, we will make you bleed for it.
This is not new. In fact, it was textbook. Textbook fascism.
In Nazi Germany, Joseph Goebbels ran the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. He banned opposition newspapers, jailed dissenters, and controlled every printed word.
In the Soviet Union, Glavlit enforced strict censorship through surveillance and disappearances. In Mussolini’s Italy, journalists were arrested for using the wrong tone.
In the U.S., McCarthyism used fear to silence voices, blacklist actors, and jail political opponents under the Espionage and Sedition Acts.
They banned the Associated Press in the spring. They defunded PBS and NPR. They shut down diversity in newsrooms. Removed the press from the White House. They replaced regulation with loyalty tests in the government, and when that wasn’t enough, they brought out the guns.
This isn’t just a political project. It’s a cultural purge. A slow erasure of every institution that doesn’t serve the new regime. And journalists? They’re just next in line.
Because fascism always fears the lens of the camera. The notebook. The archive. Or the witness. And in 2025, America shoots the witness in the face.
Fascism is Capitalism in Decay.
Note From the Author:
If you made it this far, you already know this isn’t about headlines. It’s about paying attention before the window to do so disappears. I write to document what’s happening in real time. I investigate where I can, but I also write like this (fast, emotional, unfiltered) because some things shouldn’t wait for an editor.
If you want to stay aware, subscribe for free. If you want to help me keep going, a paid subscription helps fund the work I do across all of it. The research, the public records and the stories that keep getting missed or buried or spun.
I don’t work for a media outlet. I don’t have a boss. I have a browser full of documents, a computer that doesn’t have nearly enough memory, and a need to call it what it is.
The "free" press died during the Reagan administration when Reagan's FCC voted to abandon the "Fairness Doctrine" in broadcasting. Then Congress attempted to codify the doctrine into law and Reagan vetoed the bill. At that point it became the "Who has the most money" doctrine.
Dissent in Bloom, thank you for this powerful piece. The anger it evokes is righteous and necessary. You have laid out the 'how' with chilling precision.
Your parallels to 20th-century fascism are accurate and important. I believe this also perfectly mirrors an even older playbook: that of the British East India Company (EIC). The EIC wasn't just a company; it was the original Corporate State. It fused its commercial power with state power to protect its business model, which was the mass-scale looting of a nation. It had to crush the local press and silence dissent because you cannot conduct a heist in broad daylight.
That is what we are witnessing now. The defunding of PBS and NPR and the neutering of corporate media through FCC "investigations" is not just a political purge; it's a business requirement for the Financial Nexus. They need to control the information battlespace to prevent the public from seeing the methodical asset-stripping of the country. The narrative about "ideological corruption" is the Great Distraction, designed to make us fight horizontally over culture while they loot us vertically.
They aren't just silencing the press. They are silencing the witnesses to their crime. This blatant move shows their vulnerability. They fear the truth so much they have to burn the institutions that report it. It proves the fundamental conflict isn't just political; it's economic. The ultimate act of resistance, then, is to build things they can neither buy nor silence.
Keep up the vital work.
Ethan Faulkner
Common Sense Rebel