Welcome to The Tea newsletter!
I’m so thrilled you’re here with us.
My team and I launched The Tea with Myriam Francois in November 2024 in direct response to an ongoing crisis in the media one that became painfully salient during the coverage of the genocide in Gaza. Consider this stark shift: the skewed coverage, the digital shadowbans and of course, the impact of the concentration of wealth and power on editorial lines. In 1983, 50 corporations owned 90% of US media. Today, that exact same footprint is dominated by just 6 corporate giants: Comcast, Walt Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount Skydance, Sony, and Amazon.
This consolidation isn’t just an abstract corporate ledger; it has a very specific face, and it increasingly belongs to tech billionaires treating our information ecosystem as a strategic asset to buy political immunity and policy leverage. We see this narrative cartel in action with David Ellison’s takeover of CBS News and Paramount heavily backed by his father, Oracle founder and major Trump donor Larry Ellison, who famously leveraged Oracle’s cloud infrastructure to secure a massive stake in TikTok’s US operations. If you’ve followed the Bari Weiss debacle at CBS you can see the impact of this in real time.
This sits alongside Elon Musk’s weaponization of X, a platform he has used to amplify his immense political influence, which culminated in his appointment to spearhead the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) under Trump giving a single billionaire unprecedented, de facto authority to audit federal agencies and dismantle the state from within. It continues with Jeff Bezos’s ownership of The Washington Post which serves as a highly effective shield for Amazon’s multi-billion-dollar CIA and Pentagon cloud contracts and the quiet acquisition of legacy titles like Time, The Atlantic, and CNN by billionaire powerbrokers like Marc Benioff, Laurene Powell Jobs, and John Malone. Whether it is Powell Jobs bankrolling the centrist Democratic establishment while steering the ideological parameters of The Atlantic, Benioff using Time to lobby world leaders on the Davos agenda, or right-wing mega-donor John Malone explicitly forcing CNN to soften its adversarial edge, the motive remains identical. When the primary watchdogs of political and corporate accountability are bought up like luxury vanity assets by the wealthiest individuals in human history, independent journalism ceases to be a public service and instead becomes a defensive shield for the ruling class.
The people driving these massive media takeovers are rarely concerned with the interests of the public, with democracy, or with accountability. In fact, in many cases, they are deeply embedded in the very political structures that we need to hold to account.
The mandate for our work at The Tea is simple: public service journalism. This means creating mission-driven content that prioritizes the information needs of our communities and our democracy over commercial profit or government interests. We believe in identifying the defining issues of our time and pinning down the best people to “spill” the truth on them, arming you with the knowledge required to make a change.
Make no mistake, change is non-negotiable. We find ourselves trapped in a constant crisis cycle from all angles from the economy to the climate, driven by polarization and hyper-surveillance. We simply cannot go down like this. The best way to confront this moment is to truly understand it.
However, we also know that we are all completely saturated in content, much of it incredibly depressing. Our goal isn’t just to inform; it is also to entertain. We want to provide you with new formats that make the exercise of digesting this world and its complexities just a little easier to swallow. You, of course, will be the ultimate judge of our success on that front!
The War on Reality
To put it plainly, it is a terrible time to be a journalist. 2025 marked the deadliest year for press fatalities since the Committee for the Protection of Journalists began collecting data more than 30 years ago. It was the second consecutive year-on-year record for press deaths, with Israel responsible for two-thirds of all press killings across both 2024 and 2025.
I connect these targeted killings directly to a broader, global attack on press freedom. When journalists on the ground are murdered, we aren’t just losing facts we are losing the eyewitnesses who provide the shared architecture required to understand reality. Without them, we become far easier to manipulate, disorient, and prime for the empty promises of a strongman leader who claims to have all the answers.
Funding for independent journalism is crashing at the exact moment journalists are being killed at historic rates. We cannot separate these economic realities from the assault on our sense of truth. The elimination of on-the-ground storytellers occurs alongside the rise of technologies designed to manipulate our understanding of events within carefully curated digital spaces posing as neutral platforms. Taken together, this is a coordinated attempt to reengineer the very structures of our reality. It forces us to constantly ask: Who can be trusted? What is truth? What is real?
The Techno-Autocrats Reading Your Mind
Remember, the images and stories you consume are engineered by privately owned companies led by profit-driven techno-autocrats. These are men and it is predominantly men who have openly flaunted their hostility to democracy and manifest their disdain for our privacy daily.
Look at billionaire investor Peter Thiel, who famously declared that “freedom and democracy have become incompatible” and voiced opposition to women’s suffrage. Look at Elon Musk, who addressed a far-right rally in central London, sharing a stage with a convicted criminal to tell the audience: “Whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die.”
Their control extends far beyond images or content; it lies in how that content is delivered to your individually studied psyche. They have spent years accumulating data on the smallest minutiae of your intimate thoughts and beliefs. They know what you look at when no one else is watching, who you DM secretly, which stories you like, and which posts you archive.
For years, we joked that talking about toothpaste would trigger an immediate toothpaste ad on our feeds, while tech companies insisted they weren’t listening through our phone microphones. Turns out they were, and still are. But the reality in 2026 is much worse. Apple recently acquired an Israeli startup whose technology enables the analysis of “silent speech.” It tracks facial skin micro-movements and biometric signals like skin vibrations, lip movements, and micro-expressions to interpret speech without a user ever making a sound. It essentially decodes your internal monologue. You heard that right. If you’ve noticed specific items popping up on your feed the moment you think about them, ask yourself: is it a coincidence? You tell me.
Reclaiming the Analog World
The point of this is to sound the alarm on the disintegration of journalism. The pursuit of impartial knowledge in service of the public is being hijacked by private interests where it survives, or defunded out of existence where it challenges power. Simultaneously, we are facing a relentless assault on our sense of reality in the spaces we spend the most time: online. If you are Gen Z or a Millennial, that’s between 5 to 7 hours a day, and it’s rising rapidly for Generation Alpha.
The distinction between the analog and digital worlds has blurred to a dangerous degree. Surgeons now report patients requesting facial surgery to match their digital filters demanding looks that appear entirely unnatural offline simply because that specific aesthetic is rewarded by the algorithm.
How many of us now interact more frequently with a digital community than our real-world neighbors or families? How many of us anchor our self-esteem to a perceived digital identity over our real-world existence?
This matters deeply. As we continue to migrate into total technological integration, we must remain acutely aware that our grasp on reality itself is under siege. The time we have left to identify reliable sources of information and support platforms dedicated to public service journalism is shrinking.
A year and a half ago, I set up The Tea network to help fill this vacuum. I can’t fill it alone, of course. But in the midst of a shrinking space for free thought and a corporate stranglehold on our senses, we must begin to carve out a brave, independent new world together.
Thank you for being part of the journey.
Myriam Francois
The Tea