{"podcast":{"title":"Paul Krugman Podcast","slug":"paul-krugman-podcast-7703924","podcast_index_feed_id":7703924,"rss_url":"https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/277517.rss","website_url":"https://paulkrugman.substack.com/podcast","image_url":"https://substackcdn.com/feed/podcast/277517/97debc08d318fda1d382063e54848600.jpg","author":"Paul Krugman","episode_count":81,"summary":"Notes on economics and more","last_synced_at":"2026-07-26T10:17:51.645609+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/paul-krugman-podcast-7703924"},"episode":{"title":"Oligarchy and the Media","slug":"oligarchy-and-the-media","published_at":"2026-07-22T10:30:00+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/paul-krugman-podcast-7703924/oligarchy-and-the-media","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/paul-krugman-podcast-7703924","url":"https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/oligarchy-and-the-media","audio_url":"https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/207828170/88e38f07306812208a5711c649abb619.mp3","summary":"For all my interviews and more, subscribe on YouTube . Transcript Good news. The second richest man in America might be prevented from taking over CNN. That's the good news. The bad news is, aside from thefact that he probably will manage to pull it off anyway, the bad news is that that would be only a small piece of the ongoing takeover of U.S. media by oligarchs. And in turn, the media takeover is just part of the extraordinary exercise of power by the extraordinarily wealthy small number of men who have been wreaking so much havoc with America as we know it. Hi, I'm Paul Krugman. Doing a video today, because I didn't feel like doing a usual chart-heavy, analytics-heavy post, but very much on a topic I have been writing about and will continue to write about, which is the rise of oligarchy in America. Now, I know some people balk at that. But we're not talking about some kind of hidden conspiracy. We're not talking about the Protocols of the Elders of PayPal. We are talking instead about stuff that's largely out in the open, though not fully understood, which is the way that an incredibly wealthy small group of men, mostly men, is able to commandeer a lot of the political life of a country that is still nominally a democracy. And that's a fundamental story for our time, maybe the fundamental story. How does that takeover work? Well, there is what I think of as the middle level, which is the place where it's most easily quantified, tends to get most of the attention, which is campaign finance. American campaigns are very money intensive and have become more money intensive because we've opened the floodgates with Citizens United. And a lot of that money comes from a very small number of incredibly wealthy people. According to the New York Times analysis, about 20% of…","meta_description":"For all my interviews and more, subscribe on YouTube . Transcript Good news. The second richest man in America might be prevented from taking over CNN. Th…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":847,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/paul-krugman-podcast-7703924/episodes/oligarchy-and-the-media/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/paul-krugman-podcast-7703924/oligarchy-and-the-media.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}