Advocates fighting for a better future understandably tire of playing defense. Their fatigue comes from always working to stop bad things from happening, or sometimes just to make them slightly less bad. They hunger for positive and proactive policies instead.

Of course, we need both stances. It’s hard to build something new when you’re getting run over and run off the field. Defense alone can’t produce a truly independent and in-depth press, free from undue corporate and government influence. But if we stop defending against blatant censorship and runaway consolidation, there’s little room left for viable alternative outlets. The U.S. populace may not hold the media in particularly high regard at the moment. We face a fractured and truth-challenged world, with Trump poisoning public discourse and launching a decade’s worth of attacks on the press as “an enemy of the American people.” Yet, even as this authoritarian president attacks specific journalists, he retains the fig leaf of providing his followers with the “truth” on social media and decries only what he labels “fake news.” So, if people agree that they want reliable facts and news—even if they can’t agree on what counts as a fact anymore—why do we rely on failing, advertising-driven business models and continually under-invest in the production of quality journalism and civic information? What problems stand in the way of producing this public good? Trump himself, and his entire administration, are obviously a searing threat to journalism and to individual journalists’ livelihoods, safety, and freedom. Threats to shut out, silence, assault, or jail journalists are hardly a new or uniquely American phenomenon, but the rapid crescendo of such attacks under the second Trump administration is beyond alarming. At Free Press, we work to educate people about such harms, pass policies that protect against them (like shield laws and jawboning protections), and defend individual journalists from arrest and attack. Free Press also fights corporate media consolidation, even though we don’t believe corporate media alone will produce journalism that serves all of us. There’s a tight nexus between authoritarianism and corporate consolidation. Merger parties will capitulate quickly to a corrupt regime in order to get their transactions approved. (It’d be nice to think that the fourth estate’s ethics make it immune to such tactics, but in an era of the Ellison family promising favorable coverage of the administration in exchange for antitrust approvals, we can’t fool ourselves.)

Recent developments like Disney standing up against the FCC’s threats to its ABC broadcast licenses, and even going on offense about the chilling impact of that agency’s actions, show that the tide may be turning. Big companies may have learned to stop routinely retreating, capitulating, and complying in advance when this administration pushes too far.

Yet even if the largest and most well-heeled outlets can stand up to those threats, there are still reasons to be concerned about media consolidation in authoritarian times.

For one, having fewer competing viewpoints and competing journalists is worse for expanding our horizons and uncovering the truth. For two, having fewer strong voices in the marketplace for ideas gives a government bent on censorship and narrative control a smaller number of chokepoints it needs to squeeze and coerce.

What’s more, even without an image-obsessed autocratic president overtly demanding more favorable coverage of himself and his administration, corporate consolidation is bad news. At Free Press, we’ve documented when fighting mergers and regulatory rollbacks that antitrust laws and broadcast ownership limits are necessary and effective in preserving local journalism, competition, and diversity. The promise that larger conglomerates will take their excess profits and pour them back into improved and increased coverage is a phony, trickle-down economics argument. Increased hours of news after a television merger often means nothing more than duplicate stories and repeat newscasts, choked with watered-down national stories instead of truly local reporting. Companies insulating themselves from competitive pressures through mergers and acquisitions of rivals won’t invest more, they’ll just use the profits to pay shareholders or pay down the massive debts they ran up to make the merger happen in the first place. Broadcast journalism and media is special, insofar as rules limiting ownership, reach, and even content have generally survived constitutional scrutiny till now. The “public interest standard,” based on a spectrum scarcity rationale, has meant that the FCC can to some degree decide who speaks over the nation’s airwaves. Brendan Carr has become Trump’s censorship czar, and whether cynically or fervently or a toxic mixture of both, he’s bent that standard perhaps beyond the breaking point in less than two years of Trump’s second term. It’s even more difficult, in American jurisprudence and under the First Amendment, to do anything about the size and reach of corporate media companies that don’t use broadcast licenses. Free Press has used antitrust tools to beat media and tech mergers, including but not limited to broadcast deals. A storied line of U.S. Supreme Court cases confirms that undue economic concentration can violate federal antitrust law, even if the commercial “product” is protected by freedom of speech and freedom of the press. And there have been antitrust consent decrees and limits on non-broadcast industry sub-sectors, like film studio control of movie theaters and television network control of TV show production. But calls to strengthen or change our antitrust laws, to account not only for consumer welfare and workers’ rights but also political economy and even news concentration, haven’t resulted in any statutory changes yet. And those changes would be tested politically and constitutionally if and when they’re proposed. In other words, advocates have tools to prevent undue concentration, but there’s no way to prevent all mergers and set a strict limit on reach. And even if there were, many First Amendment advocates would argue strenuously against such limits, as a cure that is worse than the disease of corporate consolidation—or at least dangerous in different ways.

Because we can’t limit the size and reach of all corporate journalism companies, and we recognize the pitfalls and dangers in trying to do so, Free Press has never been solely focused on striving for a more perfect corporate media. We need a more complete view of the journalistic ecosystem to compensate for the limits of corporate owners, publishers, and speakers.

We’ve written about how journalism is a public good that will be under-produced if it depends solely on an attention economy and sensationalist appeal, especially when the number of online content choices from human creators (and now AI too) is astonishingly large. That puts pressure on traditional cross-subsidies for news by advertising-supported television and print companies. And that prompts harmful calls to move money away from extractive tech platforms right back to the hedge funds and corporate conglomerates running the country’s largest newspapers and TV station groups. Free Press Action opposes these kinds of bills at the federal and state level too. It’s also readily apparent that “if it bleeds, it leads” local news was never healthiest for the local communities doing the bleeding, and that a focus on the crime beat and other fear-mongering to get eyeballs on the nightly newscast perpetuates racism but doesn’t produce the kind of civic information people need. That’s why Free Press has always seen public media as a key complement to corporate outlets. Communities benefit from having a wide range of community-centered, non-commercial, and non-profit newsrooms, with at least the potential for government funding. Public money is not anathema to a free press, so long as there’s a firewall between the legislative decisions on such funding and the editorial decisions made by its recipients. An ecosystem that includes robust public media improves the quality and amount of accountability journalism produced. It’s no accident that an authoritarian Trump administration finished the job started decades ago by Republican lawmakers to zero out federal funding for public broadcasting. Free Press fought that rescission. More than PBS, NPR, and the largest non-commercial stations, those cuts hurt stations serving less densely populated, less privileged, and less affluent communities, as well as independent filmmakers and documentarians whose work finds a home on public media. Yet the prior Corporation for Public Broadcasting was never enough. We need to reimagine public media, to make it more decentralized, truly local, and resilient to political funding decisions.

That doesn’t mean taking government funding out of the equation, and forcing non-commercial stations to rely solely on “underwriting” or charity from well-to-do donors. It means projects like the New Jersey Civic Info Consortium that Free Press helped conceive and create. These kinds of models are gaining momentum in other states too. The idea is to gather public money from general treasury revenues or dedicated tax and funding streams, then administer newsroom grants independently to foster the production of civic information and responsive journalism.

There’s no silver bullet or single answer to preserving quality journalism against the dangers of corporate consolidation and government censorship. But public dollars drawn from diverse sources and administered independently can fund non-commercial journalism by and for the people in communities never fully served by corporate media outlets.