CBS Surrenders to Trump | The Nation

Just a week after the billionaire owner of The Washington Post Having ravaged its news operations in the service of plutocratic impunity, the news regime put in place by the billionaire owner of CBS News said, in essence, “Hold my beer.” After Late show Host Stephen Colbert had scheduled an interview with Democratic Texas state Rep. James Talarico and was told by the network’s legal division to cancel the segment. The rationale for this decision was the same pretext used by the Federal Communications Commission to open a ridiculous regulatory investigation into Talarico’s previous appearance on ABC’s daytime talk show, The view: Running a candidate for office during an election cycle without also accommodating that candidate’s opponents was a violation of the agency’s equal time doctrine.

News reporting and talk show appearances have long been outside the scope of equal time, because news consumers have an interest in hearing the opinions of candidates as they run for office — the exemption essentially states that viewers of these shows can be expected to act like adults capable of discerning the difference between public affairs and entertainment and straight news coverage. But Brendon Carr, the MAGA hacker appointed by Donald Trump to head the FCC in his second term, is determined to abolish these gender distinctions and transform the application of equal time regulations to benefit right-wing candidates. It continues to fuel the media persecution mania that is at the heart of Trump’s grievance politics. This debased reasoning led Carr to pressure ABC to suspend Jimmy Kimmel for criticizing MAGA theories about the Charlie Kirk assassination. Although Carr has yet to launch a formal review of the equal-time restrictions, the White House’s multi-pronged attack on media independence has progressed to the point where, as Colbert noted in his opening monologue, “my network is already acting like it does.”

CBS lawyers advised Colbert to refrain not only from airing his interview with Talarico, but also from discussing the decision to take it off air. But since CBS announced last year that it was canceling Colbert’s show in the spring, he has invoked the sacred privilege of the short-lived program…What are they going to do, fire me?— to target CBS and Carr in his opening monologue and post his interview with Talarico on the show’s YouTube page. (You can watch it here; Colbert’s opening monologue is here.) “You’re chairman of the FCC, so FCC you,” Colbert told Carr, before repeating the agency’s clearly unhinged and self-serving invocation of the equal time rule. “You yourself are motivated by partisan goals,” Colbert continued. “Let’s call it what it is: Donald Trump’s administration wants to silence anyone who says bad things about him on television, because they’re just watching television.” Colbert also noted that Carr’s equal vigilance does not extend to radio shows, which are overrun with right-wing hosts giving interviews to right-wing politicians.

But you don’t have to subject yourself to hated AM radio shows to see the damage that unfettered MAGA ideology has done to our media sphere – you can just stare at the rubble left by Bari Weiss, the ridiculously unqualified editor-in-chief of CBS News, whom baby nepo billionaire David Ellison handpicked after Paramount Skydance acquired the network. Just hours before the Colbert fiasco was made public, 60 minutes Correspondent Anderson Cooper announced he was leaving the show, apparently to spend more time with his family, although this justification does not extend to the position he continues to hold at CNN. The most far-fetched explanation for Cooper’s departure is that he was fed up with ideological meddling from Weiss, who deliberately diluted a report on the horrific conditions at the Salvadoran CECOT facility where the Trump administration is storing immigrant detainees. (Though CNN may not be such a safe haven for its journalistic integrity — the cable network is potentially the next to be gobbled up by Skydance, as it revives a hostile bid aimed at thwarting Netflix’s acquisition of CNN parent Warner Brothers Discovery.)

Meanwhile, at CBS Evening Newswhich has become a dead ringer for Fox News under the mindless tutelage of its new Weiss-hired anchor Tony Dokoupil, lead producer Alicia Hastey has also fled journalistic ruin. After buying the network from the network’s new executives, she circulated a scathing farewell memo lambasting the network’s rightward shift. While it had previously been empowered to produce “segments aimed at highlighting underrepresented perspectives, interviews that challenged conventional wisdom, and efforts to make our journalism more receptive to a skeptical public,” CBS News’ new regime scuttled that news-gathering model. Instead, Hastey writes, “a radical new vision prioritizing a break from traditional broadcasting norms to embrace what has been described as ‘heterodox’ journalism. … Stories can instead be evaluated not only on their journalistic merit, but also on their conformity to a shifting set of ideological expectations – a dynamic that pushes producers and journalists to self-censor or avoid challenging stories that might trigger backlash or unfavorable headlines.”

Hastey could have cited virtually any segment from Dokoupil’s trash fire show as evidence of his appreciation of this attitude of total sycophancy to MAGA power, but the anchor’s refrain closing a venerable profile of Secretary of State Marco Rubio after the Trump administration’s illegal kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife will likely serve as the network’s epitaph: “We salute you, Marco Rubio.

This sickening performance also drives home a point Talarico made in his heated interview with Colbert: “This is the party that stood up to cancel culture…and it’s the most dangerous kind of cancel culture – the kind that comes from the top. Corporate media executives are selling out the First Amendment to curry favor with corrupt politicians. And any threat to our First Amendment rights is a threat to all of our First Amendment rights.”

Over to you, Bari Weiss.