Was it Reed Hastings that was painting Netflix's main rival not other streaming platforms, but other types of leisure like video games? This was during the streaming wars IIRC.

Regardless of how you look at it, this is yet another confluence of IP franchises merging together, whatever juice is left in them squeezed out and reprocessed over and over over time. Kind of what Oracle is in software I guess?

Working in an adjacent entertainment IP focus business myself, my eyes are glazing over a bit at this point.

and i'm not even someone you'd class as young anymore, so I don't think this is a younger generation thing

Concentrating so much power in the federal government is problematic, and unnecessary.

I predict the democrats winning, shoving it all under that table and pushing for "reconciliation" and "moving forward" while continuing the rotten status quo that got Trump elected in the first place. Maybe a few token prosecutions of low level wage workers involved.

Right wing people have repeatedly captured and destroyed journalism outlets they deem undesirable. Not that I’m saying CNN is any good.

There should be a diverse leaning of news companies, otherwise you'll only get half truths. You can't expect a left leaning news org to report anything bad about the left, or right leaning news org to present anything bad about the right. The left will be motivated to find flaws in the right, and the right will be motivated to find flaws in the left. That's a good thing. I believe an adversarial system is required to find truth. A center leaning news org is nice, but they may be motivated to keep their reporting "even", to not appear biased, which isn't really possible with the tick tock of republican and democrat leadership.

A for-profit news org changing leadership/alignment, in a response to massively falling profits [1], isn't a sign of dictatorship, it's a sign of them being aligned to the reason they exist: making moneys.

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/cnn-net-worth-sliced-half-192...