Earlier this month, CBS wimped out and paid Donald Trump a $16 million bribe to settle a completely baseless lawsuit — and to buy regulatory approval of their $8 billion merger with Skydance. The result is now going to be a CBS owned by Trump’s close billionaire friends, the Ellison family, who are clearly signaling they plan to turn the “new CBS’” news division into a glorified version of Fox News (read: propaganda).
Now that the king has received his bribe, Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr will obviously have to wind down his fake “investigation” into CBS. You might recall that Carr falsely claimed that CBS had been engaging in misleading edits to make Trump look bad, therefore violating the FCC’s “news distortion” policy.
It was a lie: the real goal of the investigation was to apply pressure on CBS to fold to Trump, and frame CBS as being mean to Republicans to set the stage for what will come next: killing critical journalism at places like 60 Minutes, and turning CBS into another right wing propaganda mill.
So the Skydance folks and Carr now have to put on a little performance. A performance where the FCC pretends it is seriously weighing the merits of the deal, and that the deal will be good for journalism, media, and the public interest. Everybody knows Carr has to rubber stamp the deal to make the Trumps and Ellisons happy, but they have to pretend that’s not what’s happening and maintain the facade that U.S. antitrust still actually functions.
And the broken U.S. press is going to help them. The end results are little stage plays like the one playing out over at Deadline, which credibly repeats Skydance executive claims that the new CBS will be dedicated to “unbiased journalism”:
“According to a filing with the FCC, Ellison and his legal counsel, Matthew A. Brill, met Tuesday with the FCC officials, and they “discussed Skydance’s commitment to unbiased journalism and its embrace of diverse viewpoints, principles that will ensure CBS’s editorial decision-making reflects the varied ideological perspectives of American viewers.”
The Deadline story doesn’t talk at all about media consolidation. It soft-sells the Trump bribe. It shows no serious interest in the FCC’s broadly unpopular and well documented efforts to crush the First Amendment. Even the headline is misleading, helping Brendan Carr pretend that he’s some sort of good faith arbiter seriously thinking about the merger’s impact on journalism:
Most importantly, the outlet fails to mention to readers that when it comes to right wing bullshit, “unbiased journalism” and “diverse viewpoints” are code for making CBS more friendly to Republicans and corporate power. It’s not at all subtle.
Skydance is already making it clear that they’re interested in bringing on long-term nonsense peddler artist Bari Weiss to “shape CBS coverage.” What the Ellison family wants CBS journalism to be will closely resemble the interests of the Ellison family. That is, soft on Republicans and soft on corporate malfeasance. And while CBS claims it wasn’t politically motivated, it’s likely the new ownership had some role in the firing of Stephen Colbert.
Deadline also parrots the claim that the new CBS will work hard to please king Trump by being more sexist and racist. Note here, too, how dutifully Deadline adopts the Republican framing of their “war on DEI” (read: pro-segregation racism) as a serious thing:
“The filing also stated Ellison and Brill discussed with Carr their company’s “commitment to promoting non-discrimination and equal employment opportunity at New Paramount, ensuring the company is fully compliant with law.” One of Carr’s chief concerns has been corporate “diversity, equity and inclusion” initiatives that he has characterized as “invidious discrimination.” He has suggested that companies that maintain DEI policies would have difficulty securing regulatory approval.”
They just quote Carr and Skydance, without even bothering with lazy “he said, she said” journalism. Most of Carr and Trump’s lazy bullshit has involved claiming that efforts to fight widespread systemic racism and sexism is somehow discriminatory against white people. Shitty U.S. press outlets absolutely adore portraying this “war on DEI” as a serious policy, as opposed to the obviously hateful ignorance it is.
Another thing Deadline (and outlets like Variety) won’t mention is that these giant media mergers always end very badly for consumers, employees, and the broader public. As Warner Brothers Discovery just demonstrated in painful detail, these deals always generate massive debt that’s offset by mass firings and degraded product quality. You can set your watch to it.
U.S. media just got significantly, document-ably worse due to consolidation. The new CBS will be significantly more right wing and corporate friendly than it already was. The entire thing will be propped up by lazy claims to the complete contrary. None of which you’d really understand, not coincidentally, from reading mainstream U.S. journalism cover itself.
To get any truthful understanding of how gross and corrupt this CBS transaction was, you’d have to go read independent media. That pretty much speaks for itself. And without serious media reform and widespread efforts to creatively fund real journalism, it’s only going to get worse.