I hope Dan Rather gets involved in this — not that he can fix it but at least he’s the most credible voice in the room right now about what the network used to be and where it stands now. Rather’s in his mid-90’s and he well remembers the days of Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow and what CBS used to be. They didn’t roll over to autocrats. But that was then under different ownership and management and this is now and that’s what may in fact come down because CBS has a merger going on that Trump could stonewall. So for pragmatic, financial reasons, the all seeing eye network may choose to turn a blind eye to truth and go along with the bully entering the White House Monday. Wall Street Journal:
Paramount Global executives have held internal discussions about settling a lawsuit filed by Donald Trump over a CBS News interview with Vice President Kamala Harris, according to people familiar with the situation, a sign of larger efforts to dial down tensions with the incoming president.
Paramount, owner of CBS, its namesake studio and several cable channels, has a major piece of business in front of the new administration: its planned merger with Skydance Media. It’s become clear to executives at both companies that Trump’s dissatisfaction with CBS News will make the review tougher than they anticipated, and that they’ll likely need to offer concessions to win approval, people familiar with the situation said. […]
Trump’s lawsuit against CBS, which seeks $10 billion in damages, alleges that the network committed election interference by editing portions of an interview with Harris, favoring her campaign for president. Trump claimed CBS aired one version of the interview on “60 Minutes” and another version on its show “Face the Nation,” each containing different answers about Israel. CBS has said it aired a more succinct version of Harris’s interview on “60 Minutes.”
There was no indication that Paramount had approached Trump’s team about a settlement, but executives at the company were gaming out options to reduce friction with the incoming administration.
“What’s going on here is a lot of bluster to discipline the future operations of CBS,” said Andrew Jay Schwartzman, a longtime public-interest attorney and senior counselor at the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society. “My guess is that this is just to kind of soften them up and a warning to others.” […]
The Paramount-Skydance deal could face other serious challenges. John Moolenaar, the Republican chairman of the House select committee on China, said Wednesday that the merger warranted review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. China’s Tencent Holdings, which was recently added to a U.S. blacklist of Chinese military-linked companies, is an investor in Skydance. A Skydance spokeswoman said the Tencent investment in the new Paramount would be less than 5%.
This is a complex can of worms. At first blush, the reality of this situation is that the Child in Chief could stonewall a major media merger simply out of spite and to get back at people he feels have wronged him, which is any media outlet which has simply reported facts that are not favorable to Trump and that’s everybody.
ABC News set a horrible precedent by rolling over to Trump. If CBS follows suit then it will be even worse. The Washington Post is hemmorhaging talent right now. Top journalists are leaving, subscribers are jumping ship en masse and the Los Angeles Times is in a situation where its billionaire owner wants AI to write “the other side” of news stories so as to be “fair and balanced” — and you know whose motto that is.
The Era of Trump is a War On Truth. Since 2015 when the media began normalizing his candidacy, which was anything but, the legacy media has been manipulated by Trump and have played into him for ratings, while the right-wing media industry has expanded.
We cannot have two different narratives of reality. That’s what we’ve been dealing with and it doesn’t work. So now it looks like Trump intends to get all the major legacy media outlets under his boot and so far the plan is working fine.
If there’s one news story worth keeping an eye on, it’s this one. CBS cannot roll over like ABC did. This is about a lot more than a media merger, it’s about the First Amendment and democracy itself.
Men are generally more careful with their pocketbooks than their principles…Emerson
When they built the Golden gate bridge in the 30s, they installed a safety net that saved 19 men. They called themselves the Halfway to Hell club. The free press used to be that cultural safety net…so I guess America should be renamed On the Road to Hell club.