There's Now a Report Card for Media Capitulation, and It's Full of Chickens
Free Press mapped out the ownership, donations, and compromises behind 35 major media companies. The results aren't pretty.
Over at Margaret Sullivan's always-excellent
newsletter, she's got an exclusive on something called the Media Capitulation Index. Free Press, the media advocacy group (not to be confused with Bari Weiss’ thing), basically created a report card for how badly major media companies are caving to Trump administration pressure. Their rating system? Stars for independence, chickens for capitulation.Out of 35 major media and tech companies they evaluated, exactly two earned stars: Bloomberg and Netflix. Two! Everyone else is somewhere on the chicken scale, from "vulnerable" (one chicken) all the way to “propaganda” (five chickens).
The New York Times scored one chicken. CBS's parent company Paramount got three. Disney, which owns ABC, also three. Meta clocked in at four chickens, which tracks given Zuckerberg's recent Mar-a-Lago residency application. Fox also got four, and honestly, I'm surprised it wasn't five.
The full propaganda rating went to Trump Media and X/SpaceX, because of course it did.
This index dropped at a perfect time. We just watched CBS pay $16 million to Trump over a basic 60 Minutes edit. ABC handed over $15 million for something they probably could've beaten in court. Bezos spiked the Post's endorsement and then donated a million to Trump's inauguration. It's like watching everyone pay protection money in real time.
Free Press identified four main ways these companies capitulate: through payments, abandoning DEI commitments, editorial interference, and old-fashioned ring-kissing at Mar-a-Lago. They trace the problem back to media consolidation post-1996 Telecommunications Act, when we basically handed the keys to billionaires and acted surprised when they started driving toward their own interests.
Get the data
The actual index Free Press created is worth digging into. It's not just a list of ratings — they built an interactive report where you can click through each company and read exactly how they earned their chicken rating.
Take Google's parent company Alphabet, sitting at two chickens. Click through and you'll find they're part of a $9 billion Pentagon contract alongside Amazon, Microsoft, and Oracle. Suddenly that million-dollar donation to Trump's inauguration makes more sense. Same with their abrupt decision to scrap diversity programs.
Or look at Paramount's three-chicken rating. The report details how they spent the summer desperately seeking approval for their Skydance merger, which meant playing nice with an administration that could block the deal. Every corporate decision starts looking different when you see the regulatory pressures behind it.
Each entry also tracks what Free Press calls "DEI Doublespeak" — companies that made big commitments to diversity and inclusion a few years ago, only to quietly dismantle those programs the moment it became politically inconvenient. T-Mobile dissolved its civil rights partnerships while seeking merger approval. Pattern recognition doesn't require a PhD here.
The report even includes specific examples of editorial interference, like Warner Bros Discovery pressuring CNN to soften Trump coverage. Not speculation, not reading between the lines — documented pressure to change coverage.
Still, take it with a grain of salt
I'm not saying you should base all your media consumption decisions on whether a company got two chickens or four. This index isn't gospel. It's one organization's attempt to measure something that usually stays invisible—the quiet compromises, the editorial tweaks, the donations that buy access rather than news coverage.
But I appreciate that someone's trying to put numbers on what we're all watching happen. When media companies insist they're maintaining editorial independence while simultaneously paying millions in settlements and showing up at Mar-a-Lago with checkbooks, it helps to have receipts. Even if the chicken metaphor is a bit much. The real value might be in forcing us to think about these connections.
Free Press put together something that makes the abstract understandable. That's useful, even if you quibble with their methodology or think they were too harsh on your preferred outlet. At minimum, it's a starting point for conversations we should've been having years ago about who owns our media and what they want in return.
The full report's worth browsing, if only to see how deep these entanglements go. And those facts paint a picture of a media ecosystem that's way more compromised than most of us want to admit.
In other news
The death of the anonymous internet
The UK's new Online Safety Act requires age verification for porn and other adult content, and VPN downloads immediately exploded. According to Wired's Lily Hay Newman and Matt Burgess, VPN sign-ups surged by as much as 1,800 percent after the law went into effect Friday. But here's the thing—the law doesn't just cover porn. It also applies to content about self-harm, suicide, and eating disorders, and platforms like Reddit, X, and Bluesky are now adding age verification for tons of previously accessible content. Digital rights advocates are warning this normalizes surveillance mechanisms that governments can easily expand later.
The UK's Online Safety Act is now forcing Reddit users to upload selfies or photo IDs to view subreddits documenting war crimes and conflict footage. According to 404 Media's Emanuel Maiberg, communities are being labeled "mature content" and locked behind age verification. Reddit is using a company called Persona (backed by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, naturally) to handle the ID checks. As Maiberg points out, this isn't just about protecting kids — it's making crucial information about ongoing atrocities and conflicts harder to access for everyone. The same pattern is spreading to the US with similar age verification laws expanding state by state.
A women's safety app called Tea just leaked 72,000 verification selfies and government IDs, and it perfectly illustrates why the UK's new age verification laws are a disaster waiting to happen. Garbage Day's Ryan Broderick writes, Tea required users to upload photos and IDs to prove they were women so they could review men in their area. The app's security was so bad that hackers found all the unencrypted data sitting in a public directory. Now those photos are on 4chan, turned into a "hot or not" ranking app, and mapped by location. Meanwhile, the UK just rolled out similar ID verification requirements for accessing “harmful content” online — which apparently includes protest footage and subreddits about cider. As one engineer put it: “The biggest story on US Twitter being an app leaking all of its users ID's while in the UK it's the government rolling out ID verification to access the internet and claiming it's perfectly safe.”
Shooting in NYC
A gunman killed four people at a Manhattan office building Monday while trying to reach NFL headquarters, claiming in a note that he had CTE from high school football. The Associated Press reports that Shane Tamura drove cross-country from Las Vegas, entered the wrong elevator bank, and shot several people before killing himself. The note accused the NFL of concealing brain injury dangers for profit — despite Tamura never playing professional football, only high school ball nearly two decades ago.
This isn't the first time a former football player has turned to violence while claiming CTE was to blame. The New York Times' Ken Belson notes that Aaron Hernandez, who murdered an acquaintance, was later found to have severe CTE, and in 2021, former NFL cornerback Phillip Adams shot and killed five people in South Carolina before dying by suicide. Several other former players like Dave Duerson and Junior Seau deliberately shot themselves in the chest (rather than the head) so their brains could be studied for the disease. The problem is that CTE can only be definitively diagnosed after death, meaning these claims can't be verified until it's too late. Researchers are trying to develop tests for the living, but results have been hit-or-miss.
Our big, dumb world
Republicans in nearly 20 states are pushing bills to ban "weather modification" based on chemtrail conspiracy theories, with Tennessee and Florida already signing them into law. NBC News reports that Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tim Burchett introduced federal legislation hitting alleged weather modifiers with up to $100,000 fines and five years in prison. Greene feels vindicated after years of being mocked for claiming “they're controlling the weather.” As one meteorologist put it: “To outlaw something that doesn't really exist to appease voters is so incredibly easy. It would be like if voters hated unicorns and I passed an anti-unicorn bill.”
The EPA took the unusual step of creating websites to debunk chemtrail conspiracy theories after catastrophic flooding in Texas sparked wild claims about weather modification. The New York Times' Maxine Joselow reported this month that EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said his team compiled “everything we know about contrails and geoengineering” to release publicly, noting that chemtrails are “often inaccurately” conflated with normal condensation trails from airplanes. One atmospheric scientist said the EPA's effort seems reasonable but warned that “those already convinced of the conspiracy will likely be unmoved. Instead, they'll probably just conclude that the E.P.A. is in on the coverup.”
But before you give the EPA too much credit, Administrator Lee Zeldin also announced Tuesday he's trying to overturn the agency's 2009 scientific finding that greenhouse gases threaten human health. Axios reports that Zeldin called this “driving a dagger into the heart of the climate change religion” on a conservative podcast. The endangerment finding provides the legal basis for regulating emissions from cars and power plants under the Clean Air Act, so overturning it would gut most climate regulations. Zeldin argued he wants “clean air, land and water” but alleged there are people who want to “bankrupt the country” in the name of battling climate change. So apparently the EPA has time to debunk chemtrail conspiracies but is actively working to ignore the actual scientific consensus on climate change. Great.
Watch Democracy Now! Not a chicken in sight. Make sure you donate too.
Maybe after the shameful white-wasshing of Israeli starving Gazans and especially children, the raters will award the New York Times an additional chicken.