Consolidation Makes Outlets Vulnerable

President Trump has routinely sought to influence the business dealings of U.S. media companies, including Netflix and Paramount’s fight over the future of Warner Bros. Rodney Benson, author of the book “How Media Ownership Matters,” has argued there’s a word for this trend: media capture. On today’s show, Benson joins Kimberly to explain how the phenomenon works and why he believes it’s playing out in the U.S. Plus, we’ll smile about the wonders of the cosmos.

Here’s everything we talked about today:

• "Trump World Is Picking Sides in the Battle for Warner Bros." from The Wall Street Journal
• "Is the US Media Captured?" From Columbia Journalism Review
• "Trump's Year of Media Capture" from Rolling Stone
• "Inside Bari Weiss’s Hostile Takeover of CBS News" from The New Yorker
• "Rodney Benson on the Value of Publicly Backed Journalism" from Columbia Journalism Review

Join us tomorrow for “Economics on Tap.” The YouTube livestream starts at 3:30 p.m. Pacific time, 6:30 p.m. Eastern.