“We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.” –Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis
When Donald Trump announced the banning of three news outlets—MSNOW, CNN, and Politico—from White House on Sept. 17, he crossed a bright line protecting the First Amendment, and alarms spread as almost never happens. Even his far-right media allies like Newsmax were against him.
But that “bolt from the blue” was hardly isolated. It came right alongside Trump appointees closing the Kennedy Center, the culmination of a long-running attack on artistic freedom, and Trump’s broader effort to reshape American culture to reflect his bigoted worldview. And it was echoed before and after by two breathtaking exercises of oligarchic power to do just the same.
Prior to Trump’s press ban came the expulsion of the pro-Palestinian rapper Macklemore from megastar Ed Sheeran’s Loop tour under oligarchic threat—spearheaded by stadium-owner Robert Kraft—which quickly resulted in the rest of the tour’s musicians withdrawing from it, several of them citing their Irish heritage as victims of colonialism.
The next Monday, Sept. 21, the Democratic state attorneys general who had sued to block the Paramount/Warner Brothers mega-merger announced they’d reached a deal that would allow the merger to go forward, only to be blasted by critics in the Block The Merger Coalition, which then filed an amicus brief to stop the merger later in the week.
“Consolidating the media in the hands of friendly oligarchs is right out of the authoritarian playbook,” said Jessica J. González, Co-CEO of media reform group Free Press, a key partner of the Coalition. “What’s exceedingly clear is that our laws and our political system are not strong enough to resist the pressure and manipulation of corrupt billionaires.”
“Allowing one Trump-aligned, foreign-owned conglomerate to dominate American news and entertainment is a disastrous outcome,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
Collectively, these four developments starkly exposed how First Amendment freedoms are fundamental to democracy, and how concentrated wealth and power are fundamentally opposed to them. While the machinations involved may seem complex, and the actors far removed, results were felt immediately here in the harbor area—particularly within the arts where censorship has historically cast its dark shadow.
Lisa DeSmidt, Executive Director at the Arts Council for Long Beach, made the connection directly.
“Public art spaces belong to the public,” she said. “When the nation’s cultural center is closed to the people it was built for, and artwork is removed without notice or explanation, that’s a loss of access and a threat to free expression.
“Those decisions don’t stay in Washington,” she explained. “The Kennedy Center’s reach extends far beyond one building. Through VSA at the Kennedy Center, the Arts Council for Long Beach has received support for arts programs serving young people with disabilities in our city. When access is cut off at the top, communities like ours feel it first, and the people who lose the most are the ones who already had the fewest doors open to them.”
Long Beach actor Ray Buffer echoed DeSmidt more viscerally.
“Shuttering a cultural landmark like the Kennedy Center sends a chilling message across the entire creative ecosystem,” he said. “Here in Southern California, we feel those losses acutely. When you shrink the map of where people can safely gather and challenge perspectives, you foster a dangerous precedent of self-censorship. We have to defend free expression everywhere, because an attack on speech anywhere diminishes us all.”
Performing artists contacted by Random Lengths responded forcefully to the censorship of Macklemore.
“I’ve never been much of an Ed Sheeran fan, but he is a complete disappointment,” said Long Beach singer-songwriter Karina Nistal. “As artists, it is our duty to speak for the voiceless and defend the rights of those who cannot defend themselves. Self-expression and advocacy is the job. I applaud the other performers for dropping the tour. Long live Palestine!”
“As a working musician with a conscience, I find what Ed did to be totally unacceptable, unaccountable, and tone deaf!” said Long Beach trumpet player and musical director Dave Williams. “By his not taking a stance and letting Macklemore get fired by his personal friend Robert Kraft (who owns several stadiums and colluded with other stadium owners to get Macklemore kicked off the tour), Ed failed his fans in general. And lost a great deal of respect as a person.”
“All Macklemore did was tell the truth,” Williams went on to say. “Nothing was AI or made up. Macklemore ran existing footage of the War In Gaza (read by me: Genocide),” referring to the video that accompanied Macklemore’s song “Hind’s Hall,” which addresses the very censorship turned on him, as well as the genocide and the movement opposing it, which includes Jewish organizations like Jewish Voices for Peace as well as many individual Jews.
Part of one verse reads as follows:
You can ban TikTok, take us out the algorithm
But it’s too late, we’ve seen the truth, we bear witness
Seen the rubble, the buildings, the mothers and the children
And all the men that you murdered, and then we see how you spin it
Who gets the right to defend and who gets the right of resistance
Has always been about dollars and the color of your pigment, but
White supremacy is finally on blast
Screamin’ “Free Palestine” ’til they’re home at last
The next verse goes on to denounce the lies “Claimin’ it’s antisemitic to be anti-Zionist,” citing “Jewish brothers and sisters out there and ridin’ in solidarity and screamin’ ‘Free Palestine’ with them.”
Two other artists took a broader view.
“Sheeran’s tour fallout illustrates the problems with corporatizing art. While companies conform to the status quo, artists question it,” said San Pedro-based jazz vocalist Adriana Nicole. “Curtailing free expression by threatening one’s livelihood is especially dangerous for artists, who feel deeply and often reflect cultural shifts before they become mainstream, acting as catalysts for social change,” she said, adding a quote from Toni Cade Bambara: “The role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible.”
“Artists hold a subversive power that threatens authority, which the establishment knows, and why it actively seeks to censor the artist who dares speak out against it,” Nicole said. “Billie Holiday sang ‘Strange Fruit’ during Jim Crow, risking not only her career but her safety, effectively compelling listeners to confront racism. It’s also why she died under arrest.”
Turning to the present, she continued, “While Sheeran’s cowardly decision to submit to Messina and Kraft puts him on the wrong side of history, it ultimately reveals deeper issues surrounding the evils of capitalism, and for Gaza, settler colonial economics. The irony is that the backlash only amplified Macklemore’s message, emboldened other artists to take a public stand, and raised millions for the cause. Bravo!”
While Nicole spoke in broad moral terms, Long Beach experimental music artist Sander Roscoe Wolff drilled down into specifics.
“The controversy surrounding Macklemore’s removal from Ed Sheeran’s tour has, in my view, mistakenly focused on Sheeran, rather than the real culprit: Robert Kraft. It is the outrageous entitlement of the billionaire class to limit free expression that should be the focus of our collective ire,” Wolff said.
“Louis Messina, owner of the Messina Touring Group, caved to the pressure from Kraft and his co-owners. It was his decision, not Sheeran’s, to remove Macklemore,’ he explained. “It would be great if people boycotted concerts promoted by the MTG’s artists, including Eric Church, George Strait, Kenny Chesney, Old Dominion, Phoebe Bridgers, The Lumineers, Ty Myers, and the Zac Brown Band, and the holdings of the Kraft family, including Gillette Stadium, Patriot Place, and his soccer team, the New England Revolution. Sadly, we must vote with our dollars, as we can no longer blindly accept the malfeasance of late-stage capitalists.”
There’s an added twist to all this: the stadium involved has massive public subsidies, meaning the owners are using public money to fund their private, secretly coordinated censorship. Kraft’s Gillette Stadium is one of just two that are built without public funds. However, it still received $120 million in indirect public funding—$72 million for transportation infrastructure and $48 million in real estate taxes not charged.
There’s also another layer of subsidies involved: the entire NFL business model is built on a 60 -plus year old anti-trust exemption, that’s been the foundation for its massive economic growth. The exemption is so fundamental to how the NFL has grown that it’s virtually impossible to place a value on it.
And speaking of anti-trust exemptions, that brings us directly back to the Paramount/Warner Brothers merger.
“I don’t think these two companies should merge, but that’s not something that we are focused on with our resolution here,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said, in announcing the deal.
“We are disappointed that Attorney General Bonta went back on his promise to enforce the law and protect consumers and workers,” said Free Press Co-President Jessica González, “Based on all reports, this weak deal contains nothing but unenforceable, empty Paramount promises.”
Veteran columnist Dan Walters called it “the latest episode of California officials confronting big corporate interests over some issue, loudly promising to make business executives change their ways and then caving in,” adding that “The corporation often makes some minor concessions that allow the officials to save face.”
The underlying problem is the unaccountable power of corporations.
“Essentially, corporate interests such as Paramount take a long view of conflicts with political figures such as Newsom, Brown and Bonta,” Walters summed up. “They will make minor concessions if the net result is a bottom line profit, while politicians issue press releases claiming victory, no matter how peripheral.”
Depending on politicians to be the heroes is clearly a mistake. The larger landscape of who holds power needs to be changed. “We need to strengthen democratic systems of government, including getting money out of politics, and pass laws that break up big media conglomerates,” González said. “We need to ensure that a few billionaires can’t drown out the masses to dictate bad policy.”
Not to mention dictating who and what gets heard.
Melina Paris contributed reporting for this story.