Who Owns The Media

🔥 Episode Summary

This isn’t just about one headline.
 It’s not even just about one politician.

This is about the system.

In this episode, I break down what’s happening beneath the surface — the distractions, the narratives, and the moves being made while we’re all busy reacting in real time.

Because the truth is…
 the loudest stories aren’t always the most important ones.

We’re talking power.
 We’re talking control.
 And we’re talking about how it actually impacts you, your rights, and your future.

If you’ve been feeling like something is off but can’t quite put your finger on it… this episode is for you.

🎧 What You’ll Hear

•  Why focusing only on Trump misses the bigger picture 
•  How political distractions actually work 
•  The role of media, money, and influence 
•  What’s happening behind the scenes right now 
•  Why this moment feels different (and why it matters) 
•  How this connects to everyday people — not just politics 

📺 Watch & Listen

New episodes every Tuesday:
 🎥 YouTube: 9:00 AM Central
 🎧 Podcast Platforms: Midnight Central

🌐 Links & Resources

🔗 https://briceland.com

🔗 https://ChristyChanel.com

📱 Follow Me Everywhere

🎵 TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@ChristiChanelle

 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ChristiChanelle

 📘 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SassyPolitics

 🦋 BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/SassyPolitics.social

 ▶️ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@SassyPolitics

☕ Support: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/SassyPolitics

⚠️ Disclaimer

This content may include satirical commentary, altered media, or opinion-based analysis intended for educational, entertainment, or advocacy purposes. Any video clips, images, or quotes that have been edited or recreated are clearly intended as political or cultural critique—not factual representations. Viewer discretion and independent research are encouraged.

Transcript

Basement Mode And The Stakes

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Okay, okay. So I said we weren't doing full basement mode yet, you know, tinfoil hat. Um I did say that in the last episode. Go back and listen. I said, and I quote, today we're doing facts. Well, guess what? Facts led me to the basement. Facts handed me a tinfoil hat and said, You earned this. So here we are. Welcome to level three. Bring snacks. You are going to need it. And I emotionally eat when I'm stressed out. So, um, yeah. Because the last episode we talked about the building. Who owns the apartment complex? The illusion of variety, different logos, same landlord. And I told you, once your eyes open to that, it gets really hard to go back. Well, today, today we are naming the landlords by name. First and last. Because we are done being polite about this. And before anybody comes for me in the comments, which I know they will, let me be clear. I am not a conspiracy theorist. I am a woman with a search engine, a receipt folder, and a deep abiding distrust to anyone that tells me to stop asking questions. That's it. That's the whole platform. So, let's go. I'm Christy Chanel, and this is Sassy Politics. Welcome back to Sassy Politics, where we say the quiet part out loud and bring politics back to the human level, where it actually belongs. And today we are going full investigative journalist. This is the bonus episode. This is level three. And if you haven't listened to the previous episode yet, go do that first and then come back because this builds. Okay, still here? Good. Let's talk about money, power, and the six names you probably half know, but maybe haven't connected all the way yet. So we talked about how a small group of massive companies, Comcast, Disney, Warner Bros. Amazon, owns a huge share of what you consume every day. But here's what I didn't get deep enough into: those companies. They also have owners, investors, shareholders, people at the very top of the food chain who are not reporters, not editors, not even really media people in the traditional sense. They are money people. And the irony is so am I, except I'm an AR manager, so I bring money in. These are power people. And some of them have very specific ideas about what the world should look like. And they have the infrastructure to push those ideas into your brain every single morning while you're drinking your coffee and scrolling your phone. So let's just go a little bit deeper than we did last time. Okay. I need you to meet the three names that barely anyone talks about, but they sit quietly at the top of almost everything: BlackRo, Vanguard, State Street. These are investment firms, asset managers. They do not make movies, they do not anchor the news, they do not have a logo you'd recognize on a TV screen. And that's exactly the point. This is what they do. They collectively manage over$20 trillion in assets. That number is so large, it's basically fake. But it's real. And because they manage that money through index funds, they hold significant ownership stakes in almost every major publicly traded company in the United States, including the companies that own the media you consume. Hmm, interesting. A Harvard study found that either Vanguard, BlackRock, or State Street is the largest listed owner of 88% of SP 500 companies. And that includes major media parent companies. Now, I want to be fair here because I said we're doing facts. The way this works is it's not the same as one person sitting in a room deciding what stories get told. These firms manage money on behalf of millions of everyday investors like you and me. Your 401k might literally be invested through one of them right now. I need to look at that. These firms do vote their shares at shareholder meetings. They influence who sits on corporate boards. They have enormous leverage over executive compensation and major company decisions. And when you hold a significant stake in ABC's parent company and CNN's parent company and Fox's Parent Company, all at the same time, you have a quiet but very real interest in the stability and direction of all of them. Boomerang has called BlackRock the fourth branch of the government because it's one of the only private entities that works directly with the Federal Reserve. Yeah. Yeah. Let that sink in for a second. Mm-hmm. Now here's what makes this feel a little tinfoily, but is actually just math. State Street is partly owned by BlackRock. Okay, I'm gonna say that one more time. State Street is partly owned by BlackRock. Got a visual? Okay. And BlackRock's largest shareholder is Vanguard. So when people say follow the money, sometimes the money just leads you in a circle of three companies that own each other while also owning everything else. I'm not saying that they're evil. I'm saying that when this much financial ownership is concentrated in these few hands, and these hands have a financial interest in maintaining a certain kind of stability and certain kind of narrative, we are not talking about neutral at this point. We're talking about structural influence. And you deserve to know that that exists. And if you're not paying attention, you don't. So let's talk about some names that you actually do recognize. Because these are not passive index fund managers like the ones we just spoke about. These are people who made very specific decisions to own and influence media. And they do it very differently. Rupert Murdoch. If media power had a final boss, for decades it was this man. He built an empire that includes Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, The Times of London, and the newspapers across Australia and the UK. Wow. I did not know he didn't just have this country. That's crazy. From one family, one ideology, reaching audiences across three continents. And just in case you thought things were changing, in September 2025, the Murdoch family reached a settlement that handed full control of the empire to his son Lachlan, who is explicitly described as politically conservative. The deal was literally structured to ensure Fox News would never change its political direction. Convenient. So this all just makes so much freaking sense to me. Fox News settled a defamation lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems for$787.5 million. A number that only came out because of discovery documents that showed producers and hosts knew the election fraud claims were false and pushed them anyway. Because it was profitable. And you want to call that journalism? No, absolutely not. And the wild part is Trump has made nearly 20 appearances on Fox News in a single election cycle. Their ratings crush every competitor. Their stock has soared. So what is the lesson here? Sensationalism and fear are the most profitable things on television. And when profit and truth are in a head-to-head competition, we already know which one usually wins. Jeff Bezos. In 2013, the founder of Amazon, who, by the way, holds government cloud computing contracts through Amazon Web Services with the CIA, the Department of Defense, and basically every major intelligence agency, bought the Washington Post for$250 million. Now, I'm not going to sit here and tell you that Bezos personally calls the newsroom every morning with orders. There's no evidence of that. But I will tell you this when the owner of a major newspaper is simultaneously one of the largest government contractors in the country, and that newspaper covers the government, that is a conflict of interest that deserves a lot more conversation than it gets. The Washington Post recently gutted its newsroom and pulled back from certain coverage. Bezos also directly intervened to pull a presidential endorsement the editorial board had already drafted. Whether you think that was right or wrong isn't really the point. The point is one billionaire made that call for one of the most historically influential newspapers in the world. Elon Musk. In 2022, Musk bought Twitter, now called X, for$44 billion. He then fired a significant portion of the trust and safety team, reinstated banned accounts, and has used the platform to openly champion political candidates and causes, including the current administration. X is not just a political media company anymore, it's the town square. It's where breaking news lives and dies. It's where politicians talk directly to the public. And it is owned by one man who uses it as a personal and political instrument. I stopped using X a long time ago. Peter Thiel. And I want you to pay close attention here because this one is not in the headlines the way others are. And I think that's very intentional. Peter Thiel co-founded PayPal. He was an early investor in Facebook, which is data, and he co-founded Palantir, which is surveillance. God, that makes me so nervous. You don't even know how nervous Palantir makes me. Um, Palantir is a data analytics company that was started in 2023 with CIA funding. That name comes from the all-seeing crystal balls in Lord of the Rings, the ones that corrupted their users by showing them only partial, manipulated versions of reality. And I'm not making that up. Like, what the actual fuck? That is the mythology the founder chose to name his surveillance company after. So if you were looking at good versus evil, um, which side would that be on? Just asking a question here. Palantir currently has contracts with the Department of Defense, the FBI, the NSA, and ICE. In 2025, the US Army awarded Palantir a$10 billion contract, consolidating access to virtually every Army database. In April 2025, ICE paid Palantir$30 million for a system that provides near real-time tracking of immigrants and their movements. There are reports of Palantir building infrastructure to merge government data on American citizens across agencies. Tax records, immigration records, health data into a unified system. And Peter Thiel, he was a major donor to both Trump and J.D. Vance. The technology he funded is now the operational backbone of the current administration's enforcement machine. And that is not a media company in the traditional sense, but controlling what data the government has on you and controlling how information flows through surveillance and targeting systems, that is information control. I need you to stay with me here. Because some people hear all of this and think, okay, so rich people control the narrative. That's just how it is. And it's always been that way. And that's just half the truth and half dangerous. It has always been this way. And every time in history, when it got that bad, there were consequences. Serious, serious consequences. So let's learn from them. William Randolph Hearst, late 1800s. This man owned a chain of newspapers and decided that he wanted a war with Spain. Not because of some grand geopolitical strategy, but because war sells papers, and why the fuck not? His reporter in Cuba sent back a telegram that said, essentially, there's nothing happening here, can I come home? Hearst reportedly replied, You furnish the pictures, I'll furnish the war. Now, historians debate whether that quote is real, but what's not debated is what happened next. His papers ran sensationalized, often fabricated stories about Spanish atrocities in Cuba. They blame Spain for the explosion of the USS Marine before anyone knew what caused it. They screamed for war in giant headlines every day. And in 1898, the United States went to war with Spain. His paper even ran a front-page headline that said, and I am quoting, How do you like the journal's war? He literally took credit for a war because it moved papers and it worked. His circulation hit one million. Does that sound familiar? Sensationalism. Fear. Emotional manipulation. Outrage sells. Different century. Same playbook. Goebbels and Nazi Germany. Now, this is one I want to handle very carefully. You can't just slap a Nazi comparison on everything, and we've we've been doing that a lot. And that is lazy and it minimizes real atrocities. But there are specific factual lessons here that we have to talk about. Joseph Goebbels was the Reich minister of propaganda. He controlled the press. He controlled the radio. He controlled what images were seen and what was suppressed. He coordinated all media into one voice with one message. And the outcome was that millions of ordinary people, just regular people, not monsters, were convinced to accept and participate in atrocities because the narrative that they were fed made it feel justified. They made it feel necessary, almost patriotic. The lesson is not that we are Nazi Germany, because we are not. The lesson is the narrative control, real systematic, centralized narrative control, is one of the most dangerous weapons ever developed. And it does not require a military. It just requires owning enough microphones. Soviet state media. The Soviet model was different, less hysterical, just more suffocating. The state controlled all information. There was no fake variety. Just Pravada, which literally means the truth. And that was it. But what happened? People stopped trusting anything. Not just propaganda, anything. When you know the information you're receiving is manipulated, you develop kind of a permanent cynicism that makes collective action just about impossible. You just don't know who to believe. You don't know what's real, so you just survive. You stop trying to understand and you just try to get through the damn day. Does any of that sound familiar? Because I feel like a lot of Americans are in that exhausted, cynical place right now. Of course, we don't have Soviet state media, but the overload, the manipulation, the constant performance, it creates the same emotional result. Paralysis, distrust, withdrawal. Operation Mockingbird. This one is real. Confirmed, declassified. This is not a theory. During the Cold War, the CIA ran a program that, by their own admission, involved relationships with over 400 journalists across major American news outlets. This included the New York Times, CBS, and Newsweek. These journalists were paid, briefed, and in some cases directed to write stories that served U.S. intelligence interests. The operation was exposed in the 1970s through the Church Committee Congressional Investigations and by journalist Carl Bernstein. Yes, the same Carl Bernstein from Watergate. The CIA director at the time publicly stated the agency would stop placing material in American media. So whether you believe they actually stopped is none of my business. What is not debatable is that it happened. The government covertly shaped what Americans read in their newspapers, which means it's entirely possible that it's happening again. The press, which is supposed to be the adversarial check on power, was at least partially domesticated by power. There's no conspiracy there. This is a congressional finding. The receipts exist. So Let's put all of this together. 1890s, a rich man decides what war to start because it helps his business. 1930s and 40s, a government decides what reality its citizens are allowed to perceive. Cold War, an intelligent agency, quietly infiltrates the press. Today, six or seven individuals, and my son would jump in and say, six, seven, um, and three massive financial institutions hold significant influence over the majority of what you watch, read, share, and scroll. The specific mechanisms change. The people change. But the pattern, the pattern is the same. Powerful people. When they get control of information, they use it to protect and expand their power. I mean, it's not always malicious. It's not always conscientious either. And the thing that makes this more complicated than the historical examples that I just gave you is that the manipulation is not just on your television. It's in your hand. It knows your name. It knows what makes you angry. It is optimizing for your most vulnerable emotional moments. It's serving you content at 2 a.m. when you can't sleep and you're already anxious. And the algorithm knows that about you. That's a level of access to the human mind that Hearst couldn't have even dreamed of. So before you spiral, because I see you, I am you, and what it feels like to learn all of this and just want to throw your phone in the lake. Let me bring it back down. And you need to know this is definitely not hopeless. Knowing this is the beginning of being hard to manipulate. Because here's what all of these systems, from Hearst to Craballs, to Mockingbird to Algorithm, from Hearst to Craballs to Mockingbird to the algorithm, all have in common. They only work when you don't see them. The second you can identify the frame, the frame loses its grip on you. Not completely, not forever, but enough. So here's your homework. And I'm serious about this. The next time you feel a strong emotional reaction to a headline, especially anger, fear, and that can you believe this feeling? Pause just for five seconds and ask yourself who benefits from me feeling this way right now? Who put this in front of me? What am I not being shown? That's it. That's the whole skill. Five seconds. That question. You don't have to have all the answers. You just have to stop being on autopilot. Because the machine, whether it's a 19th-century newspaper baron, a Cold War intelligence agency, or a 21st century algorithm, the machine depends on you not asking that question. So ask it every time. And then tell somebody else to ask it too. Because that is how this spreads. By people deciding that their brains belong to them. We are building something at LinkedWeStand. A community where people can talk about this stuff without feeling crazy, where you can ask hard questions and not get canceled or dismissed or mocked for wanting to understand the world you actually live in. Go to LinkedWeStand.com, click get involved at the top right, put your information in and get started with us. Because this is not a solo mission. It never was. You are not crazy, you are not paranoid, you are paying attention. And paying attention is the most revolutionary thing you can do right now. I am Christy Chanel. This is Sassy Politics. I will see you next Tuesday. And yes, I know. I said we weren't doing a full basement mode yet. I lied, but only a little bit of a little bit of a little bit more