I’ll begin, as an author is wont to do, with a book plug — I have a new novel out, which was serialized here at The American Spectator’s website this summer and will be published on Amazon on October 1. Its title is Blockbusters, and it’s an exploration of a scenario in which a well-funded conservative effort takes down the existing oligopoly that governs mass media in the country.
Blockbusters is the third in the current series of Mike Holman novels I’ve been writing. Some of our readers might recall from the first two books, King of the Jungle and From Hellmarsh With Love, that I have a somewhat disturbing penchant for filling the books in this series with soon-to-be-true happenings.
I have every confidence that Blockbusters will not disappoint on this score. After all, just as one example, Jimmy Kimmel had already been fired in the book.
Five corporations control the vast majority of American pop culture — meaning movie production, cable television, and broadcast TV — and those five are heavily invested in music and other manifestations of entertainment offerings in this country. The five are generally all legacies of the first major movie studios and TV networks, and the names still carry forward.
Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount, and Comcast NBC Universal are the successors to the three major Hollywood movie studios from the beginning of feature films back in the 1910s. ABC Disney is a legacy company arising from a movie studio that surfaced in the late 1930s and 1940s, as well as one of the three early television broadcasters. The fifth of the Big Five media conglomerates, Sony, is a Japanese company that arose from one of the first foreign manufacturers of TV sets.
These are very, very old companies. And they’re built for an age that is dying, if not already dead.
These are very, very old companies. And they’re built for an age that is dying, if not already dead.
The first experimental television broadcasts in America are generally accepted to have taken place in the early 1930s, with commercial FCC-regulated broadcasting beginning on July 1, 1941. Cable television, as it’s currently formatted, dates to somewhere around 1980. If you’re of Generation X or older, you still generally regard cable TV as a “new” innovation, because whether you were a kid or an adult it was an amazing thing to suddenly have a plethora of television choices beyond the three or four broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS) and the occasional independent station whose offerings were usually woefully below the network standard.
It took a while, but not a long while, for that amazement to wear off. After all, Bruce Springsteen’s “57 Channels (And Nothin’ On)” was released in 1992.
The point of that history lesson is that cable TV, which is the basis of American mass media, is now about 45 years old, and as amazing to you as it might be depending on your age, we have now had cable TV longer than we haven’t had it in the television age.
It isn’t a new innovation. In fact, it’s a dying industry that won’t last very much longer. And that five-corporation oligopoly that the cable TV industry organized itself into, at least on the programming side, is coming apart quickly.
If you aren’t following the delicious descent of Paramount into the clutches of Skydance, the independent film production company fronted by David Ellison (his father and chief financial backer is Larry Ellison of Oracle fame), you’re missing one of the great stories of American capitalism. Skydance is one of the few film producers who can consistently turn out moneymakers — including the Mission: Impossible and Transformers movies, not to mention Top Gun: Maverick a couple of years ago — and their slow-grinding takeover of Paramount spits out interesting effects on a near-weekly basis.
Including the shedding of executives and on-air talent at CBS News. And the refusal to renew the outrageous contract of Stephen Colbert and the shuttering of his colossal financial loser of a late-night talk show. Paramount is shedding overhead in a desperate bid to please its new prospective owner, and those affected are squawking with relish.
At Warner Bros. Discovery, they’ve positioned themselves for future survival by spinning off several massive losers within their portfolio of cable channels into a new company called Discovery Global Media. Among those channels are TNT, TBS, TruTV, CNN, HLN, Cartoon Network, Adult Swim, Cartoonito, Boomerang, Discovery Channel, TLC, HGTV, Food Network, Cooking Channel, Animal Planet, Investigation Discovery, and the Oprah Winfrey Network. It’s an astonishing array of programming and network commercial time, and the public’s interest in all of it is exceptionally limited.
CNN has been dumping expensive contracts ever since.
The Ellisons are exploring a merger with Warner Bros. Discovery as well, though probably not with Discovery Global Media. So you’ll recognize how freaked out this is making the Left, here was Crazy Liz Warren losing her ever-lovin’ over the suggestion…
The ink is barely dry on the shady $8 billion Paramount/Skydance merger, and now Paramount wants to add Warner Bros Discovery to its growing list of owned media companies.
This deal would be a dangerous concentration of power over our media and news. It should be blocked.
— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) September 16, 2025
I’m not saying she’s wrong, per se. What I will say is that you do very often get consolidation of shrinking industries.
And you also see spinoffs as companies under pressure try to shed dead weight.
Comcast, for example, which, just like Warner Bros. Discovery, has created a spinoff company. It’s called Versant, and Comcast has poured E!, USA Network, SyFy, Oxygen, The Golf Channel, CNBC, and MSNBC, which has been re-styled as MSNOW, in a change which has brought mostly snickers into its new Island of Unwanted Toys side corporation.
In both the cases of Discovery Global Media and Versant, the corporate overlords are holding onto production and unloading distribution in recognition that television channels themselves are losing steam as a means of disseminating content to the public.
Which is obvious, of course. Why tie yourself to appointment television when whatever show that might be on the schedule will be streaming somewhere and available at your convenience? For that matter, why wait to watch an hour a week of a show when you can be a bit patient and stream whole seasons in a weekend binge?
When the public isn’t watching TV for the purpose of watching TV but rather to consume stories or other content, the corporate middleman deciding what makes its way to the tube and what doesn’t loses a great deal of leverage.
We are becoming free of the gatekeepers.
One of the lessons of Kimmel’s firing that nobody is paying attention to is that while FCC Chairman Brendan Carr is being made into a villain for having gone on TV and noted the stupid and untrue things Kimmel said about Charlie Kirk’s murderer were beneath the standard of broadcast television that his agency regulates, it wasn’t Carr but ABC’s affiliates who stepped in and forced Kimmel’s ouster. I talked a little bit about this in a post Thursday at The Hayride…
What Carr is talking about when he raises the specter of FCC sanctions, fines and killing broadcast licenses is that he’ll be going after local ABC affiliates. That’s a very big move, and it involves a whole lot of complicated actions. It’s really unlikely he’d actually be doing that. But just the possibility that the FCC chairman would go down that road scares the bejesus out of the affiliates. It’s a lever that Carr is uncommon among FCC officials in being willing to pull.
And, of course, the Left hates him for it. In the aftermath of Kimmel’s firing, Carr is becoming the anti-First Amendment bogeyman.
The thing to know about this is that those network TV affiliates who are purportedly in Carr’s crosshairs are happy as clams right now.
Two companies in particular who own a big fraction of ABC’s flock of affiliate stations, Sinclair and Nexstar, were the prime movers in getting Kimmel fired. Both told ABC they weren’t going to carry Kimmel’s show anymore, and the question of losing their broadcast licenses was raised.
Carr was on TV praising Sinclair and Nexstar for stepping up and forcing change.
In other words, don’t assume Brendan Carr is some heavy-handed tyrant riding herd on the TV networks. Something else entirely is likely true, which is that he’s playing the heavy in order to give the affiliate stations leverage against networks like ABC.
In the past, there was basically zero leverage for those affiliates. Particularly when it came to woke programming.
Do you think the operators of a network affiliate station in, say, Jackson, Tennessee or Cheyenne, Wyoming really want to carry a show like Will & Grace in prime time? A clue: not really. The Left says a show like that is revolutionary and it changes American culture. For the affiliates in flyover country, all it does is make for tougher ad sales in local markets.
That’s one reason why so many local affiliate stations around the country, which used to be locally owned, are being sold to syndicates like Sinclair, Nexstar, Gray TV and others. The ABC Disneys of the world deliver crappy programming that regular Americans don’t want, and so ratings stink compared to a half-century ago, the public looks to things like streaming as alternatives to watching broadcast TV, and a local TV station that used to be a gold mine is now hard as hell to turn a profit with.
The networks did this. And the network execs have for decades told the affiliates to stick their complaints about it where the sun doesn’t shine.
You think the local affiliates are worried that Brendan Carr is threatening their broadcast licenses? Think again. They love it. They finally have something they can use to tell the Disney suits — the Comcast (NBC) and Paramount (CBS) suits, too — that they’re through accepting woke trash programming.
If you think the cable TV industry is under pressure, you should see local broadcast TV. And those guys are finally starting to shoot back at the networks. Before you think Carr is a tyrant who’s out to get the networks, what he’s really doing is standing up for the smaller companies that own those TV stations against the Big Five oligopolies. (RELATED: Pull ABC’s Broadcast License? After the Last Few Days? Hell, Yes!)
And you will see that practically nowhere else. Which doesn’t make it false.
All of this chaos is making us much freer, in case you haven’t noticed.
As news consumers, we’re increasingly able to aggregate a curated stream of information via platforms like X — and as horrified as the legacy media elite might be, we’re better informed as a populace than we were. The MAHA movement’s explosion, terrifying as it might be to the medical establishment and its Big Pharma overlords, is a great example of a societal change the elite couldn’t see coming and cannot contain.
We all know about the news business. But in entertainment, the melting away of the gatekeepers is just beginning.
Because those movie studios and the tight little community of executives and muckety-mucks whose decisions on which projects to greenlight onto screens big and small no longer have a magic touch in picking winners. Hollywood as an industry is in a protracted slump that they can’t blame on COVID anymore, not when the public is openly rebellious in rejecting the woke propaganda so often proffered as entertainment. Disney’s ruin of the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises, for example, has turned them into money losers when that wasn’t previously thought possible.
And this loss of public credibility and inability to drive mass audiences into the theaters comes at the worst possible time. If you’re on social media, you’re surely seeing the explosion of funny AI videos — many of which are take-offs of the old Dos Equis Most Interesting Man In The World TV ads, for example — which are proliferating.
Yes, some of those AI videos are utterly atrocious. So are the Saw movies and anything starring Lena Dunham.
In that way, AI video is astonishingly like the early silent films, a few minutes long, which populated the old nickelodeon movie houses in the first part of the 20th century. Like those silent films, the AI videos are short, exceptionally cheap to make, and rapidly evolving in quality.
And like those silent films, it won’t be long until those videos evolve into features that can entertain for longer.
A half-hour or an hour TV show. A series. A full two-hour feature film.
What you might not understand is that most of the AI content isn’t solely machine-generated. It’s the product of prompts given to it by humans, which means it’s still human creativity underlying the AI stuff. So if and when AI begins punching through and taking over the film industry, it’s going to be more of an extension of CGI — an editing tool, a special effects generator, a way to green-screen the principal photography of a film and generate a digital set or background behind it, and so on.
That means the super-creative computer geek who spends hours making a vision into a movie with AI could very well crank out something that matches the quality of a Disney film before too long. If you’ve seen what Disney is making lately, that’s not really all that high of a bar.
This is going to happen, and when it does, the entire structure of corporate media will be challenged. Without an oligopoly on content creation and distribution, and with a democratization of film and TV production that AI promises, we’re rapidly going to progress to a point where all that really matters is the relationship between the storyteller and their audience.
Without gatekeepers and middlemen in a position to decide what we see and what we don’t.
It’s exciting, though perhaps a little scary. But it’s inevitable. The status quo is old and decrepit and dying, and we as a public have decided it does not serve us well.
Innovation is coming. The creative destruction of the free market is coming. It’s here, actually.
Nobody knows what this is going to mean. So conservatives who’ve been frozen out of corporate media for a half-century might start thinking about launching a conquest of media.
The Ellisons seem to be doing in real life what Mike Holman’s gang does in Blockbusters. Don’t bet against them.
But also, don’t bet against that geek in front of his computer.
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