Morning Joe Sounds Alarm: Conservatives Are No Longer Silencing the Media —They’re Taking It Over

Axios founder Jim VandeHei sounded the alarm about the threat of a conservative takeover of the media landscape during a Tuesday morning appearance on Morning Joe.

The conversation was centered around the Disney/ABC decision to end the indefinite suspension of late-night host Jimmy Kimmel after only missing a handful of shows, and FCC Brendan Carr’s attempt to walk back initial comments in which he appeared to have threatened regulations and investigations if Kimmel was not suspended or fired.

“Most conservatives that you’ve known throughout your lifetime believe in free speech,” VandeHei replied to Joe Scarborough, ostensibly praising Senator Ted Cruz for pushing back on the Trump administration’s actions. “One of the reasons Donald Trump won was a massive backlash against the curtailing of speech by Democrats in their estimation and in reality, in many cases. And so the idea that you’re then going to do exactly to them what they did to you, is patently nonsensical, and so it’s not that surprising that Cruz would do it.”

“I do think you’re right that so few Republicans have spoken up against Trump. I don’t want to be the skunk at the party, but step back. Like, if you’re watching this, you’re like, ‘Oh, this is great, now maybe things will get reset,'” the Axios founder continued.

“Look at what’s happening around this in terms of conservatives making a lot of progress in being able to not just silence media, but kind of start to take it over,” he warned, before offering evidence in support of his claim:

You already have Elon Musk controlling X. If you look at what is happening with this TikTok deal, it’s largely going to end up in the hands of Oracle, it looks like the Murdochs, people that are sympathetic to Trump. So you’re going to have the two biggest platforms that shape the reality for the largest number of people under the control of people who are quite friendly to the existing federal government. Then you look at even the Kimmel thing. When you’re talking about these affiliates like Nextar or any company that can decide what to air ABC, they control that. They’re trying to merge. When those two merge and if they get the approval of the merger because they’ve done the things that the administration wants to see them to do, this consolidates power over a lot of local broadcasting, which is what the vast majority of people over the age of say 60 or 65, who might vote in and off your election, are paying attention to. So Republicans are making a tremendous amount of progress in terms of starting to even the playing field in terms of who is putting the message out there.

He’s right, however, you can almost hear the preemptive conservative chorus insisting that powers that be that control legacy media have always been on the left side of the spectrum, despite conservative-minded Fox News dominating ratings over the past two decades.

Watch above via MSNBC.

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