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On this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with an urgent warning about TikTok’s looming deal with Trump-aligned insiders—a move David calls the “biggest giveaway since the days of the railway grants.” He argues that the American media landscape has been quietly transformed, and political power has shifted from legacy outlets to algorithmic platforms loyal to the president.

Then David speaks with the filmmaker Ken Burns about his new documentary series on the American Revolution. Together, they explore the Revolution’s competing legacies—liberty and exclusion, heroism and hypocrisy—and how its unresolved contradictions still shape the nation’s identity. Burns reflects on the moral complexity of figures such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, the forgotten role of Loyalists and Indigenous nations, and the Revolution’s echoes in contemporary America.

Finally, David discusses Benjamin Nathans’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause, an exploration of the Soviet dissident movement and the story of Alexander Esenin-Volpin, who defied tyranny by insisting that Soviet laws be obeyed exactly as written.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

David Frum: Hello and welcome to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be Ken Burns, the great American documentarian, producer most recently of a remarkable series on the American Revolution. We are so pleased and honored to welcome Ken Burns to The David Frum Show.

My book this week will be a very relevant history of the Soviet dissident movement by Benjamin Nathans called To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause. This may seem like a chapter from the history of a bygone regime, but the lessons that I want to single out for discussion this week are very applicable to the United States in the 2020s.

Before getting to either of those topics, I wanna open with some preliminary thoughts about some recent events in the news. I hope you are all following these proceedings with the plans to sell TikTok to a group of American advisers. This is supposed to happen, according to law, by December 16. There have been a number of deadlines, each of them postponed again and again by executive order.

In 2024, Congress passed a law requiring TikTok to be divested from its Chinese ownership to an American group. The law was signed by President [Joe] Biden, and it was approved by the Supreme Court as being a legal exercise of congressional authority. When Donald Trump won the election, he showed some displeasure about the law. TikTok had been very favorable to Donald Trump’s cause in the 2024 election. He owed them a big debt of gratitude. He didn’t wanna transform them, and he wasn’t much interested in complying with a Biden-era law. But it is the law, and there were some opportunities here. And so Trump began to push back the deadlines repeatedly, later and later and later; the latest pushback is to December 16. But it looks like a deal is going to happen, and a group of hand-selected insiders are about to purchase 80 percent of the U.S. operations of TikTok from the Chinese company. A lot of this is very murky, but reports in The Wall Street Journal and other financial papers that quote unnamed senior administration officials suggest that the price is going to be about $14 billion.

Now, I’m gonna start with the financial aspect of this. TikTok U.S. throws off about $10 billion a year, and most conventional estimates would suggest that that would mean that the company should be worth $50 or $80 billion, or possibly even more. There will be no public auction—these insiders have been chosen, apparently, for their loyalty to President Trump. It looks like it’s going to be the biggest giveaway since the days of the railway grants. But in those days, at least you got a railway for your money. In this case, the company already exists; all that’s happening is a select group of insiders are going to receive a massive windfall.

Now, Donald Trump will presumably want something back—and I’ve written about this story in more detail in the print Atlantic, and if you want all the details, you should go there. But one can expect that the TikTok algorithm, owned by a group of people who owe tens of billions of dollars of thank-you to Donald Trump, will continue to favor Donald Trump’s views, maybe even more outrageously than they do now. And this brings us to a challenge to our understanding that is going to be difficult for those of us of a certain age.

Now, if your mind goes back to America as it used to be—and in MAGA world, you hear this a lot—you have this idea of “the media”; there’s this thing called “the media.” And they are supposedly very liberal. And when you press people, What do you mean by “the media”? They usually answer something like The New York Times, CNN, maybe the broadcast evening news—CBS, NBC, ABC—because those were the companies that used to be the most powerful companies in America when they were young.

It used to be that the people who had the ability to decide what is news and what is not news, to make a discussion stick, to force politicians to answer, it was a sort of short list, thinking about the year 1975—again, the networks; major national papers: New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal; local news affiliates in major markets like Chicago, Los Angeles, and Houston; and major local papers like The Atlanta Constitution, the Chicago Tribune, and others; maybe Time magazine. These were all institutions that both produced and distributed their own content, they were primarily either text-based or television-based, and they had a kind of a shared outlook. They’re not as liberal as all that, but they were broadly supportive of the foreign policy of the United States and the government of the United States, and they lean liberal, especially on issues of civil rights and civil liberties. That’s the media landscape that many people grew up with and that many people imagine is still there.

But when you think about What does media mean in the year 2025?, I don’t think there’s any way to get around the fact that, by far, the single most powerful media company in the country today is TikTok. Even though TikTok doesn’t produce its content—its algorithm decides what you see—it might as well be producing it. It picks and chooses among thousands of entrants, and it directs streams of revenue to the people who are chosen. TikTok is the—apparently among those under 30—it is the single most-relied-upon source of information.

What else would be powerful? Well, other kinds of new media platforms like Instagram and Facebook, owned by Meta; YouTube, owned by Alphabet. Again, they don’t produce the content, but they decide what is seen. Now, there’s some people who do produce content who are important: Fox News, watched by the president of the United States; and some consortiums of local TV stations, local TV affiliates, like those owned by Sinclair.

But we live in a new media environment, in which the media, as they exist in popular rhetoric and popular remembrance of older folks, are just not that important anymore. And the people who are important are companies that a lot of Americans are not in the habit of thinking of as the media, especially not TikTok. But these new media powerhouses, they are very different from the old. They are much more beholden on government for special favors. You may remember that story from the very beginning of the Trump administration when Amazon paid for the life rights for a Melania Trump documentary the reported sum of something like $40 million. It looks like this was just a straight gift for the family of the president to leave Amazon alone. Other media companies have paid their ransoms: CBS and ABC News and others have paid $16, $15 million ransoms to be let out of litigation that in the case of ABC was likely to lose, in the case of CBS was certain to lose. And CNN is under similar kinds of pressure. The New York Times has been put under similar kinds of pressure.

The new media, the platforms of today, are much more dependent on government and owned by people who are political allies of President Trump. We have moved imperceptibly from a world of sort of institutionalist, establishment-minded liberal media to post-institutional, very beholden to government, very pro-Trump media, and we don’t see it because we are not in the habit of recognizing these media companies as media companies. But as you try to understand the information diet of your fellow Americans, if you are someone who is watching The David Frum Show and reading The Atlantic, you are consuming a media of a very different quality and kind and form than that which is consumed by most of your fellow citizens. And while, congratulations, you’ve got a much healthier media diet than they do, there are a lot of them, and they matter, and they vote. So to understand what is coming, you need to understand how this media is being shaped.

And you also need to understand that the people who are governing this country—Donald Trump and his circle—have a very clear view of the new media that matters.