From Campuses to Newsrooms, Corporate Oligarchy and State Repression Converge to Stifle Free Expression

The Trump administration’s attacks on universities and media institutions have rightfully garnered ample condemnation and warnings about state overreach. But when it comes to attacks on freedom—be it academic freedom, freedom of speech, or press freedom—the state is not the only tyranny involved. Much of the repression we are watching unfold today cannot be properly understood without challenging a long-standing false dichotomy between a tyrannical state on the one hand, and a noncoercive private sphere—a “free market”—on the other. Appreciating and confronting the totality of the threats we face demands turning this imagined binary on its head and considering the role of corporate oligarchy as an abettor and accelerant of state tyranny.

As two recent Roosevelt Institute reports show, pervasive private power and networks of wealthy individuals have gradually and insidiously eroded critical freedoms—a repressive influence that can be best seen in the examples of higher education and media. As billionaires have amassed ever greater political power alongside their burgeoning fortunes, they now wield unprecedented influence over democratic institutions. Unsurprisingly, this influence is often used to promote their own financial and ideological agendas. Along with the help of a sympathetic state and captured policy apparatus, the ultrawealthy’s decisions have functioned to atrophy the key democratic institutions of media and higher education, turning them into vehicles for private gain rather than the public good. This is why we see so many corporate donors in higher education funding research and programming that aligns with a plutocratic worldview, while billionaire media owners censor their papers’ opinion pages and, allegedly, determine what content is or isn’t seen by the public.

As billionaires have amassed ever greater political power alongside their burgeoning fortunes, they now wield unprecedented influence over democratic institutions.

With these institutions hollowed out and weakened, they become even more vulnerable to an authoritarian strongman who can step in and bend them to his will. Far from acting as a check on overreach or protectors of liberty, the billionaire class goes along with this, understanding that their interests are best protected by currying favor with a pay-to-play administration.

Of course, the recent attacks on academic freedom by both federal and state governments—in the form of funding cuts and freezes, student visa restrictions, and ideologically driven admissions and hiring mandates—are obvious examples of state tyranny that infringe on our First Amendment rights. The administration is using state coercion to remake higher education in its image, stripping universities of the agency to pursue their missions and shape their own futures.

But as law professor Luke Herrine explains in his recent Roosevelt Institute report, to focus only on these state threats is to consider just one side of the coin. In reality, the infringements on academic freedom and free expression in higher education do not only come from the government. Often they come from within universities themselves in the form of powerful and influential trustees, who, especially recently, have been agnostic if not hostile to academic freedom and the democratic tradition of political dissent on college campuses; and from nongovernmental outsiders, like wealthy donors who leverage their financial backing to shape what is taught at the schools to which they donate. These private pressures can converge with state coercion to create a particularly repressive double whammy.

The bipartisan crackdown on Palestine solidarity protests that took place on college campuses across the country is one such example. Billionaires like Marc Rowan and Bill Ackman used their power as both donors and trustees of private universities to launch successful campaigns to oust public and private university presidents who did not sufficiently censor pro-Palestinian speech and protest, while legislators forced university leaders into kangaroo-court congressional hearings to pressure them to further crush student activists.

We see a similar dynamic playing out in our media institutions. Americans have long been rightfully skeptical of state control over the media system. But as my colleagues, Bilal Baydoun and Victor Pickard, and I recently explained in a Roosevelt Institute report, a singular focus on state meddling in our information ecosystem can cloud other, equally dangerous pressures that come from wealthy owners in our media system. Often, the motivations of these owners are commercial, throwing out the media’s inherently democratic obligations and instead treating news organizations like profit-maximizing firms. Under the regulatory whims of an authoritarian administration bent on entrenching its own power and that of the ultrawealthy, media owners make a calculated and rational decision to support the political forces that will best advance their own personal interests.

Under the regulatory whims of an authoritarian administration bent on entrenching its own power and that of the ultrawealthy, media owners make a calculated and rational decision to support the political forces that will best advance their own personal interests.

These political and commercial interests converge in the example of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post—last week, Bezos laid off one-third of the Post’s staff, marking the latest setback for journalism in the US, which has for years now undergone a steady erosion despite its centrality to a healthy democracy. The move comes one year after Bezos decided the Post’s opinion section would begin “writing every day” in defense and support of “personal liberties and free markets.” What explains the billionaire’s decision to dictate the ideological parameters of its editorial page to fall closer in line with right-wing views and hollow out its reporting capacity by nixing a third of the paper’s staff, all while he shells out $75 million to license and market a documentary about Melania Trump? Parsimony suggests these choices were made to advance Jeff Bezos’ personal interests, regardless of how they affect freedom of speech, right of the citizens to information, or the sacrosanct role of a free and independent press in a democracy. 

As this example makes clear, it’s not just state censorship of speech that we should be concerned with. Like in the higher education context, a singular focus on government obscures the threat of converging coercive powers—a threat that has become increasingly serious as billionaires not only decide what content we see on digital platforms or which news outlets survive, but even come to hold powerful roles in government themselves.

The current administration’s blatant disdain for freedom in higher education and media institutions cannot be properly assessed without also accounting for private interests’ corrosive effects on freedom. It cannot be understood without implicating the bipartisan class of donors and decisionmakers—whether on boards of trustees or boards of directors—that for decades have routinely usurped these freedoms for private gain, weakening our democratic institutions along the way. The truth is that our institutions fell prey to the wealthy well before the Trump administration could issue its first hostage-taking decree, and it is precisely this reality that has helped pave the way for a state-private alliance against the public. Now, as these two forces partner up, increasingly becoming one and the same, the public vs. private binary exposes itself as the misleading oversimplification it always was.