Pawel Popiel

@ppopiel.bsky.social

1911 Followers 676 Following

Media policy + platforms + political economy | Assistant Prof @ Murrow College of Communication, Washington State University | US Team Research Lead - GMICP.org | Affiliate @ MIC Center, UPenn and CITAP, UNC | Philly expat | pawelpopiel.com

Paramount-WBD post-merger labor concentration scenario - the entity acquires the largest concentration of TV creative labor
The announcement comes a day after a Florida-based pastor sued the company for giving a near-fatal suggestion not to consult a doctor.
Battle of Waterloo, 1815
Decades of mergers and acquisitions have reduced the number of major U.S. media companies to a handful of transnational conglomerates that dominate the production and circulation of news, film, television, sports, games, and other forms of media and culture. If Paramount Skydance acquires Warner Bros. Discovery, not only will this newly-formed conglomerate be burdened with $79 billion of debt, it will struggle to respect competitive safeguards, serve consumer needs, cultivate the media industry’s long term health, and act in the broader interest of the public. A team of more than 20 media experts from universities across the U.S. and Canada have collaborated on this research to encourage the courts, government regulators, non-governmental organizations, legislators, and citizens to challenge this deal. While this study addresses some of the quantitative impacts of this potential merger, our scope is far wider. The thirteen sections of this study define consumer welfare, public interest, and healthy competition more broadly, and consider democratic objectives like fair media access for non-profit and public-serving organizations, the preservation of community cultural spaces like theaters and of community social events like sports, and the support of a diverse range of stories and storytellers. Having spent decades researching the many (often non-quantifiable) ways that media and culture shape our lives as citizens and individuals, we enumerate here what kinds of impacts we can expect from this deal, and why policymakers and the public should be so concerned.
"Mr. Johnson felt chagrined by how easy it was. He recalled that for years he read the print edition of the local newspaper to come up with his own sense of which candidates most closely matched his values. “I felt a bit lazy for not doing more,” he said. “It felt easier, but I am not sure that everything was correct.”"
"‘Who Should I Vote for?’ Voters Turn to A.I. Before Casting Their Ballots It takes effort to be an informed citizen. Artificial intelligence tools offer an alluring shortcut — but they’re not without risk."
As digital platforms are increasingly shaping access to information, their control over platform data has profound implications for research, innovation, and accountability. This article presents the first comprehensive empirical study of how digital platforms have used contractual terms to enclose publicly available data over the past decade. Analyzing the Terms of Use of 279 platforms from 2012 and 2022, we identify a systematic increase in both restrictive and permissive clauses governing access to data for research purposes. We find that platforms adopted a dual contractual strategy: restrictive terms limit third-party access to data for research, while permissive terms preserve the platform's own ability to use and share data with selected partners. This strategy emerged alongside the rise of consent-based privacy regulation, especially the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which, despite its objective of protecting users, inadvertently expands platforms’ discretion over data access. Our findings suggest that privacy regulation has facilitated, rather than curtailed, platform data enclosures—enabling platforms to assert de facto control over data in the public domain. We contribute to the literature on data governance, platform regulation, and contract theory by documenting how platforms adapt boilerplate contracts in response to regulatory change and leverage privacy obligations to restrict independent research. These findings carry significant implications for legal and policy debates surrounding data access, transparency, and the future of platform accountability. They underscore the need to regulate the privatization of publicly available data to ensure equitable access for research serving the public interest.
Draws heavily on Habermas Often forgoes Habermas’s considerations of the bourgeoisie as a hegemonic coalition and instead reads the public sphere in terms of abstract Foucauldian discourse.
Me: Why are we stealing content from dead people? Grammarly: Lawrence Lessing says "Frame the ethical stakes..."
Me: This is some downright theft Grammary AI: Joan Didion: Anchor the opening in a...
When the Trump administration went looking last spring for National Endowment for the Humanities grants to cut, it turned to a familiar scourge of professors: ChatGPT. Last March, two employees from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency arrived at the agency with the mandate of canceling previously approved grants that ran afoul of President Trump’s agenda. But instead of looking closely at funded projects, they pulled short summaries off the internet and fed them into the A.I. chatbot. The prompt was simple: “Does the following relate at all to D.E.I.? Respond factually in less than 120 characters. Begin with ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’” The results were sweeping, and sometimes bizarre.
Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://help.ft.com/faq/gifting-and-sharing-an-article/what-is-a-gift-article/. https://www.ft.com/content/97bda2ef-fc06-40b3-a867-f61a711b148b In the note, which is likely to complicate negotiations, Amodei wrote that much of the messaging from the Pentagon and OpenAI, which struck its own agreement with Hegseth on Friday, was “just straight up lies about these issues or tries to confuse them”.
"Iran succession: Asked who he would like to take over Iran, Mr. Trump gave a strikingly blunt answer. “Most of the people we had in mind are dead,” he said. “Now we have another group, they may be dead also, based on reports. So you have a third wave coming. Pretty soon we’re not going to know anybody.”"
Warner Bros Discovery Gives Paramount One Week to Improve $30-Per-Share Bid as Netflix Deal Advances
About half of Americans say they are worn out by news, and many have tuned out
Judge individuals, not classes
NYT headline: State and Federal Officials Clash Over Shooting Inquiry
"Given the scale of the deportation agencies, there is simply no way for legal responses to keep pace with the lawless mass lockup. Unlike ICE, the habeas bar did not receive a multi-billion dollar investment to underwrite limitless expansion. Moreover, law’s traditional tools for situations like this, such as classwide injunctive relief, are unavailable thanks to jurisdiction-stripping provisions (see 8 U.S.C. § 1252(f)), which the Supreme Court underscored in Garland v. Aleman Gonzalez when it rejected classwide injunctions against illegal ICE detention. Any meaningful response must confront ICE’s power directly. As others have explained, the bipartisan multi-decade provision of an “unconditional flow of money, equipment, and resources to DHS … allowed [it] to operate with minimal accountability.” The answer, then, must be to take away ICE and CBP’s money, headcount, and guns. In my view, the only politically sensible way to mount this direct challenge is by dismantling the agencies"
“He said, ‘Make sure you guys don’t cut the tape, make sure the interview is out in full,” Ms. Leavitt said in an even tone, according to a recording of the exchange obtained by The New York Times. “Yeah, we’re doing it, yeah,” Mr. Dokoupil responded. Ms. Leavitt replied: “He said, ‘If it’s not out in full, we’ll sue your ass off.’”
We examine the evolving political economy of the U.S. wireless communications market through a case study of the 2020T-Mobile/Sprint merger. Drawing on industry data from the Global Media & Internet Concentration Project and policy documents from the merger review, we show how the merging parties and regulators worked to construct the perception of competition to justify the transaction's approval despite clear evidence of oligopolistic concentration. We conceptualize this strategy as performative competition, involving regulators downplaying antitrust concerns, reframing consumer harms, and emphasizing speculative promises of 5G deployment to approve a corporate merger. We argue that performative competition is an increasingly necessary regulatory strategy, which emerges from policymakers’ neoliberal deference to dominant industry actors in a political economy marked by the growing consolidation of wireless markets; entails an increasing decoupling of communications policymaking from regulatory empirical analysis; and fulfills a discursive policy function of legitimating policy decisions to policy stakeholders.
Mr. Trump’s deal preserves many of the ties to China that the law was designed to sever. ByteDance would reportedly license or transfer its recommendation algorithm to the new U.S. entity. TikTok would continue to manage “global product interoperability,” meaning the American app would remain integrated with TikTok’s worldwide platform. Oracle, the app’s U.S. cloud provider, would serve as a “trusted security partner,” monitoring the system and eventually retraining the algorithm. Make no mistake: In this new arrangement, Beijing will still have leverage over the newly structured entity.
Although a core concept in the field of communication, discourse and how it operates in policy-making has not received much attention from platform governance scholars. Accordingly, this study theorizes the relationship between platform governance and policy discourses, drawing on Julia Black’s work on regulatory conversations and Vivian Schmidt’s discursive institutionalism framework. We use the framework to conceptualize platform governance and attendant power relations between policy actors as constituted through institutionalized policy discourses. We apply the framework to examine Australia’s Online Safety Act, which introduces a co-regulatory platform governance approach to tackle illegal and harmful content and behaviour online. Our analysis situates the policy as a communicative constitution of platform governance and a product of the interplay between institutionalized power dynamics and policy discourses. Our framework and case study have implications for platform governance scholarship, offering insights into the role policy discourse plays in shaping and legitimating co-regulatory platform governance initiatives.
Annual after-tax wage growth compared with inflation. Only high income exceeds inflation rate.
" Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://www.ft.com/tour. https://www.ft.com/content/fce77ba4-6231-4920-9e99-693a6c38e7d5 Even allowing for some fudging between annualised run rates and period-end totals, the apparent gap between revenues and running costs is a lot more than has been reported previously. And, like Ed, we’re struggling to explain how the numbers can be so far apart. If the data is accurate — which we can't guarantee, to reiterate, but we’re writing this post after giving both companies every opportunity to tell us that it isn’t — then it would call into question the business model of OpenAI and nearly every other general-purpose LLM vendor. At some point, going by the figures, either running costs have to collapse or customer charges have to rise dramatically. There’s no hint of either trend taking hold yet."
"Paramount’s leadership has not shied away from making its views on the war in Gaza public. In September, it became the first major studio to denounce a celebrity-driven open letter signed by A-listers like Emma Stone and Javier Bardem that called for a boycott of Israeli film institutions implicated in “genocide and apartheid” against Palestinians. (Warner Bros. followed, but cited legal reasons for its decision.) And sources say Paramount maintains a list of talent it will not work with because they are deemed to be “overtly antisemitic” as well as “xenophobic” and “homophobic.” Whether the boycott signatories are on that list is unclear. [Update, Nov. 7: Other sources intimately familiar with Paramount said that while an itemized list does not exist, the management team shares a set of values and has no desire to work with anyone who expresses hate in public and damaging ways]."
"The three human rights groups’ account terminations cumulatively amount to the erasure of more than 700 videos, according to an Intercept tally. The deleted videos range in scope from investigations, such as an analysis of the Israeli killing of American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, to testimonies of Palestinians tortured by Israeli forces and documentaries like “The Beach,” about children playing on a beach who were killed by an Israeli strike. Some videos are still available through copies saved on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine or on alternate platforms, such as Facebook and Vimeo. The wiping only affected the group’s official channels; videos which were produced by the nonprofits but hosted on alternate YouTube channels remain active. No cumulative index of videos deleted by YouTube is available, however, and many appear to not be available elsewhere online."
In April of 2024, Zhao was sentenced to four months in prison after pleading guilty to charges that he and Binance had failed to adequately implement anti-money laundering protections. The company was also hit with a massive $4.3 billion fine as part of its settlement with the Department of Justice under the Biden administration. The department said that Binance had become a hub of criminal money laundering, facilitating “billions of dollars of unregulated cryptocurrency transactions,” including “nearly” $900 million in transactions between the US and Iran.
Weiss, 41, has no experience working in broadcast television, though she has carved out a reputation as a heterodox opinion writer and burgeoning media operator. Known for her attacks on liberal institutions and “cancel culture”, Weiss founded the Free Press with her partner Nellie Bowles in 2021 after she left the New York Times as a columnist, claiming that she was heavily scrutinized for her conservative views and criticism of the left at the paper. On Monday, Weiss wrote in the Free Press: “As of today, I am editor-in-chief of CBS News, working with new colleagues on the programs that have impacted American culture for generations – shows like 60 Minutes and Sunday Morning – and shaping how millions of Americans read, listen, watch, and, most importantly, understand the news in the 21st century.”
ABSTRACT This study examines the political economy, discursive legitimations, and effectiveness of the primary U.S. policy response to narrowing the digital divide: public subsidies for internet service. Using Philadelphia as our case study, we analyze municipal efforts to enroll low-income communities in low-cost commercial broadband plans supported by the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP). Like many other U.S. cities in the neoliberal era, Philadelphia sought to organize its digital equity initiative as a decentralized network of public agencies, commercial broadband providers, and nonprofits. Drawing on expert interviews, focus groups with ACP-eligible subscribers, and policy documents, we find that despite the city’s goal of achieving universal service, the networked initiative ultimately advanced the economic interests and market position of Comcast, the city’s monopoly broadband provider – with only minimal gains in connectivity. We argue that the evolving relationship between Comcast and the city of Philadelphia exemplifies what we refer to as the dialectic of the network. While often assumed as opposing forms of economic and social organization, the monopoly – centralized, vertically organized, hierarchical – and the network – decentralized, horizontal, leaderless – actively reinforce and legitimize one another as part of the neoliberal conquest of America’s communication infrastructure.
Chart showing polarization, state of democracy, and both political parties party as the most important problems facing U.S. today, up from 2023 when economy and inflation were top concerns
The settlement makes YouTube, which is owned by Alphabet’s Google, the final Big Tech company to settle a trio of lawsuits Trump brought against social-media platforms in the months after he left the White House. Meta Platforms agreed in January to pay $25 million, most of it to a fund for Trump’s presidential library, and X agreed to pay $10 million, much of it going directly to Trump, The Wall Street Journal previously reported. Google executives were eager to keep their settlement smaller than the one paid by rival Meta, according to people familiar with the matter. Trump’s share of the settlement—$22 million—will go to the nonprofit Trust for the National Mall, earmarked for the construction of a Mar-a-Lago-style ballroom Trump is building at the White House, according to the court documents. The White House has said the ballroom, expected to cost $200 million, would be funded by donations from Trump and “other patriot donors.” A further $2.5 million will go to the other plaintiffs on the case, a group that includes the American Conservative Union and writer Naomi Wolf. The settlement doesn’t mention attorney fees. Google declined to comment.
In addition to helping allies buy a growing share of U.S. media, in his first eight months Trump also has managed to score conciliatory overtures from the nation’s tech billionaires, who fired fact-checkers at major social media platforms, curbed moderation of hateful content and asserted rigid editorial control over the op-ed pages at The Washington Post, one of the country’s most prominent newspapers. If the Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger is approved and Larry Ellison joins Andreessen Horowitz as part of the impending TikTok deal, a movie studio, CBS, CNN, Fox, 185 Sinclair-owned TV stations and a major social media platform will have owners with strong ties to Trump.
The deal, first revealed on September 11, 2025, would erase one of the five remaining movie studios and concentrate oversight of two of the country’s most prominent newsrooms – CNN and CBS, both targets of the Trump administration’s ire – under one owner with strong ties to Donald Trump. Based on research from the Global Media & Internet Concentration Project, our analysis shows that Paramount Skydance-Warner Bros. Discovery would gain control of more than a quarter of the US$223 billion U.S. media market, along with influence over film, television, streaming and the cloud infrastructure upon which digital media increasingly depends. The combined entity would acquire nearly half of the cable television market, including HBO and CNN. The merger would nearly double Paramount’s share of the video streaming market, uniting HBO Max, Paramount+ and Discovery. By combining two major Hollywood film studios, it would also capture nearly one-third of the film production market.
Nexstar announced Tuesday that it intends to buy Tegna for $6.2 billion — a deal that has been rumored for weeks. To pull off what would be the biggest change in TV broadcast ownership history, however, the Federal Communications Commission would have to relax rules limiting how much of the country one company can reach with its over-the-air signal. The FCC appears open to changing the rules. Chairman Brendan Carr said the agency “is committed to ending all of the rules and regulations that are no longer necessary.” Similar rollbacks have happened before. The deal faces other complications, too. Almost simultaneously, The Wall Street Journal reported that Sinclair — another of the country’s largest station groups — is also eyeing Tegna. And while Nexstar called its deal with Tegna a “definitive agreement,” any sale must still be approved by Tegna shareholders. In the world of media mergers, “definitive” often comes with wiggle room.
“I argue that the AI industry shares virtually no ideological overlap with national conservatism,” Miller said, referring to the conference’s core ideology. Hours ago, Miller, a psychology professor at the University of New Mexico, had been on that stage for a panel called “AI and the American Soul,” calling for the populists to wage a literal holy war against artificial intelligence developers “as betrayers of our species, traitors to our nation, apostates to our faith, and threats to our kids.” Now, he stared right at the technologist who’d just given a speech arguing that tech founders were just as heroic as the Founding Fathers, who are sacred figures to the natcons. The AI industry was, he told Sankar, “by and large, globalist, secular, liberal, feminized transhumanists. They explicitly want mass unemployment, they plan for UBI-based communism, and they view the human species as a biological ‘bootloader,’ as they say, for artificial superintelligence.”
The United States Tennis Association asked broadcasters of the U.S. Open to censor any protests or reaction to President Donald Trump’s appearance at the men’s singles final Sunday, according a memo reviewed by The Athletic on Saturday. The memo was first reported by the tennis reporter Ben Rothenberg of Bounces. According to the memo, Trump will be shown on feeds from the tournament during the pre-match ceremony, which includes the presentation of the U.S. national anthem, ahead of the final between Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz. “We ask all broadcasters to refrain from showcasing any disruptions or reactions in response to the President’s attendance in any capacity,” the USTA said in the memo. The memo said Trump planned to watch the match from a suite as a guest of a sponsor, prompting additional security for the event.