A timeline of 2025’s staggering losses for Democrat media

Happy Sept. 1 to all — even the haters and losers in corporate media who, truth be told, haven’t had a great year.

That doesn’t mean no one’s winning. On Wednesday, One America News announced that Google’s YouTube TV will now carry the channel in its basic package. The deal comes just three years after OAN was dropped by Verizon and DirecTV under pressure from advertisers, activist groups, rising costs, and a political climate openly hostile to conservative media.

The cracks in profits and the resulting hard decisions and pivots are everywhere to see.

Meanwhile, the corporate press keeps sinking. President Donald Trump, FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, collapsing public trust, and brutal market shifts have combined into a perfect storm for the old media guard. Line up the casualties, and the wreckage speaks for itself.

Carr set the tone just weeks into the new administration with a Feb. 11 letter to Comcast and NBCUniversal alerting them that they’re under investigation to “ensure your companies are not promoting invidious forms of discrimination in violation of FCC regulations and civil rights laws.”

FCC rules under the Communications Act have long barred companies from discriminating on race, sex, religion, or age. But this marked the first time an administration used those tools against woke corporate culture. It was a warning shot heard around the world.

The shake-up didn’t stop there. On Feb. 24, MSNBC cut ties with Joy Reid, its longtime host known for race-baiting and peddling conspiracy theories.

Days later, on Feb. 26, Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos announced a major shift in editorial policy: The paper would now “focus on personal liberties and free markets.” The move looked less like patriotism and more like a calculation to protect Bezos’ global business interests. Still, it stunned the Post’s anti-Trump staff, many of whom saw it as surrender to the country’s new conservative mood. Opinion editor David Shipley quit in protest almost immediately.

Then, a month later on March 27, Carr kicked off the second week of spring by sending another letter warning of an investigation into DEI policies violating civil rights law — this time to Disney and ABC.

Spring capped off on June 8, when ABC senior national correspondent Terry Moran fired off a middle-of-the-night rant about how White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller’s “hatreds are his spiritual nourishment.” He wrote the post just over a week after he interviewed the president in the Oval Office.

It’s the kind of unhinged post that would have been standard fare during Trump’s first term, but times had changed, and ABC fired him. Moran stands by his characterization of Miller. He’s now “an independent journalist.”

By summer, the hits to corporate media were coming harder and faster. On July 2, CBS announced it was settling with Trump over deceptive edits to its “60 Minutes” campaign-trail interview with Vice President Kamala Harris.

The $16 million settlement mirrored ABC’s settlement with Trump seven months prior, paying approximately $1 million to cover Trump’s legal fees, with the rest going to the future Trump presidential library. It also included an agreement to release future, unedited transcripts of presidential interviews.

During the spring, as part of the blowback over the Harris interview, CBS had hired a producer to oversee “sensitive” content. That oversight led to the April 22 resignation of longtime “60 Minutes” producer Bill Owens.

Then on July 17, CBS announced it would not renew Stephen Colbert’s contract. It was the end of the 32-year run for “The Late Show” and a dismal result of how snide and political it had become since David Letterman’s departure from the show a decade ago.

The very next day, on July 18, the Senate passed the White House’s rescission package, ending taxpayer money to PBS and NPR. The hyper-Democratic television and radio networks had been conservative targets for decades; now, they were on their own. Four days later, on July 22, NPR’s newsroom chief, Edith Chapin, announced she was leaving the company.

Then it was back to business. On July 24, the FCC approved a Paramount Global/CBS-Skydance Media merger. The deal came complete with a commitment to eliminate DEI and to install an ombudsman over CBS News. These moves were a direct result of the FCC’s push to actually enforce the Communications Act’s public interest standard, which requires balanced viewpoints for companies that want to use public spectrum.

Biden-appointed FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez was furious. Monitoring for bias, she claimed, is a terrible threat to press freedom.

On July 31, it was back to the Washington Post. That day, “fact-checker” Glenn Kessler, columnist Jonathan Capehart, and dozens of other Democrat journalists accepted the struggling paper’s proposed buyout package.

The following day, Aug. 1, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting announced it would shut down under the business pressures caused by the end of taxpayer funding.

All that, and the year is far from over. The cracks in profits and the resulting hard decisions and pivots are everywhere to see. When you combine the pressures of declining profits and a rightly distrustful public with an administration interested in using the tools of the American civil rights regime to actually protect all classes of Americans, it’s a near-perfect storm.

Gentlemen, it’s time to reap the whirlwind.

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