I, for one, am going to miss the warm, maternal embrace of a six-corporation media oligopoly

I was having a $140 Niçoise salad with a former Viacom senior vice president at a midtown restaurant that does not list its prices, when he said something that struck me to my absolute core: “Who is going to tell the masses what to be mildly annoyed about now?”

It is a question that has haunted me ever since. For decades, we complained about the homogenization of culture by Big Media. We bemoaned the fact that just six massive conglomerates controlled 90 percent of what we read, watched, and listened to. We called them gatekeepers. We called them monopolies. But looking around at the fractured, un-focus-grouped chaos of the modern internet, I think it is time we issued a formal apology to the C-suite executives who worked so tirelessly to keep us safe from our own thoughts.

Consider the much-mourned finale of Stephen Colbert’s Comedy Central program, which many point to as the high-water mark of modern political satire. When Colbert hung up his character’s suit, it was not just the end of a television show. It was the twilight of the grand, glorious era of corporate-managed dissent. His parent company provided a safe, perfectly lit, ergonomically sound sandbox for the nation to process its anger, bracketed seamlessly by commercials for the Ford F-150 and Doritos Locos Tacos. It was beautiful. It was contained. It generated incredible returns for shareholders.

We took for granted the immense, unseen labor of the corporate oligopoly. Do you have any idea how hard it is to organically synthesize a national conversation? It takes thousands of middle managers, synergistic quarterly planning retreats in Aspen, and a delicate, unwritten gentleman’s agreement between rival holding companies to ensure the American public never gets too riled up about anything that might threaten capital gains taxes.

I have sat in boardrooms in Burbank where the exact precise dosage of anti-establishment sentiment was titrated into the evening lineup, ensuring viewers felt heard while remaining incredibly docile consumers of fast-casual dining. That is not censorship. That is public service.

You think you want a decentralized media landscape. You think you want independent voices. But independent voices do not have human resources departments. They do not have compliance officers ensuring that edgy comedy mathematically aligns with the risk tolerance of global pharmaceutical sponsors. When a YouTuber or a Substack writer yells at you, there is no multinational defense contractor secretly underwriting their broadcast to ensure the geopolitical status quo is maintained. It is just raw, terrifying noise.

I look back fondly on the days when you could wake up, turn on a television network owned by General Electric, and watch a handsome anchor in a tailored suit tell you exactly which overseas conflict to care about for the next 72 hours. It was comforting. We were swaddled in a warm, protective blanket of vertically integrated synergy. If the network said a war was necessary, you trusted them, because you also trusted their parent company to manufacture your washing machine.

The next time you consume an unfiltered, un-focus-grouped piece of media on a platform not overseen by a 74-year-old billionaire in a bespoke suit, ask yourself: is this really better? Do you truly want the burden of deciding what matters? I think you will find, as I do, that freedom is vastly overrated compared to the soothing, heavily curated embrace of the corporate monoculture. Please, bring back the gatekeepers. We are lost without them.