the real story is the way the country's obscenely rich have hijacked new and old media to pour lemon juice in the country's unhealed race and gender wounds to divide the electorate and derail genuine progressive reform, justice-oriented taxation, and corporate oversight

now THAT's a story

when the press covers its own consolidation it's paragraph after paragraph of stenographed business analysts ignoring documented history and chittering about synergies and scale

the actual impact on real people, competition, markets, and labor is of absolutely ZERO interest to any of these people

again it's this very weird, narrow, simulacrum of journalism, shot exclusively through the lens of corporate business interests, that couldn't give any less of a fuck about the real-world impact of unchecked corporate power, corruption, consumer rights, the impact on the arts, or anything else

when you take on this level of debt you inevitably turn to layoffs and corner cutting and price hikes to please Wall Street's demand for impossible quarterly growth, and it inevitably goes downhill from there (in a saturated market esp), regardless of what a clever special boy you think you are

it's not just "regulating AI" they're fighting. They're also trying to ban states from protecting the environment, protecting labor, or holding companies accountable for fraud.

The focus is on "AI" to sell the idea that they're protecting amazing American innovation from mean old government.

The fact that it created more millionaires is proof that taxing the rich works!

Those taxes don’t exist in a vacuum: they get reinvested in social programs that actually improve peoples’ lives, not pork barrel projects and overly complex wonkery that helps like 3 people.