All posts tagged "cbs news"

Health guru Peter Attia out at Bari Weiss' CBS News after Epstein revelations

Health and longevity influencer Dr. Peter Attia has left CBS News after newly released files in the Jeffrey Epstein case revealed email correspondence between him and the late financier and convicted child sex offender, according to reports.

The fallout over his relationship with Epstein prompted Attia to leave his contributor role, which he was recently given by Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss just days before the Department of Justice released a new batch of materials in the Epstein files, The New York Times reported. More than 1,700 documents included Attia's name and conversations between the two men.

"The files showed Dr. Attia providing extensive medical testing and advice to Mr. Epstein, lamenting that he couldn’t tell anyone about Mr. Epstein’s 'outrageous' life and making crude comments about women," according to The Times. "The emails prompted condemnation from many other doctors."

Staff discovered Attia's decision from a note to the network's booking department that explained Attia would leave effective immediately, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Another trusted institution has bitten the dust under Trump

Producer Alicia Hastey departed CBS News Wednesday, saying the work she came to do was “increasingly becoming impossible,” as stories were now evaluated “not just on their journalistic merit but on whether they conform to a shifting set of ideological expectations.”

Whose ideological expectations was Hastey referring to? Would it be impertinent for me to suggest it’s the sociopath in the Oval Office?

Hastey’s criticism came a little over two weeks after Bari Weiss, the anti-“woke” opinion journalist who became editor-in-chief at CBS News, unveiled her “21st-century” vision at a town hall meeting.

Weiss told producers and staff they were free to leave if they didn’t like it. Since then, at least six out of 20 CBS Evening News producers have accepted buyouts.

At that town hall meeting Weiss also named a bunch of new contributors — including the anti-aging influencer Peter Attia. In the latest tranche of Epstein files, Attia appears over 1,700 times, including in an email in which he tells Epstein that “p—y is, indeed, low carb.”

In a missive to the newsroom, Weiss declared that “We love America” should be a guiding principle for the relaunch of the CBS Evening News.

Meanwhile, Weiss has replaced Evening News anchors John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois with Tony Dokoupil — who was best known for hassling the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates for his “extremist” belief that apartheid is morally wrong.

In one of his first broadcasts, Dokoupil accepted without question Israel’s justification for violating the terms of the ceasefire when it killed three journalists in Gaza, reporting only that “Israel said it was targeting a group operating a drone affiliated with Hamas.”

Weiss faced blowback in December when she shelved a 60 Minutes report about Venezuelans being deported by the Trump administration to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison hours before it was set to air.

Sharyn Alfonsi, a long-standing 60 Minutes correspondent who reported the segment, accused CBS News of pulling it for “political” reasons.

“Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices,” she wrote in a note to the CBS News Team. “It is factually correct. In my view, pulling it now, after every rigorous internal check has been met, is not an editorial decision, it is a political one.”

The segment later aired on Jan. 18, drawing more than 5 million viewers.

The story CBS posted about Renee Good’s killing in Minneapolis reported that “the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who fatally shot Renee Good last week in Minneapolis, Jonathan Ross, suffered internal bleeding to the torso following the incident, according to two U.S. officials briefed on his medical condition.”

No identifiable source was given for CBS’s assertion of “internal bleeding.” A CBS News staffer reported “huge internal concern” that the source was an anonymous leak by the Trump administration meant for an outlet they could trust to run it, no questions asked.

Weiss doesn’t exactly report to Trump, of course. Trump runs CBS News the way he runs Venezuela — with a widely understood threat that he’ll wreak havoc if it doesn’t do what he wants.

As Trump told Dokoupil recently in a rambling nearly 13-minute interview, if Kamala Harris had won the presidential election in 2024, “you probably wouldn’t have a job right now.”

Perhaps CBS News didn’t edit Dokoupil’s rambling interview with Trump because, moments after it ended, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt conveyed Trump’s threat that “if it’s not out in full, we’ll sue your ass off.”

You see the way Trump now controls CBS News. Dokoupil is Weiss’s newly minted anchor. Weiss is David Ellison’s newly minted head of CBS News. David Ellison is his father’s (Larry Ellison) newly minted head of Paramount, which is the new owner of CBS. Larry Ellison is a pal of Trump’s who contributes to Trump’s super PAC. And Trump? He allowed Ellison to buy CBS and now has the power to take the prized Warner Bros Discovery out of the clutches of Netflix and deliver it to Ellison as well.

Among David Ellison’s first moves at CBS was to gut DEI policies, appoint right-wing hack Kenneth R. Weinstein to a new “ombudsman” role, and appoint Weiss.

I’m old enough to remember when CBS News would never have surrendered to a demagogic president. But that was when CBS News — the home of Edward R. Murrow (who also revealed to America the danger of Joe McCarthy) and Walter Cronkite — was independent of the rest of CBS. And when the top management of CBS felt they had responsibilities to the American public that transcended making money for CBS’s investors.

America can survive without a 60 Minutes it can trust, just as we can survive without trustworthy editorial pages of the Washington Post — whose owner, Jeff Bezos, has demanded it reflect right-wing capitalism and whose newsroom he just gutted.

But at some point, as Trump continues to repress criticism of him and his regime, American democracy is compromised beyond repair.

Here, in contrast to the Trump suck-up CBS News has become, is the courageous CBS News’s Edward R. Murrow, from April 13, 1954:

- YouTube www.youtube.com

Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/. His new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org

This media tale goes beyond irony to tell us something very dark about America

According to the concept of “manufactured consent,” elaborated by Noam Chomsky and Ed Herman in the 1980s, the media carries out a propaganda function in support of the dominant political system. In the United States, this consent has favored particular governments beyond the US government itself — for instance, Israel in its conflict with Palestinians. A recent example has been CBS, owned by David Ellison’s Paramount and under Bari Weiss’ editorial leadership, which has systematically suppressed Palestinian voices in favor of Israel and President Donald Trump.

In another example of manufactured consent, Weiss’ CBS rejected a 60 Minutes story that made the Trump administration look bad on El Salvador. Incidentally, since the end of last summer, the US State Department has dropped criticism of both Israel and El Salvador in its human rights reporting, merging the interests of CBS with the politics of the current administration. When journalist Sharyn Alfonsi wrote the segment about the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) in El Salvador and what life there is like, the content was pulled at the last minute because Weiss said it needed more reporting and balance, even when journalists at CBS invited all sides for a comment. They insisted that the decision was political and not editorial.

Jeffrey St. Clair for CounterPunch recently stated that “CBS under [Bari] Weiss may be worse than Fox News, because nobody takes Fox seriously as a news source and many do CBS, though not for much longer, one suspects.”

Andy Borowitz pointed out that, “When Bari Weiss and CBS decided to censor the report on El Salvador’s brutal prison, they didn’t realize that bootlegged copies would surface.” Indeed, as reported by Variety, the “report yanked by Weiss about the horrific treatment of detainees deported from the US to a prison in El Salvador … leaked online after appearing on a Canadian-TV app.”

Alfonsi did not hold back in her criticism:

Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices. It is factually correct. In my view, pulling it now — after every rigorous internal check has been met is not an editorial decision, it is a political one. We requested responses to questions and/or interviews with DHS, the White House, and the State Department. Government silence is a statement, not a veto. Their refusal to be interviewed is a tactical maneuver designed to kill the story.

Alfonsi further explained:

If the administration’s refusal to participate becomes a valid reason to spike a story, we have effectively handed them a “kill switch” for any reporting they find inconvenient. If the standard for airing a story becomes “the government must agree to be interviewed,” then the government effectively gains control over the 60 Minutes broadcast. We go from an investigative powerhouse to a stenographer for the state. These men risked their lives to speak with us. We have a moral and professional obligation to the sources who entrusted us with their stories. Abandoning them now is a betrayal of the most basic tenet of journalism: giving voice to the voiceless.

Back in 2020, Weiss, in her resignation letter to the New York Times, stated that “self-censorship” and “fitting a predetermined narrative” to satisfy “a narrow audience rather than allowing a curious public read,” led her to quit.

Just before that, in 2018, she authored in the Times, “We’re All Fascists Now,” a right-wing lament that basically talks of a center-left discourse threatening free speech by its mere interrogation of the hard right.

In essence, Weiss complains of the left trivializing fascism only to cover up the fact that she accepts hard power and state authority and structural violence as forms of conventional wisdom beyond criticism. Cultural norms are not really “left leaning,” but it is certainly useful for her to present them this way. Weiss is in the business of providing security to dominant groups in advancing and advocating the consensus required by the state-corporate news nexus.

Weiss might discount how popular fascism was and is in the context of US history in the first place. When you factor in the popularity of the Ku Klux Klan, which peaked at 6 million-plus members in the early 20th century, American admiration for Mussolini, and the regional popularity of the German Bund, the United States has a horrific past with extreme right affiliation. Just over 1 in 3 Americans listened in the 1930s to Charles Coughlin, an outspoken supporter of Nazism.

But you don’t even need to go far back in history to see the US role in El Salvador’s deterioration or Trump’s subversion of US asylum law, all to promote fascism and militarism. Currently, the Trump administration’s deportation of Venezuelans in violation of international humanitarian law is well known as an emerging crime against humanity. A federal judge has just issued a ruling that requires the United States to grant due process to deported Venezuelans. Additionally, the entire matter has the potential to be examined by the International Criminal Court.

CBS certainly knows that CECOT is a large, high-security prison in El Salvador that has been cited by Human Rights Watch, the UN General Assembly, and the Yale Global Health Review for its harsh conditions and human-rights related concerns. HRW’s report in November 2025 was entitled “You Have Arrived in Hell,” a concept reiterated by Spiegel International. Amnesty International and Relief Web's coverage of the expulsions, which entail people deported from the U.S. and sent to CECOT. It is illegal under international humanitarian law to send refugees to known places of human rights abuse.

Weiss seems to believe that the flagrant nature of Trump’s actions requires the press to yield and to ignore facts that “seem radical.” Additionally, Weiss encourages apolitical journalists to engage in self-censorship and to dismiss the buried segment as a “workplace dispute.”

All the while, 60 Minutes remains entirely mainstream and conventional. As reporter Dave Zirin points out, 60 Minutes was never perfect, it’s been a mouthpiece for war and empire many times over the decades.” He aptly explains how Weiss canceled “the brave testimonials of Venezuelans, tortured in Trump’s El Salvadoran slave labor prison.”

To Zirin’s point, Weiss, a loyal commissar to corporate statism, has internalized the belief that her job is to reinforce the corporate rather than the contrarian brand of 60 Minutes and avoid coverage of geopolitical issues that might make her job more difficult. When she undermines actual reporting and denies the labor, dignity, and courage found in solid reporting, she is trafficking in the politics of organized forgetting and silence.

What Weiss does worst of all, of course, is to provide cover for Trumpian structural viciousness, what policy analyst Khury Petersen-Smith has called the “era for spectacular violence.” This all comes as International relations expert Stephen Zunes recently pointed out how “the United States is now ranked 57th in political freedom,” behind dozens of nations and territories according to Freedom House.

Weiss is only helping to contribute to the trend, and this backlash is likely to continue.

Daniel Falcone is a historian, teacher, and journalist. In addition to Foreign Policy in Focus, he has written for The Journal of Contemporary Iraq & the Arab World, The Nation, Jacobin, Truthout, CounterPunch, and Scalawag. He resides in New York City and is a member of The Democratic Socialists of America.

This courageous woman risked it all to shame Trump's minions

Once you begin surrendering to Trump, he always wants more. You can’t appease a tyrant.

David Ellison’s CBS — after gutting DEI policies, appointing right-wing hack Kenneth R. Weinstein to a new “ombudsman” role, and making anti-“woke” opinion journalist Bari Weiss editor-in-chief of CBS News (despite her lack of experience in either broadcasting or newsrooms) — on Sunday removed a segment from 60 Minutes featuring stories of Venezuelan men deported by the Trump administration to what the program called a “brutal” prison in El Salvador. Weiss had demanded changes to the segment.

The Ellisons — fils et père — have been seeking Trump’s support for their hostile bid to acquire Warner Bros Discovery, but Trump has been unhappy with recent episodes of 60 Minutes, even under its new management. Hence, the segment’s removal.

Sharyn Alfonsi, a long-standing 60 Minutes correspondent who reported the segment that was removed, accused CBS News of pulling it for “political” reasons.

Here’s Alfonsi’s note in full:

News Team,

Thank you for the notes and texts. I apologize for not reaching out earlier.

I learned on Saturday that Bari Weiss spiked our story, INSIDE CECOT, which was supposed to air tonight. We (Ori and I) asked for a call to discuss her decision. She did not afford us that courtesy/opportunity.

Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices. It is factually correct. In my view, pulling it now-after every rigorous internal check has been met is not an editorial decision, it is a political one.

We requested responses to questions and/or interviews with DHS, the White House, and the State Department.

Government silence is a statement, not a VETO. Their refusal to be interviewed is a tactical maneuver designed to kill the story.

If the administration’s refusal to participate becomes a valid reason to spike a story, we have effectively handed them a “kill switch” for any reporting they find inconvenient.

If the standard for airing a story becomes “the government must agree to be interviewed,” then the government effectively gains control over the 60 Minutes broadcast. We go from an investigative powerhouse to a stenographer for the state.

These men risked their lives to speak with us. We have a moral and professional obligation to the sources who entrusted us with their stories. Abandoning them now is a betrayal of the most basic tenet of journalism: giving voice to the voiceless.

CBS spiked the Jeffrey Wigand interview due to legal concerns, nearly destroying the credibility of this broadcast. It took years to recover from that “low point.” By pulling this story to shield an administration, we are repeating that history, but for political optics rather than legal ones.

We have been promoting this story on social media for days. Our viewers are expecting it. When it fails to air without a credible explanation, the public will correctly identify this as corporate censorship. We are trading 50 years of “Gold Standard” reputation for a single week of political quiet.

I care too much about this broadcast to watch it be dismantled without a fight.

Sharyn

Alfonsi wins this week’s Joseph N. Welch Award for courage in the face of tyranny (named for the chief counsel for the U.S. Army who confronted Senator Joe McCarthy with the iconic question, "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?" which led to McCarthy’s demise).

I’m old enough to remember when CBS News would never have surrendered to a demagogic president. But that was when CBS News — the home of Edward R. Murrow (who also revealed to America the danger of Joe McCarthy) and Walter Cronkite — was independent of the rest of CBS. And when the top management of CBS felt they had independent responsibilities to the American public.

America can survive without a 60 Minutes it can trust, just as we can survive without trustworthy editorial pages of the Washington Post. But at some point, as Trump continues to repress criticism of him and his regime, American democracy is compromised beyond repair.

We are coming to the end of only the first year of Trump II. He and the lapdogs and sycophants around him have done more damage to this nation in less than a year than I thought possible.

They have not been alone in their destruction. They’ve had enablers in the form of billionaires such as Larry and David Ellison, along with quisling managers such as Bari Weiss, who confuse having money and power with possessing integrity and fostering the common good.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.
Robert Reich's new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org

'Not a Freudian slip': Analyst astonished by Trump's 'confession'

President Donald Trump just made an astonishing "confession" about pardons, an analyst flagged Monday.

In his Substack essay, Democratic strategist Mike Nellis, founder and chief strategy officer of Authentic, called out why Trump's response in a "60 Minutes" interview with journalist Norah O'Donnell was troubling and "the biggest story in the country."

Trump returned to CBS for the first time after suing and settling with the company. He claimed to "know nothing" about Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, despite the president having pardoned him after his company boosted the Trump family's crypto business.

"Let’s be clear: this wasn’t a Freudian slip. It wasn’t a mistake. It was a confession. Trump freed a crypto kingpin who pled guilty to fraud — just like he pardoned cop-beaters from January 6th, just like he pardoned drug dealers, sex offenders, and white-collar crooks — because he’s likely getting paid, one way or another, in this massive corruption scheme," Nellis writes.

Nellis points out how Republicans might have reacted if former President Joe Biden made a similar move.

"Can you imagine the reaction if Joe Biden said he pardoned someone because Hunter told him to? If Biden blindly freed a scammer based solely on his son’s recommendation — no due diligence, no second thought — conservative media would be frothing at the mouth. Republicans would launch twenty investigations before lunch. But with Trump? Shrugs. Silence from the MAGA influencers," Nellis writes.

Americans are fed up, the writer adds. And that is something Trump can't escape, especially ahead of election day.

"Trump’s a skilled liar, but he can’t gaslight people about the cost of living. This is daily reality for millions. And Democrats learned that the hard way last cycle. Now it’s Trump’s turn — tomorrow, in New Jersey, Virginia, and beyond. And again in two years, when voters boot the GOP from power," Nellis writes.

'Not a great sign': Worry mounts as big-name CBS News journalist announces exit

Surprised reactions flooded in on Monday after CBS Evening News co-anchor John Dickerson announced he was leaving the network, with one observer saying the veteran journalist's move was "not a good sign."

Dickerson, who joined CBS 16 years ago, made the announcement as the company leadership shifts and "significant changes" are signaled ahead for the broadcast news division, The New York Times reports.

He said in a statement: "At the end of this year, I will leave CBS, sixteen years after I sat in as Face the Nation anchor for the first time. I am extremely grateful for all that CBS gave me — the work, the audience’s attention and the honor of being a part of the network’s history — and I am grateful for the dear colleagues who’ve made me a better journalist and a better human. I will miss you."

Social media users responded to the news.

"It'll be really interesting to see if John Dickerson is leaving CBS News voluntarily or if he was pushed out," Gizmodo reporter Matt Novak wrote on Bluesky.

"Dickerson is one of the best broadcast journalists in the game, and someone who would clearly be a real asset to a new leader interested in strengthening the network's journalism. But, of course, we know [Bari] Weiss isn't actually interested in journalism as such," New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie wrote on Bluesky.

"John Dickerson being pushed out (or finding it intolerable to stay) at CBS News is all you need to know about where the network is headed," Clara Jeffery, editor in chief of Mother Jones/Center for Investigative Reporting/Reveal, wrote on Bluesky.

"John Dickerson is one of the best journalists of his generatrion [SIC], so of course he's leaving CBS News," lawyer and writer David Lurie wrote on Bluesky.

"John Dickerson announces he’ll be leaving CBS at the end of the year. Not a great sign for the network," writer Charlotte Clymer wrote on Bluesky.

How our media became so vulnerable to Trump — and what we can do about it

Jimmy Kimmel returned to the airwaves just two weeks and two days ago (although in Trump time, it seems far longer).

Disney’s decision to allow Kimmel back on was a victory for freedom of the press and a setback for Trump’s authoritarianism.

Nonetheless, today’s media ecosystem is far more vulnerable to authoritarianism than it was decades ago.

Today I want to explore three structural changes in our political economy that have made it so, and suggest what must be done to strengthen media independence.

1. Media concentration has facilitated censorship

After Paramount’s CBS settled Trump’s frivolous $16 million lawsuit against them and canceled Stephen Colbert, much to Trump’s delight, the FCC swiftly approved Paramount’s merger with Skydance.

The result: a newly consolidated media giant now run by David Ellison — son of Larry Ellison, the world’s third-richest man and a major Trump donor.

Now, Ellison has announced Paramount’s acquisition of The Free Press and installed its anti-“woke” founder, Bari Weiss, as editor-in-chief of CBS News.

This is the same billionaire-led conglomerate that wants to absorb Warner Bros. Discovery — an even bigger step toward the concentration of the power to shape public opinion.

The proposed merger would hand control of CNN, CBS News, HBO, MTV, Comedy Central, BET, HGTV, TNT, and more to a single mega-corporation — with Trump’s allies at the helm.

When the media is under the control of a handful of people, it’s far easier for an authoritarian in the White House to intimidate that handful — and force them to do his bidding — than when the media is less concentrated.

In 1983, the U.S. media was dominated by 50 companies. Today, that number has shrunk to just six giant media conglomerates.

2. Ultra-wealthy individuals are now controlling major media. These are people likely to be biased against the public’s right to know.

The second trend has been a shift in control over those media corporations to a relative handful of ultra-wealthy moguls.

As noted, the Ellison family is rapidly taking over a large swath of media.

Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, bought X (then Twitter) for $42 billion. He then turned it into a right-wing cesspool.

Jeff Bezos, the second richest, owns Amazon and The Washington Post.

Rupert Murdoch, another billionaire, owns Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Post.

Why are the ultra-rich buying up so much of the media? Vanity may play a part, but there’s a more pragmatic — some might say sinister — reason.

As vast wealth concentrates in the hands of a few, this small group of the ultra-wealthy may rationally fear that majorities of voters could confiscate their wealth through, for example, a wealth tax or the elimination of the “stepped-up basis at death” rule, which would tax all capital gains.

If you’re a billionaire, in other words, you may view democracy as a potential threat to your net worth.

Control over a significant share of the dwindling number of media outlets enables you to effectively hedge against democracy by subtly (or not so subtly) suppressing criticism of you and other plutocrats.

Seen in this light, Jeff Bezos’s decree that The Washington Post’s opinion section support “personal liberties and free markets” isn’t just a means of ingratiating himself with Trump. It also reduces the risk that movers and shakers in the nation’s capital might be seduced into raising taxes on people like Bezos.

3. The shift from stakeholder to shareholder capitalism.

Behind these maneuvers lies a third underlying shift — from the stakeholder capitalism of the first three decades after World War II to the shareholder capitalism that began in the 1980s — along with the rise, starting in the 1990s, of CEO pay packages consisting of large amounts of shares of stock and options to purchase additional shares.

Paramount (CBS) surrendered to Trump, and Disney (ABC) initially did so, because they determined that fighting him would have cost those firms’ CEOs and shareholders far more.

Disney then discovered — when its customers threatened to boycott all Disney products and services — that the actual cost of surrender was far higher than it had counted on. Hence, its decision to reinstate Kimmel.

I’m old enough to remember when CBS News would never have surrendered to a demagogic president. But that was when CBS News — the home of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite — was independent of the rest of CBS, and when the top management of CBS had independent responsibilities to the American public.

The New York Times, by contrast, decided to fight Trump from the moment he initiated a lawsuit against it. That may be because the Times is owned and controlled by the Ochs-Sulzberger family through a trust that holds a majority of special, high-voting shares in the company. The Times is not dedicated to maximizing shareholder value; it’s dedicated to the public’s right to know.

***

Trump and his stooges are engaged in blatant political censorship that runs afoul of the First Amendment.

But the three underlying trends I’ve just outlined — the consolidation of media into a handful of outlets, the increasing control of the media by the ultra-rich, and the growing primacy of shareholder interests — have made it far easier for Trump and his lackeys to do their dirty work.

When and if We the People are ever back in charge, not only do we have to protect freedom of speech from demagoguery, but we must also reverse these three underlying trends that have made it far too easy for a demagogue to undermine such freedom.

This will require:

conditioning media ownership on a proven commitment to the public’s right to know,
using antitrust laws to prevent or break up media monopolies and giant media conglomerates, and
raising taxes on the ultra-wealthy so they have less power to undermine our democracy.

Easier said than done, obviously, but key prerequisites for restoring American democracy.

***

Here’s CBS News’s Edward R. Murrow in 1954, criticizing Senator Joe McCarthy — and criticizing America for allowing McCarthy’s witch hunt. Would today’s CBS News have allowed Murrow to say this on the air?

- YouTube www.youtube.com

Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/
Robert Reich's new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org.

That eerie sound you’re hearing is the First Amendment falling

One of the largest mergers in media history was approved Thursday by the FCC — an $8 billion marriage between Paramount and Skydance Media.

This was epic not as a business story but as a broadside against democracy. The agency established in 1934 as an independent honest broker was deployed as a weapon of domestic war by President Donald Trump.

Like any major merger, this one had twists and turns and complexities. This one had more than its share, as The New York Times reported:

“In recent weeks, Paramount has been engulfed in turmoil stemming from the company’s strained relationship with the Trump administration. The company paid $16 million this month to settle a lawsuit brought by President Trump. Critics — including CBS’s ‘Late Night’ host, Stephen Colbert — said the settlement was effectively a payoff to secure approval from the Trump administration, claims the company flatly rejected.”

In the end, however, the drama was dwarfed by an unprecedented, naked assault on a national media establishment that Trump has long slandered as “the enemy of the people.” And in true authoritarian form, the Leader’s will was executed by a shameless lackey — FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, who tweeted:

“President Trump took on the legacy national media. He smashed the facade that they — and their Hollywood and New York execs — get to control the narrative. President Trump is now stacking up the wins with more to come.”

Such servile sycophancy from an FCC chairman is certainly without precedent in the independent agency’s 91-year history. But so is having the chair’s role filled by a bootlicker who co-authored Project 2025’s section on the FCC.

In Trump II, it’s barely a speed bump on the road to dictatorship.

The FCC’s 2-1 decision was put in its place by the lone dissenter and Democrat on the panel, Commissioner Anna Gomez:

“After months of cowardly capitulation to this Administration, Paramount finally got what it wanted. Unfortunately, it is the American public who will ultimately pay the price for its actions.

In an unprecedented move, this once-independent FCC used its vast power to pressure Paramount to broker a private legal settlement and further erode press freedom. Once again, this agency is undermining legitimate efforts to combat discrimination and expand opportunity by overstepping its authority and intervening in employment matters reserved for other government entities with proper jurisdiction on these issues.

Even more alarming, it is now imposing never-before-seen controls over newsroom decisions and editorial judgment, in direct violation of the First Amendment and the law.”

That eerie sound you’re hearing is the crumbling of the First Amendment. As I wrote here, the CBS capitulation to autocracy will go down as one of the most cowardly and damaging surrenders in American media history.

Tempting as it might be to blame it all on Trump, the ultimate culprit in the story is a media giant willing to sell its soul to an extortionist.

And as Commandant Carr put it so bluntly, there’s more to come.

'Liars on notice!' Trump issues ominous threat as he collects millions in settlement

U.S. President Donald Trump took to social media Tuesday to rub salt in the wounds of CBS News by announcing he has now received the $16 million settlement amount agreed to earlier this month.

"BREAKING NEWS!" the president wrote. "We have just achieved a BIG AND IMPORTANT WIN in our Historic Lawsuit against 60 Minutes, CBS, and Paramount. Just like ABC and George Slopadopoulos, CBS and its Corporate Owners knew that they defrauded the American People, and were desperate to settle."

Trump sued "60 Minutes" over an October interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris that Trump claimed was edited "completely and corruptly" to change Harris's answers.

The settlement was seen as a way to appease Trump during Paramount's $28 billion merger with Skydance, which required sign-off by the Federal Communications Commission. Political satirist Stephen Colbert called the deal "a big fat bribe," and was fired shortly thereafter.

Trump's post continued, "Paramount/CBS/60 Minutes have today paid $16 Million Dollars in settlement, and we also anticipate receiving $20 Million Dollars more from the new Owners, in Advertising, PSAs, or similar Programming, for a total of over $36 Million Dollars."

Trump called the settlement "another in a long line of VICTORIES over the Fake News Media, who we are holding to account for their widespread fraud and deceit." He then threatened other outlets he has beef with, including The Wall Street Journal, which recently published a story about Jeffrey Epstein that he tried to quash. Trump filed a $10 billion suit against WSJ and owner Rupert Murdoch.

"The Failing New York Times, The Washington Post, MSDNC, CNN, and all other Mainstream Media Liars, are ON NOTICE that the days of them being allowed to deceive the American People are OVER. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!"