At the last minute 60 Minutes pulled a segment covering the experiences of detainees at CECOT in El Salvador. This was done by Bari Weiss, the CBS News editor in chief. She wanted to avoid controversy, she said. It blew up in her face.
Weiss said the segment was flawed because it didn’t present the administration’s point of view. That’s largely because the administration failed to respond to 60 Minutes’ requests for comments. Sometimes silence is a response. “A free press isn’t free if stories get shelved just because the powerful won’t talk,” Congressman Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) said. I rarely watch CBS News, but it’s sad that the network of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite has come to this.
There was commentary when Weiss was named to the position that she lacked experience in the news side of the business. She’s always been on the opinion/editorial side. I hope she gets canned soon. But the larger issue has to do with what political pressure is doing to the news business. And what’s behind that is mergers and media monopolies.
For years the FCC enacted regulations to make sure news consumers had access to sources from a variety of companies. But Trump’s FCC chair has thrown that out the window. Now there is a raging battle going on over which right-wing interest is going to end up with a digital media monopoly. And right now CBS and CNN are being sacrificed to Trump, says Franklin Foer at The Atlantic.
The fate of Warner Bros. Discovery is no longer a regulatory matter. It is a medieval tournament, in which the king invites rival bidders to compete for his approval. To acquire the media company, the aspirants—Paramount and Netflix—will have to offer a sacrifice: Whoever can damage CNN the most stands to walk away with the prize.
This is one of those moments in Donald Trump’s presidency when an event that would otherwise be recognized as a death knell for democracy somehow fails to elicit the outrage it deserves. Warner Bros. Discovery owns CNN, whose coverage Trump views as hostile to his administration. So he is abusing the government’s merger-approval power in order to insist that the next owner of the venerable outlet mold its journalism to his liking.
He does a good job of explaining why changing technologies have made the news business far more fragile and more susceptible to authoritarian manipulation than they were back when Katharine Graham decided to publish the Pentagon Papers. That kind of expose may not happen again in the U.S. The press won’t be free to do it.
It seems to me that these media companies are screwing themselves. Many are participating in these mergers driven by greed. They refuse to stand up to Trump even when the law and constitution are on their side. In the end the public will pay the price and the result won't be good but I can't really muster any sympathy for most of them, they are for the most part willing participants in their own demise.
Look at media at the local level. Only in islands does it remain intact. Twenty years ago, we fed biased news to the local paper, and they printed it without edit or fact checking. We used to joke about an independent paper almost a hundred miles away having the only true stories about what was going on locally. Today that paper is no longer independent either.
It is more than a war on the free press it is a war on the truth.
The truth is they are waging it on us using our tax dollars.
When they tax you with tariffs you don't even know how much you are paying. They like it that way.
Regarding CBS News, the Ellisons have the same blind spot common to wealthy billionaires; hermetically ensconced in the bubble created by their wealth and greed, they failed to realize the limited viability of wingnuttery as a philosophy in business. CBS was viable as a business because it drew and retained loyal viewers who respected it for its practice of actual journalism, delivering news and building trust with industry giants like Murrow, Cronkite and others, regardless of corporate interests or how it impacted ideologically. It built a solid brand that viewers relate to and appreciate. The Ellisons are on track to realizing a costly error in thinkng they could refocus CBS to right wing gaslighting, entertainment propaganda and naked Trump publicism and expect to retain the viewers that respected CBS for the reputation it had built over the decades. How blind are the Ellisons? Look no further than their apparent thinking it was a good business decision to hire Bari Weiss to lead it. The only people Weiss is fooling is herself and the Ellisons. The only question now is how long will it take for Weiss to run CBS News into the ground.
Regarding CBS News, the Ellisons have the same blind spot common to wealthy billionaires; hermetically ensconced in the bubble created by their wealth and greed, they failed to realize the limited viability of wingnuttery as a philosophy in business. CBS was viable as a business because it drew and retained loyal viewers who respected it for its practice of actual journalism, delivering news and building trust with industry giants like Murrow, Cronkite and others, regardless of corporate interests or how it impacted ideologically. It built a solid brand that viewers relate to and appreciate. The Ellisons are on track to realizing a costly error in thinkng they could refocus CBS to right wing gaslighting, entertainment propaganda and naked Trump publicism and expect to retain the viewers that respected CBS for the reputation it had built over the decades. How blind are the Ellisons? Look no further than their apparent thinking it was a good business decision to hire Bari Weiss to lead it. The only people Weiss is fooling is herself and the Ellisons. The only question now is how long will it take for Weiss to run CBS News into the ground.
"Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one."
Quote Origin: Freedom of the Press Is Guaranteed Only to Those Who Own One – Quote Investigator®
CBS is owned by Paramount Skydance, whose CEO (and top shareholder?) is David Ellison, son of Larry Ellison, one of the more dangerous Zillionaires on the planet these days. Larry Ellison owns Oracle, a database giant, which is now involved with lotsa Gov't surveillance projects around the world. Their Bots will probably flag this comment…
Larry Ellison's Wiki page includes an interesting quote:
'In 2017, Ellison donated $16.6 million … to the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces (FIDF), saying, "Since Israel's founding, we have called on the brave men and women of the IDF to defend our home". This was the largest donation in the organization's history.'
…Mostly interesting in that Ellison, a US (born & raised) citizen, refers to Israel as 'our home'.
David Ellison's hiring of Bari Weiss is a prime example of 'falling up'. She is most famous for whining about being treated badly by 'Woke' people, and accusing everybody of anti-Semitism. IMO, the second part is the real reason she now runs CBS.
"Accusing everybody of anti-Semitism"
Yes, almost everyone is an antisemite these days save the fundamentalist settlers who are busy bashing Palestinians heads in and stealing all their land. These days in this country if you point out that tens of thousands of innocent children have been murdered by the IDF in Gaza you are an antisemite. If you call for a two state solution you are an antisemite. It's a disgusting merging of religious fundies, mainstream center right and center left in this country and mainstream Zionists in Israel. All the while the majority of elected democrats in this country either agree with it, don't see it or are afraid to call it out. I tried to broach this subject with some lefty friends of mine the other day and they just don't want to discuss it.
O.T. hey diaper don go fuck yourself, again!
Supreme Court blocks Trump from deploying the National Guard to Chicago | CNN Politics
My immediate concern (next three years) is how much they can get away with. The consolidation of media giants gives the fascists a huge megaphone. If he can, Trump will use that megaphone to spread lies. Trump also wants to gag those outlets who speak the critical truth. And 'critical' has a double meaning – 'not flattering' is one, but 'objectively true' is the other.
From what I read, before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Russian citizens were cynically aware that their communism was a hoax. In a time before the Internet, they knew they were being asked to work more for less. The government had real and complete control of information then. It's a whole lot harder now. Russia then had a major problem keeping its athletes and artists from defecting. A small xenophobic country may get there – see S. Korea.
Suppose Trump has control of the networks to the degree there is no criticism. They put out the official numbers without question. Unemployment keeps going down. Wages are going up. Only Democrat-run cities have crime. Medical costs are declining – drug prices keep declining by hundreds of percent. Will Trump's poll numbers go up when the 'news' is a stark contradiction of reality?
OK. Trump's control of the media will be in conjunction with using the military to suppress popular dissent. Because there aren't enough federal thugs and the judicial system won't let the feds conduct mass detention and/or murder of citizens. So by default, the military is the only foce that MIGHT be able to suppress dissent if (for example) voting was suspended nationwide, or in blue states, or by some racial metric.
Control of the media is a tool, not an end. I predict this ends with mass opposition to Trump. It won't be institutions, not Ivy League colleges or elite legal firms – sure as hell, not Wall Street or any of the TV networks. It will come down to huge numbers of people standing up for DEMOCRACY against Trump (or Vance) trying to crush Americans for the Constitution by calling out the military. And I think the armed forces (mostly) won't do it because too many people with lots af stripes on their sleeves or gold braid know what they signed up for.
And it wasn’t Trump or fascism.
The odious Tony Dokoupil is the new anchor of the CBS Evening News.
It's the monopolies. It will be a herculean task to fix the mess. The monopolies are the designer drug for the billionaires. We'll have to rebuild from the ground up. Local local local. Local economies. There will, of course, need to be interstate commerce because it's hard for any state to provide everything needed by their state society. But that doesn't have to mean there have to be national level monopolies.