By Free Press
Photos: Wikimedia Commons
WASHINGTON — On Wednesday, Free Press published an authoritative report analyzing the retreat in 2025 of the nation’s largest media companies from prior commitments to promote diversity, equity and inclusion principles in their workplaces and policies. The report — COMPLICIT: Corporate Media’s Capitulation to Trump’s Attacks on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion — sheds new light on the ongoing capitulation of major media and tech companies to the dictates of a bigoted and corrupt Trump administration.
Read COMPLICIT here.
In compiling, analyzing and cataloging the DEI reversals and retrenchment of companies like Apple, Comcast, Meta, Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery, report author and Free Press Campaign Manager Ruth Livier finds that the owners of the nation’s largest news, information and entertainment conglomerates are complicit in facilitating the Trump administration’s whitewashing of the media and erasure of diversity.
“Trump’s anti-diversity, equity and inclusion executive orders form the foundation of his regime’s efforts to dismantle our democracy. Outside of Trump and his enablers, no one is safe from attack,” writes Livier, who holds a Ph.D. in information studies from UCLA. “Failing to serve as an essential check against tyranny, corporate players are increasingly serving as megaphones for the MAGA movement, putting vulnerable communities at greater risk of attack — and betraying our democratic values.”
COMPLICIT finds that 26 of the top 35 media companies caved to the administration by rolling back various DEI policies and practices just days or weeks after Trump issued anti-DEI executive orders on Jan. 20 and 21, 2025. Some of these companies got ahead of the executive orders: Amazon, Disney, Fox Corporation, Google, Meta and X had already backed away from prior diversity, equity and inclusion measures in the weeks following Trump’s November 2024 election.
Livier said:
“President Trump has mobilized his loyalists in government to purge all references to diversity, equity and inclusion from agency websites, publications and other materials. But they haven’t stopped there. Through his proxies at such agencies as the FCC and FTC, Trump has pressured the private sector to perform similar purges across their businesses.
“These purges strike at the core of our democracy. The principles of diversity, equity and inclusion are essential to robust engagement. A civil society thrives when diverse communities are fully represented and everyone is safe to express their opinions. These vital principles are now under sustained assault from a Trump administration seeking to whitewash history, control the narrative and undermine opportunity for people of color and other targeted communities.
“This has been glaringly obvious in the behavior of massive corporate media companies. The owners of the nation’s largest news, information and entertainment conglomerates have enabled the regime’s white-supremacist erasure of diversity. The companies’ failure to stand up for democratic principles exposes a deeper rot infecting the U.S. media system, where obedience to the dictates of an authoritarian ruler takes precedence over their First Amendment-protected obligation to speak truth to power — and ensure equitable opportunities, representation and protections for us all.
“COMPLICIT also finds a disturbing phenomenon across the sector: the tendency of major media companies to say one thing about their DEI commitments while doing the opposite. The doublespeak is an attempt to please the Trump White House while paying lip service to people in the United States, more of whom support DEI principles than don’t, according to several 2025 polls. By abdicating their duty to hold power to account, corporate media have endangered vulnerable communities. The report places these companies on notice and serves as the start of a major 2026 Free Press initiative to call out their failures and pressure these conglomerates to fairly represent everyone in the United States.”
