Let’s take an honest look at ourselves for just a minute. Let’s drop the platitude of “America, Land of the Free!” Let’s just truly “keep it real” for this moment. Here it is:

The United States does not have a “free press.”

Nope. Sorry to blow up your dreams. But, America doesn’t have a free press, we have a free (unchecked) free market. And those are not the same thing.

When information is funded by advertising, the product isn’t truth. The product is attention. And attention has a favorite flavor:

• outrage
• fear
• identity
• the agenda of wealthy owners

Sound familiar? There is a better way to do media and Germany learned this lesson with blood and crushing oppression by a fascistic regime.

We need to talk about this graphic. The lesson the German people learned in the WWII era was to not allow a government, partisan propaganda machine to be legalized, normalized in order to help turn neighbors into enemies and allies into silent, complicit followers. After Hitler, they didn’t say, “Let’s just be more careful next time.”

They said:
We will never again allow information to be shaped solely by power or profit.

Note the part of that phrase “or profit.” In 1930’s Germany, wealthy oligarchs owned and controlled a large chunk of German media. People like Max Amann, Alfred Hugenberg, Julius Streicher, and the Bertelsmann Publishing Group – a family-owned media operation that called itself “religious” – all benefited heavily from a partnership with the Nazi regime and remained mostly compliant and complicit with the Nazis in order to protect their wealth.

That’s why today, Germany says – “we will not forget!” And it means not forget what the government did, and not forget what the wealthiest of the wealthy did, either. More on that in a bit.

Meanwhile, in America, we continue to tout a system where:

• Billionaires own major media outlets, even men from another country, like Elon Musk and Rupert Murdoch
• Local journalism is collapsing under the weight of takeovers by corporations and private equity firms who demand profit over truth and fact finding
• Algorithms reward emotional manipulation and horrific posts as were formerly contained by the likes of Twitter and Facebook, but now stand unchallenged by men who’ve bowed to Donald Trump
• “Balance” has now become a buzzword for platforming misinformation

And then we act surprised when people can’t tell what’s real. Here’s the uncomfortable truth:

• A market doesn’t reward truth.
• It rewards what sells.
• And what sells is rarely calm, nuanced, and patient.
• It’s loud.
• It’s reactive.
• It’s echo chamber exclusive.

How Exclusive? This graphic tells the story: What we see isn’t decided by Journalists, it’s decided by Billionaires. And why would billionaires want to own a media information outlet when they rarely make money like other products?

One Word: INFLUENCE!

Of these media owners, Murdoch, Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, and Pichai all attended the inauguration of Donald Trump – most in the front row. All of them have made large financial contributions to Trump’s campaigns and personal fundraisers.

Disney, the owners of ABC, very quickly agreed to a payout of $15 million personally to Trump when the president sued ABC over a comment he didn’t like. It is generally agreed ABC would have easily been found not guilty or liable in the case, but Disney settled. They couldn’t have other big projects that needed government approval – projects with bottom lines MUCH larger than ABC’s contribution in this huge corporation. And Disney knew an angry Trump could easily mean the end of their chances for needed government go ahead.

All of those facts resulted in award-winning Washington Post cartoonist Ann Telnaes drawing this political satire for the paper. It shows these wealthy men lining up in subjugation to Trump, bags of tribute money in hand.

But this cartoon never made it to publishing BECAUSE JEFF BEZOS WOULDN’T ALLOW IT TO BE! Ann Telnaes resigned from her long-standing job that day, saying she had never before had a cartoon nixed by someone at the paper.

So, back to Germany. The Germans understood the danger of the conflict between the pursuit for more wealth by billionaire owners and the requirements of journalistic truth. Germany’s plan didn’t eliminate bias and misinformation, but made sure the media landscape in their country could never be owned entirely by the state… or entirely by the market and the most wealthy. That tension is the point.

Because democracy and “government by the people” cannot be sustained by freedom alone. It requires an informed freedom.

Germany found a third lane between government controlled and market unregulated by developing two, public-controlled networks. Every household in Germany pays about €18 a month to fund journalism that’s created to inform… not just to attract clicks and influence.

And it’s overseen by a board made up from citizens across the spectrum of society – not politicians. The Germans knew, an information ecosystem is shaped by politics or profit will always be tainted by the idea of information coming from biased ownership.

Someone, somewhere along the line will always asking: “How do we keep them watching?” Not: “How do we help them understand?”

In America, some billionaire (perhaps a foreign-born one of influence) would scream “socialism” and cry over the roughly $20 per month tax to fund the free media. This would be to distract Americans from the idea that a few men and families owning the biggest information outlets in the world…

Is a BAD idea.

How Bad?

According to the 2026 Reporters Without Borders World Press Freedom Index, the United States has fallen to 64th out of 180 countries. This represented a drop of seven positions from the previous year, now classifying America’s media situation as “problematic”.

The decline is driven by rising legal threats against journalists, political attacks, and economic pressures on media outlets. The ranking also notes increased criminalization of journalism in the U.S., legal harassment of reporters, and political rhetoric targeting the press, leading to doxxing and death threats to major information figures. The report also specifically notes the open hostility of political rhetoric from Donald Trump being a major factor in the U.S. drop from 2015, a year in which the U.S. ranked 49th.

The American media landscape was also a significant contributor to the U.S. ranking’s decline. A high concentration of ownership among a few individuals and corporations was cited as having brought financial pressures, leading to news deserts and impacting the economic indicator.

The U.S. to 64th drops behind countries such as South Africa (21), Namibia (23), and even war-torn Ukraine (55). In 2015, the US was ranked 49th.

And Germany? They rank 11th.

And that’s the difference between Germany and the U.S. We claim to be free. Germany desires an educated and informed public who can keep their country “free.”

That’s where democracies either stabilize or…

…start to crack under a media controlled by self-interest, rather than a desire to help the people self-govern..