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Last month, I attended a conference put on by the Ditchley Foundation titled “The Role of the New Fourth Estate in Renewing Democracy.” The central question that arose concerned the proper relationship between the people who provide information and the profit-seeking distributors of that content. Are journalists and publishers, creators and platforms, really allies in the knowledge economy? Or are their fundamental aims so at odds that any alliance is not just undesirable but dangerous?
The extent to which tech platforms act against the interests of a free press has always been a subject of contention. The increasing entanglement of US foreign policy with the health of tech platforms and AI companies, and the undeniable hostility of the current US government toward journalists, has further implications for the future relationship between tech companies and the press. Meta’s withdrawal from support for third-party fact-checking, a year ago, and Google’s cooling on similar schemes were an early warning of the ways that the industry would align itself with the Trump administration.
The Ditchley convening took place in a library that hosted Winston Churchill’s talks during World War II. There was a discreet buzzing of phone alerts among the crowd, signaling a collective apprehensiveness. In the news: the European Union had just fined X, Elon Musk’s social platform, one hundred and twenty million euros for failing to comply with transparency standards imposed by the Digital Services Act. This unleashed a torrid response from Musk and the US government: Secretary of State Marco Rubio tweeted that EU enforcers were attacking US citizens by asking an American company to follow their rules. In a matter of hours, two related missives arrived: First, that anyone who had been involved in fact-checking, verification, or content moderation seeking an H1B visa for the US would be denied, and so would their relatives. Then the bombshell National Security Strategy fired a broadside at Europe, citing its attitude toward “free speech” as one marker of its supposed decline. At the conference, delegates workshopped questions such as whether there now needed to be a “NATO for news,” and how an industry of platforms, influencers, and reporters should redraw the rules for national security against a background of threats leveled not by a hostile foreign regime, but by the United States government.
The consequences of Big Tech’s relationship with journalism is something the Tow Center, which I am the director of, has followed for well over a decade. We recently updated our tracker with last year’s roller coaster of connections. That timeline serves as a companion to a new research database on the ongoing engagements and disputes between news publishers and AI companies.
One of the most striking aspects of the shifting news business in 2026 is how technology platforms and journalism companies are redrawing the rules of engagement around artificial intelligence. AI companies including OpenAI, Perplexity, and Palantir are embedding themselves and their AI tools in the heart of newsrooms, shaping journalism and, by turn, audiences to better fit their own objectives.
New partnerships (between Fox News and Palantir), lawsuits (between the New York Times and Perplexity), and initiatives (the Google News Initiative AI academy in India) are rolling out at a pace that suggests a business urgency on the part of AI companies and a troubling lack of strategic foresight on the part of newsrooms. While demands for financial compensation for copyright infringement, or deals for licensing AI training data, are a reflection of fair value for original reporting, there is a more important demand to be made: that technology companies will support the function of a free press and guarantee the security of journalists in the face of political pressure.
Certain initiatives, such as the Microsoft-backed ProJourn legal support project, have been welcome sources of resilience. The Google News Initiative has provided hundreds of millions of dollars for global journalism initiatives in the past decade. At the same time, the unreliability of other platforms in safeguarding journalism has already done untold damage to the field. As Reporters Without Borders catalogued, Meta has “waged war on journalism” through defunding fact-checking and effectively “banning” legitimate journalism completely in countries such as Canada that passed legislation to make platforms pay for the news they published. X’s “free speech” standards have made a platform that was once crucial for modern journalism an even more hostile environment, particularly for women, journalists of color, and LGBTQ+ journalists.
There are those of us who’ve argued for a long time that the democratic health of our information environment rests on a wealth transfer from those who exploit power and data to those who seek to report on its effects. We must accept that it is no longer realistic to think that the US regulatory system or political environment will facilitate this outcome. What is more likely is that the squeeze on domestic and overseas news providers will intensify and extend to include their relationships with distribution platforms. A potential new ownership structure for TikTok in the US points to greater political alignment in platform ownership. The extent to which platforms can be used against the interests of a free press is exemplified by Elon Musk’s 2022 takeover of Twitter and subsequent use of the platform as an ideological cudgel.
It is not hard to imagine how this might play out. The lawsuit that Donald Trump has initiated against the BBC for an embarrassing and misleading edit seems to lack legal merit. But what if the president pushed the idea that overseas media was a danger to national security and election integrity? What if companies such as Apple and Google were asked to delist BBC apps from their stores, or remove their channels from YouTube, not just in the US, but globally? Would platforms that are heavily dependent on government contracts refuse?
International news organizations like Axel Springer, Ringier, and Fox News are presented as ideal new partners by Palantir, a company whose technology enables Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in the US to locate civilians for deportation. The same technology can be used to track journalists and citizens reporting on the raids. Do journalistic organizations have faith that Palantir will stand up to pressure from its biggest clients? The former Palantir employees who signed a letter earlier this year condemning the company do not: “Big Tech, including Palantir, is increasingly complicit, normalizing authoritarianism under the guise of a ‘revolution’ led by oligarchs. We must resist this trend,” they wrote.
Is the primary job of media companies to maximize shareholder value, tell the truth about the world, hold the powerful accountable, or provide people with the knowledge to enable effective self-governance? In the past these aims have often gone together. Now, if tech platforms—the new power brokers in information—see the preservation of democracy as a prerequisite for business success, they will need to be more public about their commitment to supporting a free press at home and abroad. If, however, they see authoritarianism as an inevitable price for doing business, then journalism needs to peel away from its dependency on tech platforms and their infrastructure as quickly as it can.
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