A Banker’s Case for Taking on Big Tech
Investment bankers are not usually in the business of calling out the industries they serve. John Chachas is an exception. Writing in The AI Journal, he makes the case that media and technology giants have inflicted serious, lasting damage on American democracy, and that the political class has been far too slow to respond.
His credentials make the argument hard to dismiss. Chachas spent three decades as one of the more active deal-bankers in American media, advising on the $18 billion buyout of Clear Channel Communications, Disney’s sale of ABC Radio, and E.W. Scripps’ $2.65 billion acquisition of ION Media. He founded Methuselah Advisors and now runs Inyo Broadcast Holdings. He knows the industry from the inside, and what he sees concerns him.
On local news, his position is unambiguous. Google and Facebook appropriated the content that made local journalism valuable without compensating the organizations that produced it. Advertising revenue that had sustained local papers for generations migrated to platforms that indexed that news without paying for it. “The big and destructive power of Google and Facebook was left totally unchecked,” he writes, “until the local media industry was essentially destroyed.”
The civic function that local news served went with it. Nobody at Netflix is going to report on your city council. Nobody at Amazon is going to track the county sheriff. That work is simply not being done, and the streaming services now acquiring major production assets have no incentive to start. Chachas sees this as a democratic failure, not just a market one.
On artificial intelligence, his concern operates on two levels. The immediate level is employment. AI will eliminate substantial categories of white-collar work, and the workers left behind will be real people with mortgages, families, and skills that do not transfer easily. The longer-term level is control. He references the 1983 film WarGames as a genuine warning about what happens when technological systems advance beyond the institutional frameworks designed to govern them.
His proposed solution, a corporate-funded UBI trust tied to AI deployment, is designed to create a direct link between the economic gains from automation and support for displaced workers. Companies would still have every incentive to innovate. They would simply have to internalize some of the social cost of that innovation rather than externalizing it onto communities and government programs.
The larger argument is about accountability. Concentrated corporate power operating without meaningful oversight has already reshaped the media landscape. Chachas is making the case, with more credibility than most, that the same dynamic must not be allowed to play out unchecked in labor markets or in the governance of AI systems.