Cognitive Atrophy of the Regulatory State: The Justice Department's Algorithmic Failure and the Archaic Weaponization of Antitrust Enforcement Against Journalistic Solidarity

Abstract

Description (Abstract): In October 2026, the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) initiated an antitrust inquiry probing whether major television broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and Fox News) engaged in an unlawful restraint of trade by jointly suspending presidential pool coverage in protest of executive press exclusions. This intervention exposes a critical institutional pathology: the failure of the administrative state to deploy predictive algorithmic governance, game-theoretic simulation, or cognitive systems architectures before launching self-defeating legal campaigns. This monograph establishes three analytical pillars: The Institutional Category Error: Projecting the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act—engineered to dismantle industrial price-fixing cartels—onto non-commercial, expressive collective action protected under the First Amendment constitutes a fatal categorical confusion. Game-Theoretic Collapse & The Streisand Inversion: Overlooking settled Supreme Court immunity doctrines (specifically the Noerr-Pennington and Claiborne Hardware doctrines), the regulatory threat fundamentally inverts the payoff matrix, unifying competing networks into an unyielding coalition and dramatically amplifying public scrutiny of executive overreach. Cognitive Atrophy: Legacy administrative hierarchies, lacking predictive agentic stress-testing and subordinated to political reflexes, degrade into blunt instruments of partisan lawfare. We propose an Epistemic Governance architecture anchored in pre-emptive multi-agent simulation and inviolable Human-in-Command safeguards to prevent the degradation of constitutional institutions.