Hey, everyone, it's David Serota. If you enjoyed the first season of Master Plan, I wanted to let you know that we're publishing a new book based on the series.

The podcast recently won the 2025 National Press Club Award, so we wanted to expand it into a book.

This new book has 265 pages of reporting, exclusive documents, never-before-seen photos, and a whole new

afterward tying it all to Trump's return to power in 2025. You can pre-order your own copy

of the new book right now at levernews.com slash book. In honor of the book's release, our weekly

news podcast, Levert Time, will be publishing a

new series of audio episodes about recent developments in the master plan. Today, we're sharing

the first of those episodes right here in the master plan feed. We hope you enjoy. Thanks for

listening. From the Lever's reader-supported newsroom, this is Lever Time.

I'm David Serota.

If you only just started paying attention to the inner workings of the media industry,

you might think that America's information environment has transformed overnight.

In the past few months, President Donald Trump extracted settlements

for media giants. His underlings have vowed state retribution against his opponents. His administration

has defunded public media. And the president's biggest boosters own the algorithms that decide

what information is amplified and what information is suppressed.

Meanwhile, media companies are merging into ever larger conglomerates.

Some have muzzled White House critics as their companies seek presidential favors,

and the president is reportedly brokering a deal to hand yet another social media platform over to his billionaire

allies. And now, capping it all off, a tech billionaire has placed CBS News under the control

of a conservative provocateur. Today on Levertime, we're going to give you the secret,

untold story of how we got to this Orwellian moment

...