stLouISTA lesson on media consolidation and censorship from a Texas prison
When I heard the news that Paramount Skydance had won the bid to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery and its assets, like CNN and HBO, I cringed. I know how this movie ends.
Inside the Texas prison system where I’ve spent nearly three decades, I have personally witnessed the harm of the government choosing the media the people consume. Propaganda can turn people into individuals they would have once despised.
I earned a college degree during my incarceration. One of my classmates was an elderly guy from Mexico who went by the name Grasshopper. He was an avid admirer of Cesar Chavez, the progressive leader of the movement for farmworkers’ rights in the 1960s (this was long before the recent allegations against Chavez came to light).
Grasshopper and I believed the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan were out of control, and that important issues like housing and health care were being neglected. We felt the country needed new leadership and supported many of the progressive ideas that were being proposed by then-candidate Barack Obama. We agreed on pretty much everything.
Nearing the end of Obama’s first term, the right-wing Texas prison system decided to change the TV stations it made available to the incarcerated population. Without any advance warning, gone was our access to news programming from networks like CNN and PBS. We were now restricted to viewing the newly installed Fox News Channel and Trinity Broadcasting Network’s conservative evangelical Christian content.
Within a matter of weeks, I noticed the new programming transforming Grasshopper’s political views. He began regurgitating the talking points from right-wing commentators and Fox News prime-time hosts like Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity.
Propaganda can turn people into individuals they would have once despised.
Suddenly, President Obama had become the anti-Christ — the worst president in the history of this country. Fringe conspiracy theories like Michelle Obama being a biological man and the Affordable Care Act rationing out medical care became deeply held beliefs. Our once cordial political discussions turned into heated debates, with me having to constantly challenge what Grasshopper had heard on the latest episode from O’Reilly’s “no spin zone.”
My friend had “seen the light” and was now a die-hard conservative — and not because he’d been persuaded by new information or good-faith arguments for a different political philosophy, but because prison officials had elected to force-feed him nonsense, without the option to change the channel. It was difficult for me to believe I was even speaking with the same individual I’d known just six months prior.
Grasshopper was far from the only person to undergo this ideological shift. I noticed other incarcerated individuals’ political beliefs undergo similarly dramatic transformations after the news programming change.
It wasn’t just presidential politics. We were housed at the prison that was home to Texas’ execution chambers. Before CNN and PBS were removed, a significant number of the guys would hold vigils on scheduled execution days. We would all gather in a circle, say a few words about the things we were grateful for and allow representatives from different faiths to say a prayer for the condemned person and their family.
Once those networks were replaced by Fox and Trinity, our vigil grew smaller and smaller. When I asked people who had stopped coming to vigils why, some of them said they now felt the condemned deserved to die. Influenced by the “eye for eye” messaging they constantly heard in sermons on Trinity, my cohorts now favored capital punishment.
Additionally, incarcerated people adopted the belief of “law and order” commentators that everyone in prison had forfeited their right to be treated humanely. Overnight, guys began viewing themselves as they were portrayed on Fox — as animals. Incarcerated individuals stopped demanding basic necessities like soap and toilet paper from the prison administration, and would get angry at anyone who did. “You are in prison,” they would tell the newly-labeled troublemaker, “not the Hilton Hotel.”
Incarcerated people stopped believing they deserved soap and toilet paper. People on the outside may stop believing they deserve democracy.
By 2024, there were more incarcerated individuals in Texas prisons openly supporting Trump than I had ever seen supporting a Republican candidate in the six presidential elections that have occurred during my incarceration. Most of their views were shaped by misleading accusations. They were convinced, for example, that immigrants here illegally were raping and killing Americans at an alarming rate.
This is the same level of power the Trump administration wants to steer into the hands of its allies. They’re eager for Paramount Skydance and the billionaire Ellison family that controls it to acquire Warner Bros., which owns CNN (Paramount previously acquired CBS News and steered its coverage to Trump’s liking).
At a time of unprecedented infringements on constitutional rights, this powerful media empire could significantly diminish our capacity and willingness to combat authoritarianism.
It can achieve this not just through news but entertainment — the messages embedded into kids’ programs, or the glorification of war and normalization of police states in movies. It all adds up. Incarcerated people stopped believing they deserved soap and toilet paper. People on the outside may stop believing they deserve democracy.
You might think this can’t happen in the free world — people have far more media options available, plus they can go outside, look around, and come to their own conclusions about the state of American society.
That may be true for some. It’s also true for some on the inside, like me. Those with sufficient energy and curiosity find ways to inform themselves. But there are elderly people who mostly see the world through their television screens, rural Americans who imagine cities they’ve never visited as war zones, and “low-information voters” who don’t have the desire or time to dig beyond the surface of the information ecosystem.
That’s enough to not only swing elections but to overhaul the way we see our government, our society, and ourselves.