RIP, CBS

Trump's cronies move in at the Tiffany Network

In a busy news cycle, a milestone event in the story of American liberty might have slipped your notice.

The Trump administration, as a condition of approving the $8 billion sale of Paramount to Skydance Media, has succeeded in demanding that CBS News (owned by Paramount) appoint a “bias monitor” to oversee its coverage.

That’s right. The Trump FCC demanded an in-house stooge at the news division to alert the corporate bosses when the journalists get out of line and exhibit “bias.” How is “bias” defined? You already know that. In Trump-speak, “bias” is whenever Donald Trump doesn’t like a story.

“One of the things they’re going to have to do is put an ombudsman in place,” Trump’s FCC Chair Brendan Carr told Newsmax. “So basically a bias monitor that will report directly to the president of (Paramount).”

(As if Newsmax itself isn’t “biased,” to say nothing of Fox News. But both of those networks are cable, and so not subject to the FCC’s authority in the same way as CBS and the other broadcast networks are.)

The goal here is obvious. Carr didn’t even try to hide it when he crowed on CNBC, “President Trump is fundamentally reshaping the media landscape. The media industry across this country needs a course-correction.”

Let’s talk about bias. I worked at ABC News for almost 28 years, and I’m proud to say that. A lot of good people do a lot of really good work there, and they try hard to get the story right. There were many days over the years when I’d watch a colleague at work, on-camera or behind the scenes, and I’d think: That’s how you do this. That is how you do a story that will really help people understand the truth of what’s happening in our country and beyond.

But: Were we biased? Yes. Almost inadvertently, I’d say. ABC News has the same problem so many leading cultural institutions do in America: A lack of viewpoint diversity.

When I joined ABC News in 1997, it was basically run by white men. (I have nothing against white men; I am one.) That management structure lasted for a long time, way too long. But over the last decade or so, the company made an effort to hire and promote journalists from a much wider diversity of backgrounds and life experiences. That changed ABC News, for the better: changed our conversations, changed our perceptions of stories and events in the country and around the world, changed our coverage. For me, the job got a lot more interesting, and more fun.

But there was one way ABC did not change and did not diversify. It is no secret. There are hardly any people who supported Donald Trump at ABC News—or the other corporate/legacy/mainstream news networks. And this is bound to impact coverage, not so much out of malevolent bias (that’s the cartoon version peddled by Trump, Brendan Carr and online MAGA), but more out of what is a kind of deafness. The old news divisions don’t hear many of the voices of the country, because those voices aren’t in the newsroom. Yes, news teams go out with a microphone and a camera and accost people at Trump rallies; but to me that often comes off as weirdly anthropological and inaccurate, kind of like trying to understand nature by visiting a zoo. You don’t really see a tiger at the zoo, just a version of a tiger.

Now, this might sound strange coming from me. The manner of my…accelerated…departure from ABC News has earned me a reputation in many quarters as a raging, anti-Trump firebrand. So be it. I don’t take back or regret a syllable of the post I wrote about Stephen Miller and Donald Trump that got me fired by ABC. I think it was an accurate, fair, and true description of those men. But inside the newsroom, I had a reputation of trying to get colleagues to see the other side, to walk a mile in the shoes of MAGA, to acknowledge the democratic forces that have made Donald Trump the dominant political figure of our time.

So, yes, from my perspective, the old news networks are biased.

But Brendan Carr can go to hell.

The federal government has no business dictating the editorial content of news coverage. This isn’t Viktor Orban’s Hungary. Or the Law and Justice Party’s Poland. Or Putin’s Russia in the late 1990s, when free voices critical of the Kremlin could still be heard, before he crushed them.

But that’s the playbook. There won’t be jackbooted goons crashing into television studios or gulags for reporters. It will be accomplished by relentlessly bringing down regulatory power on media outlets and by the maximal use of legal authorities, tendentiously and dishonestly interpreted. It will be done by lawyers, zealots and toadies. Like Brendan Carr, who’s all three.

The goal is de facto state control of national media narratives. The oligarchs and billionaires and corporate chieftains have already demonstrated they will gladly assist. David Ellison, the billionaire scion of second-richest-man-in-the-world Larry Ellison, is the owner of SkyDance, and so now of Paramount, and of CBS and CBS News. (Daddy put up most of the money for the deal.) In 2024, David Ellison had donated to Joe Biden’s campaign, but in April this year he was spotted withTrump at a UFC fight in Miami. Larry Ellison is a leading contender to buy TikTok—a deal Trump will make the final decision on.

And so CBS News, a very great name in the history of American journalism, will have to live under Brendan Carr’s creepy “bias monitor” arrangement. In a social-media post, Trump also claimed that as part of the approval of the deal, CBS is paying the administration “$20 Million Dollars more from the new Owners, in Advertising, PSAs, or similar programming.”

The CEOs always think they can somehow pacify Trump or buy him off with concessions. And they are always wrong. Does this sound like a man who’s done trying to muscle the media into MAGA messaging?

“This is another in a long line of VICTORIES over the Fake News Media, who we are holding to account for their widespread fraud and deceit. The Wall Street Journal, 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.”

I wish all my former colleagues in the legacy media all the best in the coming years. And I wish all of us, here in these newer, freer, untamable media spaces strength and good cheer. There is so much work to do.