from the nannystate-bullshit dept
With the cowards at CBS/Paramount having paid their $16 million bribe, Trump’s FCC was quick to rubber-stamp its approval to the company’s $8 billion merger with Skydance (owned by Trump’s billionaire friends in the Ellison family). Part of that deal involves installing a Trump babysitter to ensure what’s left of the media giant’s journalism division is appropriately deferential to our mad baby idiot king.
The CBS/Paramount/Skydance merger formally closed last Thursday, and the new “bias monitor” is presumably now hard at work ensuring the new CBS news division is appropriately feckless. The FCC’s lone Dem commissioner, Anna Gomez, was quick to (correctly) call the appointment of a government-appointed truth-nanny a “betrayal” of journalistic independence and the public trust:
It’s grotesque, ironic, dangerous, and foreboding that the authoritarian GOP has installed a “truth monitor” at a major media network, especially after spending decades whining about policies like the long-deceased Fairness Doctrine and even longer pretending to have read Orwell’s 1984.
But it’s also hugely problematic that in just 7 months the FCC has been converted from government consumer protection agency into a 24/7 Donald Trump earlobe nibbler and speech police (under the pretense of protecting free speech and “fighting media bias,” no less). No longer does the FCC even try to competently regulate media and telecom giants to protect markets or consumers; its entire function now is to bully companies that aren’t appropriately sexist, racist, or feckless enough for Donald’s liking.
All of that said, this monitor shouldn’t really have much of a job, assuming the incompetent administration ever gets around to actually appointing a full-time staffer in the first place.
The Ellison family broadly supports Trump, and it’s inevitable that whatever’s left of journalism at the new CBS reflects that, despite a lot of the usual, empty rhetoric about a firewall between ownership and editorial. CBS was already becoming more friendly to authoritarians before the merger; it’s inevitable this just gets worse under Trump-friendly ownership and reflects a broader institutional media failure.
I think there’s two paths for the new CBS.
In one, the Ellison family finds a way to competently combine TikTok, Bari Weiss’ Free Press, and CBS to create a modern right wing tech-savvy propaganda empire that rivals News Corporation. There’s some signs that’s already underway. This “news” and propaganda would be a money pit funded by the infotainment arm of the company (see: the $7.7 billion acquisition of MMA rights).
But there’s another path in which all the debt from this acquisition spree results in the usual waves of layoffs and cost cutting and quality erosion that drives potential viewers to the exits. A path in which Larry Ellison’s nepo baby son struggles to adapt to changing markets, over-estimates the public’s thirst for Bari-Weiss style authoritarian-apologist dog shit, and, like other recent disastrous media gambits (the Time Warner Discovery mess), drives the entire operation straight into the ocean.
Either way the FCC’s new “bias monitor” is dangerous extremism, but it’s going to be so much worse if the Ellison family authoritarian coddling and appeasement gambit is actually financially successful.
Filed Under: bias monitor, cbs, donald trump, fcc, free speech, larry ellison, media, propaganda
Companies: cbs, paramount, skydance
