Answerable Curation: Dominant Intermediaries and the Concentration of Evaluative Power

A small number of media and platform institutions decide what a polity is able to consider, which claims are admissible, and which accounts carry the standing of a serious position. This paper asks on what terms that power can be held to account. It begins with media power in general but locates the strongest case in the dominant intermediary — the search, social or recommendation service that curates the visibility of others' expression at infrastructural scale — with the press and broadcasters entering mainly as contrast and limiting case. Its claim is deliberately modest. I do not argue that these institutions are organs of the state, nor that curating a feed is legislating or adjudicating; the influence such institutions exercise is not authority, and any argument that rests on equating the two collapses at the first objection. The narrower and more durable claim is that a handful of institutions concentrate three separable powers — selection, boundary-setting, and legitimation — over the conditions of public knowledge, and answer for none of them against any standard they must state or revise. I locate the constitutional interest in that concentration of evaluative discretion, and I distinguish it sharply from the ownership concentration that media-plurality law already addresses: the two can and do diverge. The remedy I defend is correspondingly narrow. It pairs a procedural duty of answerability — state the standard, explain the exercise, submit the standard to revision — with a thin substantive floor drawn not from any contested notion of fairness but from the narrowest part of the fiduciary duty of loyalty — the duty to disclose a material conflict of interest bearing on the exercise of that discretion. I own the cost of that choice: the floor reaches the interest served in the dark, not curation that is merely disclosed and self-interested, and not curation that is merely, in someone's view, unfair. It is calibrated to survive the free-expression constraints that cap it, including — decisively, and against a literature still arguing from Tornillo alone — the protection that Moody v NetChoice now extends to algorithmic curation, and the boundary that X Corp v Bontadraws between compelling a platform to characterise its editorial reasoning, which fails, and requiring it to disclose the interests that bear on it, which does not. Against the objection that any overseer will itself be captured, I claim only that reflexive answerability makes capture more costly and more visible, not that it makes capture impossible; that is the most a constitutional design can honestly promise.