Anderson Cooper decides to walk away from broadcast TV’s most prestigious news show, 60 Minutes. Stephen Colbert takes his interview with a rising Democratic politician to YouTube instead of his own late-night show. The CBS Evening News anchor presents a misleading version of the network’s own exclusive reporting on Ice arrests. And a news producer writes a farewell note to her CBS News colleagues blaming the loss of editorial independence.
If you connect the dots, the picture of what’s happening at CBS becomes all too clear. That picture comes into even sharper focus once you recall an underlying factor: the network’s parent company is trying to get a big commercial deal done and needs the help of the Trump administration to bring it over the finish line.
“Media capture” is the name that University of Pennsylvania scholar Victor Pickard gives to what we’re seeing unfold before our eyes.
What’s happening at CBS and elsewhere “isn’t a singular breakdown”, Pickard writes in a new analysis.
It’s a whole cascade of layers – media ownership, control and market structure – that “endanger our information and communication systems, our First Amendment freedoms, and our democracy”.
In the CBS situation, the immediate motivation is easy to understand. The network’s parent company, Paramount Skydance, wants to buy Warner Brothers Discovery, which also owns CNN – one of Donald Trump’s favorite punching bags and a news organization he would love to see take the same rightward turn as CBS.
Paramount Skydance is run by David Ellison, son of Larry Ellison, the Trump pal and one of the richest people on earth. Their effort is somewhat against the odds, since Warner Brothers Discovery’s board favors a competing offer from Netflix.
But the Ellisons haven’t given up, and they have some powerful friends in their corner, since any deal may need FCC approval. The Trump-appointed chairperson of the FCC, Brendan Carr, has shown himself to be a political animal, not the impartial and public-spirited leader that this crucial role calls for.
So much of what’s happened at CBS – the back-of-the-hand treatment of Colbert and the rightward drift of the news division – are ways of signalling that the Ellisons are more than willing to serve Trump’s interests.
If Paramount Skydance does end up controlling CNN, Cooper – one of the cable network’s most prominent faces – may find that trouble is following him. (Publicly, Cooper, who has had an unusual arrangement working for both CNN and 60 Minutes, says he wants to spend more time with his children; but he’s also reportedly unhappy with the direction of the show under CBS News editor Bari Weiss, who reports directly to David Ellison.)
As for Colbert, he has made no secret of where he stands, not just this last week when his interview with a Democratic Texas lawmaker ran into internal network roadblocks.
Months ago, after CBS settled a frivolous lawsuit brought by Trump last year, Colbert – on air – labeled the settlement a “big, fat bribe”. Soon after, the network decided not to offer him another contract.
It’s all a vivid example of a worrisome problem in American media. As media companies become more consolidated, and ever more in the hands of the richest Americans, priorities change radically. Editorial independence weakens; self-censorship grows.
The dominoes of capitulation seem to tumble voluntarily.
“The government doesn’t have to formally censor anyone,” wrote Parker Molloy on her newsletter, The Present Age. “It just has to make enough threats that corporations start censoring themselves.”
No surprise then that, in presenting CBS News research about immigrants arrested by ICE, the network’s evening news anchor, Tony Dokoupil, earlier this month inverted the original reporting to emphasize the crimes – not that so few of the crimes are violent. After all, that would have been contrary to how Trump has portrayed ICE-arrested immigrants as rapists and murderers. (DUIs, or driving under the influence, the reporting showed, far outpaced homicides and sexual assaults.)
And no surprise that, in leaving the network, journalist Alicia Hastey lamented that stories increasingly are “evaluated not just on their journalistic merits but on whether they conform to a shifting set of ideological expectations”.
I’ve heard fascism described as the dangerous combination of state power and corporate power. And here we are.
With a politicized FCC, a self-interested president surrounded by soulless lackeys, and corporate media bosses trying to protect commercial interests, we’re far down that road.
To pull it back means serious policy reform. For starters, that would mean strict limits on media consolidation, support for independent local journalism, and a truly nonpartisan FCC.
At the moment that’s highly unlikely, since such reform must be driven by those who understand that journalism is meant to serve the public – not to help the rich and powerful buy their next yachts.
