Emerald City Video

Back in May, while major corporations were hard at work finding novel ways to suck up to the Trump administration, something rather remarkable happened: Giant Bomb, one of the most storied and beloved names in gaming news, was freed from corporate control and purchased by a number of its past employees.

The news was greeted with celebration by the site’s audience, who were already unhappy with the way Giant Bomb had been handled by their (now former) corporate overlords.*

It was a great moment for them, and without being beholden to corporate money and overseers, the site has been able to thrive. With a subscription-based business model, they have to focus more on appealing to their audience, which makes their work a greater net good for the community.

In a media landscape shaped by a never-ending onslaught of layoffs and firings, it’s difficult to worry about little things like quality of life or how much writers are actually getting paid for their work. Giant Bomb stood out by taking actions that will make their employees’ situation materially better, while also serving the site’s audience.

Again, speaking to the audience is a key part of this. It’s how you develop relationships that will allow you to thrive without corporate money. It’s how so many of your favorite indie creators are now making a living, whether through direct sales or by utilizing platforms like Patreon and Ko-Fi.

Of course platforms — as I have said over and over again — are not your friend. Emerald City Video as a website comes to WordPress from Substack, where I could no longer feel okay supporting their Nazi Bar Problem.

For years, Substack has been the primary destination for independent journalists and writers — a great resource for creatives and thinkers who exist outside of mainstream corporate structures — but it has always been haunted by its ties to right-wing extremists and hate groups. No matter how many times they’re asked, Substack refuses to distance themselves from these users, and they have only very rarely made any effort to meaningfully moderate them.

That, of course, is not unlike social media platforms. Meta (nee Facebook) and X (nee Twitter) both actively support the Trump regime, with their CEOs attending Trump’s 2025 inauguration and donating millions to regime-aligned organizations. They have been key players in the right-wing radicalization pipeline and played a major role in the rise of western fascism in the 2020s. TikTok, nominally banned but with its execution permanently stayed after management did PR for Trump, is not much better. Even the supposed “left-wing echo chamber” at Bluesky sees censorship on issues like the Israel-Palestine conflict and other culture war nonsense where far-right users can exploit the report function.

Legacy media, meanwhile, is failing Americans in a spectacular way. The New York Times are in a perpetual abusive relationship with the President, constantly taking his beatings while begging for more. They helped Trump and Putin sabotage the Clinton campaign in 2016, have consistently sanewashed Trump’s craziest bullshit, and have been a major player in the anti-transgender hysteria which has taken over the Republican party’s platform.

Corporate ownership at The Washington Post is…well, it’s Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who has been very hands-on in making the paper more friendly to Trump and other oligarchs, ignoring the needs of his audience, even as the city that bears the paper’s name is under unlawful occupation by U.S. soldiers.

Vanity Fair just hired Olivia Nuzzi, the profoundly unethical reporter who failed to disclose she was having an affair with HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. while reporting on his failed Presidential campaign, to run their west coast office.

And, yes, American networks have gotten in on the fun. CBS, owned by Paramount/Skydance, recently announced the end of The Late Show, sending frequent Trump target Stephen Colbert to the unemployment line. They cited financial reasons (where have we heard that before?), but audiences generally found that difficult to believe since Colbert is number one in the late night ratings race and it isn’t especially close.

This week, the FCC explicitly went after Jimmy Kimmel Live! for the host’s criticism of the Trump regime, and when the administration said to jump, right-wing affiliate owners Nexstar and Sinclair asked “how high?” After Nexstar — also known as the company who bought and then ruined The CW — threatened ABC, the network (owned by Disney) balked and took Kimmel off the air indefinitely.

Not only does the FCC’s involvement here make it one of the most flagrant violations of the First Amendment in recent memory…but it raises questions about the quid pro quo happening in the background, as Nexstar is (like Paramount before it) beholden to the Trump Administration because they want to gobble up an even bigger share of the network TV market. With regulatory approval hanging over their head, they can be pushed even farther to the right than they already were in order to appease the regime.

While Trump has also taken aim at CBS’s 60 Minutes — and, yes, the network folded and effectively bribed him with a cash settlement no serious court would have awarded him — it’s telling that he has gone so hard after comedians and entertainers. Trump is a vain, petty narcissist who cannot stand being criticized, and while much of the establishment media is pretty much cowed into submission, comedians have never had any difficult finding flaws with the stupid, cruel, ill-mannered thug in the White House.

While the American right descends into a cancel culture frenzy following the murder of extremist Charlie Kirk, it is incumbent on actual patriots — not fanatics who appropriate the word — to reject attacks on the First Amendment, whether they come from government officials or their flying monkeys in the corporate media.

Yes, it would be great if we could repeal the Telecommunications Act of 1996. That might solve some problems. But it’s unrealistic, especially as long as the executive branch has full control over how both Congress and the Supreme Court behave.

What you can do, is to minimize the role of corporate media in your life. I currently write for The Beat, an Eisner Award-winning comics news site that is free of any corporate oversight and run by deeply ethical and empathetic people. Ditto Comic Book Club, where I contribute regularly. Those guys are some of the nicest, smartest people you’ll ever meet, and their comics coverage and analysis puts most of the writers at corporate-run sites to shame.

The good folks over at The Onion have been one of the most consistently fearless and entertaining voices in the Trump era, and their chief executive Ben Collins posted to Bluesky, “If you’re rich and not a coward, this is what you’d refer to as a ‘“’market opportunity’”’ to dominate a media ecosystem that’s about to be covered in grotesque government slop. To be a pop of color in a sea of beige will be easier than ever. People will flock to it. You gotta be a little brave, though.”

These are not isolated cases. Indie media is full of examples of people, publications, and platforms that are willing to say “hell no” when things are over the line. It’s time we took our ball — that is, the time, energy, attention, and money that drives the profits for media mega-corporations — and give it to those people.

There is no hope — not just for journalism, but for popular culture — if we continue to let cowards and thugs control the narrative. After decades of bad-faith arguments about a supposed “liberal media” boogeyman, the American right has cowed newspapers and networks entirely into submission. Those institutions are crumbling and, in many cases, damaged beyond repair. It’s time to build something new atop the rubble.

*For a while, Giant Bomb shared a parent company with my own former employer, ComicBook. Both of them were owned by CBS Interactive for a while, with Giant Bomb being sold to Red Ventures in 2020 and ComicBook going to Savage Ventures in August of last year. I don’t know much about their time with Red Ventures, but in 2022, Giant Bomb was sold again, this time to Fandom Inc., and it was apparently a terrible fit.