“Media Submission Index” ranks the American media according to their submission to Trump | information

The Free Press organization concluded at the end of last July, after a 6-month monitoring of the 35 largest American media companies, that companies such as Elon Musk’s

The organization, which was founded in 2003 and uses “chicken head symbols” to express degrees of surrender, seeks to expose the tendency of the media to be complicit with power and to call for reforms that guarantee the independence of the media and protect freedom of the press from the dominance of capital and politics.

The results were considered troubling at the time, especially at a time when some news empires were succumbing to blackmail by the Trump administration, including Disney, which owns ABC, Paramount, which owns CBS News, and Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns CNN.

Regarding the motives for launching the “Media Surrender Index,” Senior Director of Strategy and Communications Timothy Carr said that the idea was born after Trump took office for the first time in 2016, pointing out the president’s obsession with the way the media covers his news, his continuous attack on news organizations, and his quest to control them, especially during his current presidency, indicating that many media outlets have begun to respond to pressure. Trump.

Carr said in an interview conducted by E&P Editors and Publishers magazine that the Free Press organization identified the 35 largest media companies to study the changes that have occurred since Trump’s election at the end of last year, adding that the organization noticed the companies’ relentless efforts to show their loyalty to the president’s administration.

In response to a question about the types of surrender that the foundation found, he replied, “We identified 4 areas, one of which was paying sums of money to Trump and his family to settle lawsuits, another was reneging on previous commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion, the third was editorial manipulation or censorship, and the fourth was flattery by attending inauguration dinners or parties.”

He cited an example when several major technology companies (X, Meta, and Google) congratulated the president on his victory, while Jeff Bezos, owner of Amazon and the Washington Post, said he was very optimistic about the Trump administration, pledged to help him, and then donated millions of dollars to the inauguration committee.

Carr commented, “This type of media capitulation is not limited to these wealthy owners of technology platforms, as we also see it in Disney and Paramount paying damages in lawsuits to President Trump.”

Regarding the classification mechanism, the official at Free Press turned it into a scale of 5 chickens, where one chicken represents the beginning of weakness and the five chickens are clear propaganda. He added, “We applied this classification system as a visual way to make it easier for people to understand the company’s position on the White House during the Trump era.” As for companies that the analysis shows that they are completely independent, they receive the star symbol.

Two companies received a rating of 5 chickens: the first was Trump Media, which owns Truth Social, and the other was the X platform, which promoted right-wing political content and restricted access to some news sites, according to the Nieman Lab website, which specializes in journalism and media affairs.

What was interesting was the companies that fell in the middle between the worst and the best, as Carr described it as a kind of immediate surrender and a slippery slope that quickly leads companies to advertising.

Carr was surprised when the analysis showed that Bloomberg and Netflix received an independent star, pointing out that Michael Bloomberg is not a friend of Trump. He said that the larger the companies were, the more likely they were to surrender, suggesting that smaller media outlets such as ProPublic would receive many stars.