From Ben & Jerry’s to Jimmy Kimmel

Why some businesses serve the public good, and why corporate media sells it off for parts.

Recently, a Fox News host mused on air about whether the solution to homelessness might be simply killing the unhoused. Even for Fox, it was jarring, not because cruelty was out of character, but because it revealed the logical endpoint of their programming. Dehumanization isn’t an accident on Rupert Murdoch’s airwaves; it’s the product. Cruelty draws eyeballs, ratings rise, advertisers renew, shareholders cheer. Then, as if on cue, two unhoused people were killed in the days that followed. We cannot prove the murders were inspired by Brian Kilmeade’s grotesque suggestion, but the timing is unnerving, a chilling reminder that violent rhetoric in primetime doesn’t simply evaporate into the ether. It circulates, it validates, and sometimes it precedes blood on the ground.

Fox’s descent into open calls for violence isn’t a freak eruption. It’s part of a larger disease: the alignment of for-profit media with authoritarian power. And once you see the pattern, it’s everywhere. Jimmy Kimmel was suspended for a throwaway joke about Trump’s grotesque ballroom grief, but the punchline wasn’t the joke, it was the timing. Disney and Nexstar were simultaneously pushing a $6.2 billion merger through Trump’s FCC, whose chairman, Brendan Carr, all but said on camera: “Fire the comedian or kiss the merger goodbye.” Free speech, meet the balance sheet.

Stephen Colbert’s cancellation followed the same script, a billion-dollar merger greased by silencing a critic. It’s not that late-night comedy is a threat to national security; it’s that satire aimed at the president is bad for business when your business depends on his regulators. The marketplace of ideas, it turns out, is less about ideas and more about marketplaces.

JD Vance openly bragged that if the facts don’t suit him, he’ll just invent new ones, knowing the press will dutifully amplify them. We saw this play out in real time during the 2024 campaign, when Trump claimed migrants in Ohio were killing and eating people’s pets. It was a grotesque fabrication, debunked immediately by local officials and reporters. But instead of distancing himself, Vance doubled down. He went on CNN and admitted, almost cheerfully, that yes, the story was false, but he’d keep saying things like it anyway because it forced the media to cover the issue on his terms. In other words, he was using lies as a lever to manipulate the press, confident that legacy outlets would dutifully transcribe his words under the banner of “both sides.”

It’s a strategy of deliberate disinformation, one that treats truth as a disposable luxury and the media as a willing amplifier. When Vance brags about “creating stories,” he’s not talking about harmless spin, he’s talking about planting poison in the information ecosystem, secure in the knowledge that corporate media will water it, fertilize it, and sell ad space around it.

Together these episodes paint a picture that’s hard to ignore: the media isn’t just reporting on democratic backsliding, it’s financing it, normalizing it, and in many cases enabling it. Lies don’t spread themselves. They need a distribution system. And in America, that system is for-profit media.

The pattern has been with us from the start. In 2016, Trump hacked the business model of corporate news. He knew that outrage was oxygen, and the press supplied it in tanker trucks. CNN aired empty podiums just in case he might speak. CBS’s Les Moonves admitted Trump might be bad for America, but he was “damn good for CBS.” Reporters covered every insult and tantrum as “breaking news,” rarely bothering to contextualize it as part of a deliberate pattern. Fact-checks came hours later, buried under the avalanche of spectacle. By Election Day, Trump had received billions in free publicity, enough to swamp every rival. He hadn’t reinvented politics; he had gamed the Nielsen ratings.

If the 2016 formula was “give him oxygen,” the 2025 sequel is “punish his critics.” Consider the purge of late-night comedy. Colbert’s show disappeared just days before the Paramount–Skydance merger sailed through Trump’s FCC. Kimmel was yanked off the air within hours of FCC chair Brendan Carr threatening affiliates: “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.” A $6.2 billion deal was on the line, and Nexstar knew which way the wind was blowing. They chose profit over principle and presented it as a question of “community values.” The “community” now includes the one man who decides if your merger lives or dies.

This is corporate obedience masquerading as regulation. The merger math is brutal in its simplicity: muzzle a critic, unlock billions. Fail, and face “additional work” from the FCC. The whole sordid affair plays out in press releases that sound like they were drafted in a Politburo: criticism of “the MAGA gang” is “too offensive for local communities.” What a coincidence that those “communities” happen to overlap perfectly with the president’s enemies list.

The pattern isn’t accidental. Trump’s first rise to power was fueled by corporate media’s love affair with ratings. Every unhinged rally, every insult, every conspiracy was live-streamed, replayed, and packaged into viral clips. He didn’t have to buy airtime; networks gave it to him free because outrage pays better than truth. Tens of millions in free publicity later, he was in the Oval Office, installed not just by voters but by the clicks, shares, and Nielsen spikes that executives drooled over.

Now, in his second go-around, Trump has stopped relying on media indulgence and found something even better: a way to weaponize corporate ambition against itself. He doesn’t need to censor critics directly; he simply dangles regulatory approval over billion-dollar mergers and watches CEOs and station owners do the dirty work for him. What better loyalty test than forcing the networks themselves to silence his critics in exchange for growth? It’s state capture by spreadsheet.

This is not about Jimmy Kimmel’s joke, or Stephen Colbert’s satire, or whatever other late-night host happens to be in the crosshairs next. It’s about a system where corporations have learned that silencing dissent is good business, and regulators have learned that enforcing the president’s grudges is good politics. It’s a merger of authoritarian instinct and corporate obedience, one that leaves democracy as the only hostile takeover target.

JD Vance has been busy telling us the quiet part out loud. He brags about “creating stories” to jerk the media’s chain, and recently floated, without a shred of evidence, that “networks” may have “funded” Charlie Kirk’s alleged killer. It was a smear too sloppy for a freshman debate club, but it worked exactly as designed: it generated outrage, which guaranteed coverage, which justified further crackdowns. In this system, lies aren’t flaws, they’re features. The goal isn’t persuasion, it’s saturation.

Colleen Shogan’s story offers the counterpoint. As archivist of the United States, she saw her job as safeguarding the nation’s memory. For that, she was fired without warning and replaced by a political loyalist. The National Archives, once seen as a dull warehouse of parchment, is now in the crosshairs. Trump’s budget guts tens of millions, even as the institution faces a tidal wave of digital records it cannot currently preserve. Starve the archivists, and you starve the future. Shogan is now trying to launch a “civics moonshot” with presidential libraries and first families, insisting that history must be told honestly, failures and all. But her warning is stark: if institutions lose independence, the past itself becomes propaganda.

Even satire now feels like a front line of democratic resistance. Jon Stewart returned to The Daily Show with a parody “talent-o-meter” that measures comedians’ worth by their niceness to Trump. Jimmy Fallon ran voiceovers of syrupy praise over Trump’s tirades, turning state propaganda into slapstick. They’re funny because they’re true, the merger-for-silence regime looks less like free media and more like North Korea with better hair dye. But the fact that satire is carrying this load is itself an indictment. When corporations are willing to silence their own comedians for the sake of merger approvals, jokes become the most fragile form of dissent.

This is the sickness at the core of corporate media: profit over democracy. Outrage pays. Lies pay. Silencing critics pays. Shareholders get their dividends; Trump gets his loyalty tests; the public gets whatever sliver of truth survives between the ad breaks. A democracy cannot sustain itself this way.

Colleen Shogan is right: civics education is a moonshot. Americans need to understand what’s being stolen from them. Because once history is rewritten and laughter is regulated, democracy won’t collapse with a bang. It will suffocate quietly, smothered under the weight of quarterly earnings calls and FCC filings.

Media was once the watchdog of democracy. Newspapers exposed corruption, broadcasters aired uncomfortable truths, and even the most ratings-hungry news divisions still carried a vestigial sense of public service. That model is gone. Today, the business plan is the editorial line. Corporate media is anathema to democracy not because it tells the truth too loudly, but because it has learned that truth is rarely profitable. And when the price is right, it will happily sell the First Amendment for parts.

Independent outlets, scrappy newsletters, podcasts run out of spare bedrooms, these may lack the polish of network news, but they still carry something more valuable: a refusal to treat democracy as just another revenue stream. That doesn’t mean they’re perfect, but it does mean they are less susceptible to the merger math and shareholder obedience that have turned once-fearless institutions into corporate courtiers.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Business can serve the public good when people inside those businesses choose to make it so. Take Jerry Greenfield, co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s. When his company was still independent, it pioneered models of corporate responsibility that treated profit and social good as compatible, even complementary. Living wages, charitable giving, environmental advocacy—none of it was “efficient” in the Wall Street sense, but it proved that a company could turn a profit without shredding its conscience.

But the Ben & Jerry’s story also shows what happens once a corporation is swallowed by a conglomerate. When Unilever acquired the brand, Greenfield and his partner negotiated hard for a continued social mission, but over time, shareholder pressure diluted that vision. Public good became a line item, subject to cost–benefit analysis. In other words, even ice cream got the merger math treatment.

The same logic governs media conglomerates. For all the hand-wringing about journalistic integrity, what drives the decision to suspend Jimmy Kimmel or cancel Stephen Colbert isn’t some principled concern for civility, it’s the math of billion-dollar mergers. Conglomerates don’t factor democracy into their profit schemes any more than they factor melting ice caps into the price of Chunky Monkey. They factor only risk, return, and regulatory approval. And when the president controls all three, democracy doesn’t stand a chance.

If democracy is to survive this current wave of authoritarian capture, it won’t be because Comcast or Disney grew a conscience. It will be because enough independent journalists, readers, and viewers refused to play along with the fiction that profit equals public interest. The watchdog has been bought. The question now is whether enough of us are willing to replace it with something that still has teeth.