Paramount And CBS Willing To Kiss Trump’s Ass In Exchange For Merger Approvals
from the kiss-my-ass,-then-kiss-my-ass-again dept
For years many press outlets (and contrarian engagement pundits like Matt Stoller) tried to argue that the Trump GOP was now “serious about antitrust reform,” “reining in corporate power,” or “holding Big Tech Accountable.” The argument was that because Trumpism claims to be “populist,” it could be convinced to implement serious anti-corporatist antitrust reform that would help the public.
Of course that’s a naïve, violent misread of how authoritarianism works; kleptocrats are only interested in leveraging government power against corporate power if it’s of specific benefit to them personally.
Case in point: Last October, Trump sued CBS claiming (falsely) that a 60 Minutes interview of Kamala Harris had been “deceitfully edited” to her benefit (they simply shortened some of her answers for brevity, as news outlets often do). As Mike explored, the lawsuit tramples the First Amendment and editorial discretion.
But CBS and Paramount have a planned merger with Skydance pending review by Trump regulators. So, displaying a complete lack of any backbone, they’re already considering settling the case to get merger approval. It’s embarrassing and feckless, but a perfect example of what corporate media’s “journalistic integrity” and the right wing’s “dedication to free speech” is going to look like the next four years.
Trump’s pick for FCC boss Brendan Carr had already been threatening CBS with a blocked merger if it dared engage in the act of journalism, causing Libertarian outlets like Reason — who, let’s be clear, usually adore Carr’s dismantling of consumer protection standards — to suddenly discover he’s no friend of free speech or logic.
The right wing news ecosystem had been priming this particular pump since last fall, with outlets like the New York Post running articles like this one, claiming that Paramount and CBS’s merger with Skydance will be blocked because CBS simply has “too much liberal bias.”
The great joke here is that, as media critics like Parker Molloy have noted, CBS had been responding to authoritarianism by shifting their editorial slant ever rightward for years already (just like the LA Times, NPR, the Washington Post, and many other self serving companies). Their reward for becoming more feckless? More harassment by authoritarians, which is usually how these things work.
That’s going to be the thrust of Trump “antitrust reform”: kiss the ring and you might get what you want. Challenge Trump and you can expect the authority of the state (or what’s left of it after Trump 2.0 gets done gutting all regulatory independence and firing government workers randomly) to be leveraged against you.
Anybody telling you that Trumpism values free speech or wants to rein in corporate power are confused, bullshitting you, or selling you dodgy supplements. It’s not populism, it’s pseudo-populism to try and convince rubes to root against their own best self interests. It’s not “anti-corporatism” or “antitrust reform,” it’s the reckless, inconsistent weaponizing of government power to benefit kleptocrats personally.
For example, Trump and the GOP didn’t saber rattle against “Big Tech” because they genuinely care about corporate power or protecting free speech, they did so to bully tech companies away from moderating race-baiting right wing propaganda, a cornerstone of modern GOP party power (lying endlessly is necessary when your real world policies, like broad tax cuts for rich brats or the dismantling of female reproductive rights, are broadly unpopular).
The first Trump administration didn’t sue Time Warner and AT&T to protect consumers, they did so because Rupert Murdoch asked them to. And after T-Mobile lavished the Trump administration with praise and hotel stays, Trump’s “antitrust enforcer” Makim Delrahim worked in his free time to make sure their merger got approved; the FCC didn’t even read about the deal impact before approval.
Yet somehow you’ve got “progressive” folks like Matt Stoller, and plenty of other people who should know better, constantly insisting that Trumpism is genuine populism that can be leveraged for the greater good.
It’s nonsense; authoritarians are relentlessly self serving bullshit artists, collaboration with them is always a lose-lose scenario, and no matter how routinely companies obey in advance and fecklessly kiss the ring to gain daddy’s approval, it’s simply never going to be enough.
Filed Under: antitrust reform, authoritarianism, brendan carr, cbs news, free speech, journalism
Companies: cbs, paramount, skydance
Comments on “Paramount And CBS Willing To Kiss Trump’s Ass In Exchange For Merger Approvals”
I wonder if the people who believe such abject nonsense will regret their belief if the next pandemic hits while the U.S. government is kneecapping its public health infrastructure.
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I most certainly do not look forward to Pandemic 2: The Birds edition.
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Just now, I read that dysentery is making a comeback in Canada, due to drug-resistant shigella. Worse strains have been seen in the U.S.A. “The main way to curb the spread? Giving homeless people access to hygiene and sanitation services[…] like public washrooms and washing sinks” (I’m not optimistic about current governments doing that).
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Nor should anyone, given the (apparent) difference in CFR (case fatality rate) between SARS-CoV-2 and H5N1. The CFR for Covid appears to be something around .25%. The 1918 pandemic had a CFR of roughly ten times that, 2.5%, and thus managed to kill 25-50 million people worldwide in just a few years. It’s not clear yet what the CFR for H5N1 is, but (a) estimates are an order of magnitude higher and (b) by the time we figure out if those estimates are accurate, a lot of people will have died.
Of course CFR isn’t the only metric that matters, but it’s indicative. What should be happening right now is a massive program of disease surveillance — so that we can measure where things stand — and an equally massive program of vaccine development. Neither of these are going to happen in the US, however, and thus if H5N1 does end up in the general population, it may well be that the Covid pandemic looks like a walk in the park by comparison.
The enduring monuments to Trump’s two terms are most likely to be millions of tombstones.
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And we have the god damn MAGA voters to thank for it.
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Not just MAGA voters. The GOP has been a fascist movement for half a century. The GOP willfully and intentionally created the post-truth constituency that MAGA hijacked.
Every single Republican voter since the passage of the Civil Rights Act did this.
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They’ll blame Obama and vote Nazi harder.
Ever since Citizens United legalized corruption as the political model in the U.S., kissing political ass has been business as usual.
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It is funny that a law was written to say that people need not follow the law.
We've seen it all before
Kissing Trump’s ring won’t save you. He doesn’t care about anyone but himself. You will be thrown under the bus along with everybody else the instant it’s convenient.
This is how fascists work.
Don’t try to compromise with them, don’t try to placate them. The only winning move is to fight them at every turn.
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Since he needs to wear adult diapers, you’d probably just get covered in shit if you tried.
I’m reminded I’ve seen people panicking about the US constitution not being accessible via the white house website the last day or two.
Apparently this also happened back in 2020, as part of some kind of website refresh they do for every new president?
Which makes me wonder how many other things with unrelated explanations will get drummed up as “look! fascism is here now!”, which conceals the actual shady shit Mr. Orange is doing..
Proton Mail should take note of this, as Andy Yen was cheering on the administration for being anti big tech
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You mad, bro?
'If we suck up to the leopards things will work out great for us!'
The right wing news ecosystem had been priming this particular pump since last fall, with outlets like the New York Post running articles like this one, claiming that Paramount and CBS’s merger with Skydance will be blocked because CBS simply has “too much liberal bias.”
Setting aside for a moment that the charge is apparently not true consider just what that exposes there even if it was. ‘Your merger should be blocked because I don’t like your politics‘. Imagine the screaming and gnashing of teeth if a conservative outlet was told the same, the ‘free market’/’small government types’ would be ripping their hair out in outrage, yet because it’s about the other side they’re perfectly fine with it.
Their reward for becoming more feckless? More harassment by authoritarians, which is usually how these things work.
‘Once you’ve paid the danegeld you’ll never get rid of the dane.’
Once you’ve shown that you’ll fold under pressure and try to appease thugs it’s inevitable that they’ll keep pushing to force you to bend to their will and whims even more, because after all you’ve shown that it works.
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A lesson the UK failed to heed prior to the breakout of fighting in 1939.
“they simply shortened some of her answers for brevity, as news outlets often do” – Lol, I know you don’t really believe that if you actually listened to her answer vs. the edited answer that they aired. They completely changed her answer and they didn’t just shorten the answer. They specifically removed her famous word salad answer.
Every media organization that kissed Hitler’s ass also was promptly thrown under the bus, too.