The faux “party of free speech” strikes again. For years, the MAGA GOP has insisted that it is the true “party of free” speech even as all evidence suggests this administration is the most censorial and the most dismissive of the First Amendment in modern history. Over and over and over and over and over and over and over again we see the Trump administration engaging in blatant and obvious speech suppression.
So it’s no surprise that Republicans all across the country are now responding to any criticism or any reporting on their illegal activities as something they can threaten to suppress. ProPublica recently had an eye-opening deep dive into North Carolina’s Supreme Court chief justice, Paul Newby, who seems to view his job not as ensuring justice is served, but in bending every aspect of the North Carolina judicial system to favor and help Republicans.
It’s a long article, but you get the gist of it here:
Few beyond North Carolina’s borders grasp the outsize role Newby, 70, has played in transforming the state’s top court from a relatively harmonious judicial backwater to a front-line partisan battleground since his election in 2004.
Under North Carolina’s constitution, Supreme Court justices are charged with upholding the independence and impartiality of the courts, applying laws fairly and ensuring all citizens get treated equally.
Yet for years, his critics charge, Newby has worked to erode barriers to politicization.
He pushed to make judicial elections in North Carolina — once a national leader in minimizing political influence on judges — explicitly partisan and to get rid of public financing, leaving candidates more dependent on dark money. Since Newby’s allies in the legislature shepherded through laws enacting those changes, judicial campaigns have become vicious, high-dollar gunfights that have produced an increasingly polarized court dominated by hard-right conservatives.
As chief justice, he and courts under him have consistently backed initiatives by Republican lawmakers to strip power away from North Carolina’s governor, thwarting the will of voters who have chosen Democrats to lead the state since 2016. He’s also used his extensive executive authority to transform the court system according to his political views, such as bydoing away with diversity initiatives. Under his leadership, some liberal and LGBTQ+ employees have been replaced with conservatives. A devout Christian and church leader, he speaks openly about how his faith hasshaped his jurisprudenceandadministration of the courts.
As is happening all too often in American politics, what we’re seeing is the politicization of just about everything. That’s a shame for many reasons—namely that politics is supposed to be just about making the case for getting elected, but after that you should govern (and handle judicial matters) in an unbiased manner.
But the really striking thing in the piece is how the Republican Party tried to threaten ProPublica to drop the story by pulling a “if you don’t, we’ll tell Daddy Trump to punish you.”
When ProPublica emailed questions to Newby’s daughter, the North Carolina Republican Party’s communications director, Matt Mercer, responded, writing that ProPublica was waging a “jihad” against “NC Republicans,” which would “not be met with dignifying any comments whatsoever.”
“I’m sure you’re aware of our connections with the Trump Administration and I’m sure they would be interested in this matter,”Mercer said in his email. “I wouldstronglysuggest dropping this story.”
It’s the Brendan Carr shakedown all over again. Just non-stop, thuggish, mafioso-style bullying. “If you don’t shut up, we’ll find a way to punish you.”
It remains truly astounding that Trump and the MAGA folks spent years claiming to be the party of free speech, when basically every few days yet another one of these stories pops up. Directly calling out that if ProPublica continues to report on a very powerful, extremely politically-motivated judge, they’re going to call up Daddy Trump and have him punish you?
Pure censorial thuggishness.
But it also reveals something crucial: the MAGA GOP knows that this kind of journalism works. When ProPublica exposes how North Carolina’s chief justice has systematically corrupted the state’s courts to favor Republicans, that exposure is genuinely dangerous to their project. The threat itself is the tell—they wouldn’t bother threatening reporters if this kind of reporting didn’t matter.
And that’s the real story here. Not that they’re hypocrites about free speech (we knew that), but that their entire governance model now depends on preventing the public from learning what they’re actually doing. They have no actual policy positions that can survive scrutiny, and what they’re doing is so ridiculously unpopular that their only remaining move is threatening anyone who documents it.
As we’ve documented, Trump’s right wing billionaire friend Larry Ellison (and his nepobaby son, David) recently acquired CBS and likely co-ownership of TikTok. Like Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, the goal isn’t really subtle: Rich right wingers want to own the entirety of U.S. new and old media, then convert it into a giant propaganda and lazy infotainment mill that blows smoke up their asses.
There’s a wrinkle though: both Comcast (NBC Universal) and Netflix are also rumored to be interested in acquiring some or all of Warner Brothers (HBO being the prize). As we’ve noted repeatedly, as the streaming market saturated these executives have shown they’re all out of original ideas. The only way to goose quarterly earnings is more pointless, generally harmful consolidation:
“This could be Comcast’s last shot at transforming NBCUniversal into a long-term structural winner in media,” LightShed Partners analyst Richard Greenfield wrote in a note to investors. “If Paramount or another buyer acquires Warner Bros., there would be no obvious merger partner for NBCU.”
It’s pretty clear that Trump’s DOJ and FCC are likely to erect hurdles and obstacles making it difficult for anybody to outmaneuver Larry Ellison here. It should be interesting to watch Trump lackeys like Brendan Carr twist themselves into pretzels trying to pretend they’re conducting an equitable merger review. It should also prove interesting to see in what new ways Netflix and Comcast execs are willing to debase themselves.
Whoever wins the bid, we all lose. Warner Brothers is already the shredded husk of what was left after decades of similar, pointless consolidation, starting all the way back with the pointless AOL deal in 2001, then later layoff and chaos inducing acquisitions by AT&T and Discovery.
Skydance, Paramount, and CBS haven’t even finished firing employees due to their last series of pointless mergers. Now they’re already gearing up to generate massive new debt to acquire Warner Brothers and CNN. That’s going to result in all the usual additional layoffs and corner cutting, before you even get to the problem of letting Larry Ellison turn CBS and TikTok into right wing propaganda outlets.
Netflix and Comcast winning this bid is probably the best of a bunch of bad outcomes, but that’s going to require that both companies seriously level up their ass kissing of our mad, idiot king.
60 Minutes is under new management and things are getting stupid faster than you might expect. Last night’s episode featured President Trump, which is currently being described as “nuts.” There are all sorts of crazy moments to call out, but let’s start with the recursively meta nonsense.
60 Minutes edited out a segment where Donald Trump tells them to edit out a segment in which he brags about getting CBS to pay him because of them editing out part of an answer by Kamala Harris, and he notes that CBS clearly did the wrong thing in editing Harris in the same fucking sentence he tells them to edit out what he’s saying.
It is so fucking stupid.
As you’ll no doubt recall, last year, Trump sued CBS over the show. Right before last year’s election, 60 Minutes had interviewed Kamala Harris. As every such news show does, it had edited the interview down to make it fit into the TV time slot. MAGA culture warriors, desperate for anything to culture war about, started screaming that 60 Minutes had edited Harris to sound more coherent. This was nonsense.
What had happened was that in one question, Harris had given a long answer. CBS broadcast part of the answer on 60 Minutes. But it had broadcast a different part of that answer during the CBS Sunday morning show, Face the Nation. This… happens all the time. The full answer was too long. They edited it down to a shorter bit. The two different broadcasts chose different parts. That’s basic, fundamental, editorial discretion.
Given how often Trump is edited to make him sound more coherent, he should appreciate this. But Trump will never, ever care about how much leeway he is given and will always seek to gain whatever advantage he can. So he sued, claiming it was “election interference,” which it wasn’t. And even if it was (it wasn’t) he still won the election.
But Trump’s censor in chief Brendan Carr made it clear that the only way he’d approve Paramount’s (owner of CBS) sale to Skydance was if they first bribed Trump by agreeing to settle this frivolous case. So they paid a $16 million bribe just to get the case settled, while agreeing to install a Trump lackey as an internal censor at the network.
Trump’s full interview was 73 minutes long, but 60 Minutes only aired 28 minutes of it. They then did release the longer interview online along with a transcript, which caused people to look at what was edited. And that included this segment:
TRUMP: And actually 60 Minutes paid me a lotta money. And you don’t have to put this on, because I don’t wanna embarrass you, and I’m sure you’re not– you have a great– I think you have a great, new leader, frankly, who’s the young woman that’s leading your whole enterprise is a great– from what I know.
I don’t know her, but I hear she’s a great person. But 60 Minutes was forced to pay me– a lot of money because they took her answer out that was so bad, it was election-changing, two nights before the election. And they put a new answer in. And they paid me a lot of money for that. You can’t have fake news. You’ve gotta have legit news. And I think that it’s happening. I see–
NORAH O’DONNELL: Mr. President–
TRUMP: –I see good things happening in the news. I really do. And I think one of the best things to happen is this show and new ownership, CBS and new ownership. I think it’s the greatest thing that’s happened in a long time to a free and open and good press.
Again, I feel the need to repeat this because it is so incredibly stupid. Literally in the same sentence where he says CBS had to pay him “a lotta money” because it edited a 60 Minutes interview, he tells them to edit the interview not to air that section. Then he claims “you can’t have fake news.” Even though what he’s claiming is literally fake news. They didn’t pay him because they changed the answer. They paid him to get their merger done. Everyone knows it.
And, yes, I’m sure some people will try to defend this, but come on. There’s no defense. The President views everything in simple terms: “if it helps me, it’s good, if it doesn’t, it should be illegal.” It’s a narcissistic simpleton’s understanding of the world. And he’s in charge. It’s fucking crazy.
Speaking of fucking crazy, there were so many other crazy bits in the interview, but let’s just call out two. After all, the request to edit the section of the interview, while hypocritical, is nothing compared to the blatant corruption he admits to, or his desire to unleash the American war machine on American people.
Let’s start with this: just last week, MAGA loyalist Rep. James Comer released what may be the least self-aware report ever, screaming about how White House aides covered up Joe Biden’s mental and physical decline and because of that he didn’t know who he was pardoning, meaning those pardons should be null and void.
This comes the same week that people are raising serious questions about White House aides covering up the true nature of Trump’s physical and mental decline. And, now he’s admitting he has no idea who he’s pardoning—the very thing the Comer report claims means the pardons are void.
Two weeks ago, Trump (or whoever within the White House) pardoned CZ, the founder of Binance, who had pleaded guilty to money laundering. Though, when asked about it that day, Trump appeared to have no idea who CZ was, even though he had also (just coincidentally) given billions to the Trump family’s cryptocurrency business.
And even though he’d flubbed that question when he was asked about it right after the pardon was announced, when 60 Minutes asked him about it, he doubled down—seemingly proud of his ignorance. Which is bold, considering his administration’s entire argument against Biden’s pardons rests on the claim that Biden didn’t know who he was pardoning:
O'DONNELL: Why did you pardon Changpeng Zhao?TRUMP: Are you ready? I don't know who he isO'DONNELL: His crypto exchange Binance helped facilitate a $2b purchase of World Liberty Financial's stablecoin. And they you pardoned him.TRUMP: Here's the thing — I know nothing about it
From the full (unedited) transcript, which is way worse than that short clip above:
NORAH O’DONNELL: This is a question about pardons. The Trump family is now perhaps more associated with cryptocurrency than real estate. You and your son– your sons, Don Jr. and Eric, have formed World Liberty Financial with the Witkoff family.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Right.
NORAH O’DONNELL: Helping to make your family millions of dollars. It’s in that context that I do wanna ask you about crypto’s richest man, a billionaire known as C.Z. He pled guilty in 2023 to violating anti-money laundering laws.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Right.
NORAH O’DONNELL: Looked at this, the government at the time said that C.Z. had caused “significant harm to U.S. national security”, essentially by allowing terrorist groups like Hamas to move millions of dollars around. Why did you pardon him?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Okay, are you ready?I don’t know who he is.
Trump’s own administration is claiming Biden’s pardons are invalid because he didn’t know who he was pardoning. And Trump just proudly announced, on camera, that he has no idea who CZ is.
Then he admits that his sons basically told him to do this for their crypto business:
My sons are involved in crypto much more than I– me. I– I know very little about it, other than one thing. It’s a huge industry. And if we’re not gonna be the head of it, China, Japan, or someplace else is. So I am behind it 100%. This man was, in my opinion, from what I was told, this is, you know, a four-month sentence.
But this man was treated really badly by the Biden administration. And he was given a jail term. He’s highly respected. He’s a very successful guy. They sent him to jail and they really set him up. That’s my opinion. I was told about it.
By who? Who told you about it? A good reporter would have stepped in and asked that question, but this is the new Bari Weiss 60 Minutes where you won’t see follow-ups like that. Or if you did, they’d be edited out.
He continues:
I was told that he was a victim, just like I was and just like many other people, of a vicious, horrible group of people in the Biden administration.
Again, “who told you this?” is the next question any reporter should be asking. O’Donnell did not. Though she at least did point out that he pleaded guilty to allowing terrorist groups to engage in money laundering, which seems notable for a guy who keeps talking about fighting crime.
NORAH O’DONNELL: The government had accused him of “significant harm to U.S. national security”–
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: That’s the Biden government.
NORAH O’DONNELL: Okay. Allowing U.S. terrorist groups to, you know, essentially move millions of dollars around. He pled guilty to anti-money laundering laws. That was in 2023. Then in 2025 his crypto exchange, Binance, helped facilitate a $2 billion purchase of World Liberty Financial’s stablecoin. And then you pardoned C.Z. How do you address the appearance of pay for play?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Well, here’s the thing,I know nothing about it because I’m too busydoing the other–
Um. Isn’t that exactly why your administration is claiming Biden’s pardons don’t count?
NORAH O’DONNELL: But he got a pardon–
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I can only tell you that–
NORAH O’DONNELL: He got a pardon–
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Norah, I can only tell you this.My sons are into it. I’m glad they are, because it’s probably a great industry, crypto. I think it’s good. You know, they’re running a business, they’re not in government. And they’re good– my one son is a number one bestseller now.
So here Trump admits (1) he doesn’t know who CZ is, then (2) admits that basically his sons are the ones into cryptocurrency and “not in government,” and effectively admits that (3) he pardoned CZ on the advice of his sons, who directly profit from the pardon through their cryptocurrency business, while claiming ignorance of the entire arrangement.
This isn’t just yet another example of the most corrupt pay-for-play administration in the history of the United States but one that literally does everything it falsely accuses past administrations of doing, but way worse. Just as they’re claiming that Biden’s pardons weren’t valid, Trump is effectively admitting he has no idea who he’s pardoning, but he’s doing it to help his corrupt sons.
And I won’t even get into the frenzy MAGA continues to go through about Hunter Biden supposedly enriching himself by using his father’s name. Remember all those stories claiming payoffs to the “Biden family”? Funny how those folks are all silent about the Trump family (1) actually doing what they falsely accused Biden of doing and (2) doing it way, way, way worse.
Speaking of crime, another part of the interview involves the President falsely claiming that immigration enforcement is targeting criminals (leaving aside that he keeps pardoning criminals).
When O’Donnell asks about CBP’s tactics in Chicago—tear-gassing residential neighborhoods, smashing car windows—Trump’s response is to call for more violence:
O'DONNELL: Americans have been watching videos of ICE tackling a young mother, tear gas being used in a Chicago residential neighborhood, and the smashing of car windows. Have some of these raids gone too far?TRUMP: No. I think they haven't gone far enough.
NORAH O’DONNELL: More recently, Americans have been watching videos of ICE tackling a young mother, tear gas being used in a Chicago residential neighborhood, and the smashing of car windows. Have some of these raids gone too far?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: No. I think they haven’t gone far enough because we’ve been held back by the– by the judges, by the liberal judges that were put in by Biden and by Obama. We’ve been held–
NORAH O’DONNELL: You’re okay with those tactics?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Yeah, because you have to get the people out. You know, you have to look at the people. Many of them are murderers. Many of them are people that were thrown outta their countries because they were, you know, criminals. Many of them are people from jails and prisons. Many of them are people from frankly mental institutions. I feel badly about that, but they’re released from insane asylums. You know why? Because they’re killers.
Note the question: she’s asking him about ICE (actually CBP) tear gassing residential neighborhoods and smashing car windows. And he says “they haven’t gone far enough.” He literally thinks he should be able to have the military attack Americans.
And he’s completely full of shit about targeting “criminals and murderers.” The vast, vast majority of them are not. Over 90% of those being grabbed have never been convicted of a violent crime. We already know that Trump’s advisor Stephen Miller has told immigration officials to just grab anyone they can and to ignore any efforts to target actual criminals (because Miller knows there just aren’t that many in reality—it was all a myth they fed Fox News to get Trump elected).
But Trump is so disconnected from reality he doesn’t know that.
And speaking of disconnected from reality: he still thinks migrants “seeking asylum” means they’re literally from mental institutions. He’s been making this claim for years. No one has corrected him. No reporter has asked him to clarify. The President of the United States genuinely appears to believe that foreign governments are emptying psych wards and shipping patients to America because they’re “seeking asylum.”
So let’s recap: in a single interview, the President (1) suggests CBS edit out his complaints about CBS editing while simultaneously claiming CBS’s past editing was corrupt enough to sue over, (2) admits he pardoned someone he’s never met on the advice of unnamed people who are most likely his sons who profit directly from that pardon—the exact scenario his own party claims invalidates Biden’s pardons, and (3) endorses escalating violence against American citizens in residential neighborhoods while lying about who’s being targeted and seemingly unable to comprehend who the violence is actually being used against.
We have a President so catastrophically disconnected from reality that he’ll pardon anyone his sons tell him to, endorse any level of violence his advisors suggest, and contradict himself in the same sentence without noticing. The people around him—his kids, his advisors, his handlers—do the things they’ve spent years accusing others of doing (except way worse), and Trump happily goes along with it because he either doesn’t understand or doesn’t care. They get away with it, and they do it again, more brazenly.
The media that’s supposed to be holding him accountable has instead hired a Trump-approved censor to monitor their coverage and installed an inexperienced right-wing propagandist to run their newsroom. So when Trump sits down for an interview and admits on camera that he’s doing exactly what he’s claiming others should be jailed for… they don’t follow up or ask any tough questions.
While “AI” certainly has some useful applications, a lot of the folks in charge of the trajectory of LLMs clearly want to use it to build a giant, badly automated ouroboros of lazy internet slop that shits out ad money without the need for pesky labor. You see this most profoundly in media, where a bunch of far-too-clever lads rushed to integrate under-cooked, broadly misunderstood LLMs with disastrous results.
As it turns out, training LLMs on this kind of slop doesn’t work out well for anybody.
A new joint study by researchers at Texas A&M University, University of Texas at Austin, and Purdue University took a closer look at what happens when you train LLMs on the kind of engagement slop our modern internet gatekeepers are keen to create.
To see how these models would “behave” after subsisting on a diet of clickbait sewage, the researchers cobbled together a sample of one million X posts and then trained four different LLMs on varying mixtures of control data (long form, good faith, real articles and content) and junk data (lazy, engagement chasing, superficial clickbait) to see how it would affect performance.
“All four models tested—Llama3 8B, Qwen2.5 7B/0.5B, Qwen3 4B—showed some forms of cognitive decline. Meta’s Llama proved the most sensitive to the junk, seeing drops in its reasoning capabilities, understanding of context, and adherence to safety standards. Interestingly, a much smaller model, Qwen 3 4B, proved more resilient, though still suffered declines. It also found that the higher the rates of bad data, the more likely a model was to slip into “no thinking” mode, failing to provide any reasoning for its answer, which was more likely to be inaccurate.”
You are what you eat.
They also found that after being fed a bunch of ex-Twitter slop, the models didn’t just get “dumber”, they were (shocking, I know) far more likely to take on many of the nastier “personality traits” that now dominate the right wing troll platform:
“More than just getting “dumber” in its thinking, though, the researchers found the inclusion of junk also resulted in an interesting effect: it led to changes in the model’s “personality,” succumbing to what the researchers called “dark traits.” For instance, the Llama 3 model displayed significantly higher levels of narcissism and became less agreeable. It also went from displaying nearly no signs of psychopathy to extremely high rates of the behavior.”
And by “dumber” and “narcissistic” they of course mean a vague simulacrum of those personality traits, because modern LLMs don’t understand anything, much less adopt real personalities. You’ll often see people (even prominent NYT tech journalists) attributing malicious intent and understanding to language learning models, inadvertently advertising the fact they don’t know how any of this works.
There’s been so much misrepresentation of what these models are capable of (by both companies and the tech media), this comment below needs to be projected onto the moon:
Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.
You see this a lot in breathless articles about LLMs that are trying to “resist being shut off” or somehow “blackmail their operators.” It’s simply not how this technology actually works. It’s part of a con suggesting these models are just a few weeks and another billion away from HAL 900 sentience.
Again, none of this is to say LLMs don’t have very useful applications, such as examining vast troves of scientific data to look for patterns and facts that humans might miss. Or creating more efficient, “intelligent” software that can be predictive of the user’s needs or inputs. Or automating basic customer service inquiries in a world full of already-low quality outsourced support.
The problem with AI generally is a decidedly human one: the terrible, unethical, and greedy people currently in charge of it’s implementation (again, see media, insurance, countless others) — folks who have cultivated some unrealistic delusions about AI competency and efficiency (see this recent Stanford study on how rushed AI adoption in the workforce often makes people less efficient).
This is before you even get to the climate and energy impact of these models, or the fact that the underlying financials are a hot mess poised to cause some serious economic tumult next year as the outer layer of hype and misrepresentation burns off. Even then, this quest to turn the internet into an ocean of lazy and uncurated ad engagement slop will remain a centerpiece of the movement.
Going forward, the only thing you’ll hear reported from the Pentagon will be delivered by subservient, right-wing stenographers. The War Department has its own Ministry of Truth, staffed by people whose organizations have seen their fortunes rise along with Trump’s. The bootlicking was always there. The only change is that it’s now officially state-sanctioned.
The administration doesn’t care how this looks. It only cares that it got what it wants. Not only did it break with tradition by demanding journalists agree to play by the administration’s rules if they wanted access to the Pentagon and military officials, it broke with tradition by proudly proclaiming its victory over the First Amendment on the social media platform most devoted to stifling criticism of authoritarians:
Nearly one week since a rash of Pentagon journalists turned in their press credentials after refusing to sign a new restrictive press policy, the Defense Department announced a “new media” press corps, largely hailing from right-wing outlets.
The 60 people from various news organizations represent, “a broad spectrum of new media outlets and independent journalists,” Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell wrote in a statement Wednesday on X, adding that all of the publications agreed to the agency’s press policy.
There’s a lot to be appalled by/mock endlessly going on here. First, there’s the fact that this plan will be carried out by other federal agencies since it worked out perfectly here. Second, there’s no “broad spectrum” here, unless you consider multiple people saying the same things with the same pro-Trump deference a hot new take on journalistic freedom.
Then there are the people generously being called “journalists” by a man speaking for an agency being concurrently fellated by at least a couple of dozen extremely right-wing publications. No one would call these people “journalists,” perhaps not even those being called “journalists” by the DoD spokesman.
Brace yourself. It gets ugly immediately.
According to a draft of the announcement obtained by The Washington Post ahead of Parnell’s tweet, the coalition of signatories includes the cable network Real America’s Voice, streaming service Lindell TV (started by MyPillow CEO and Trump ally Mike Lindell), the websites the Gateway Pundit, the Post Millennial, Human Events, the National Pulse, and RedState. It also includes Turning Point USA’s media brand Frontlines, as well as influencer Tim Pool’s Timcast, and a Substack-based newsletter called Washington Reporter.
While the Defense Department was proud to announce it had ousted actual journalists from the Pentagon, it was a bit more cagey when it came to naming the ones who decided to stick around. Parnell bragged on X, but actual journalists had to ask some questions to come up with a list of those who swore an oath of fealty to Papa Doc Don or whatever the fuck it is we’re calling Donald Trump these days.
What’s more surprising is the list of people who left. I’m not talking about the expected ex-pats or the ones already kicked out by the Pentagon (NPR, New York Times). I’m talking about Trump proxies like Newsmax, Fox News, and the Daily Caller. These outlets — despite spending most of their time ensuring the administration always has a bullhorn to borrow — also thought the Pentagon’s demands were inappropriate, which left only the weirdest and worst of the right wing media in place to do the government’s bidding.
And this demand was even too much for one writer who worked for a right wing outlet that has spent the Trump years (which includes the Biden years) further distancing itself from anything that could be considered credible reporting — the Epoch Times — found both the DoD demand and his (now former) employer’s concession too much to stomach:
A national security reporter at the right-wing Epoch Times newspaper has resigned after the publication signed on to rules restricting news gathering within the Pentagon.
The reporter, Andrew Thornebrooke, submitted his resignation in writing on Friday. Although he did not have an active Pentagon press pass, he regularly covered issues related to the Defense Department and frequently reported from the cavernous military complex while working at the publication.
In his resignation email, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Thornebrooke called The Epoch Times’s signing of the pledge a choice to “abdicate our responsibility as journalists in favor of merely repeating state narratives.”
Thornebrooke also took issue with an editorial directive to refer to antifa as a “terrorist organization” despite there being no evidence it’s an “organization” (rather than an ideological movement), much less involved in terrorism.
This is censorship that isn’t even pretending to be something else. The public statements declaring a new “press” corp are just a victory lap by brutish people who have the audacity to claim they have the moral high ground while shitting all over the rights their predecessors fought and died for.
After nabbing Paramount/CBS and a chunk of TikTok, the Ellison family is now setting its sight on Warner Brothers — or what’s left of Warner Brothers after decades of pointless, harmful mergers with AOL, AT&T, and Discovery. While Warner Brothers is fielding bids for a buyout, Trump’s buddies at the right wing New York Post make it clear Trump wants the company to go to his other friend, Larry Ellison:
“The Trump administration favors Paramount Skydance to buy Warner Bros. Discovery – and a number of rival bidders are likely to face stiff hurdles from US regulators in the blockbuster auction, On The Money has learned.
That puts Paramount Skydance – the newly formed media giant headed by CEO David Ellison, the son of software magnate and longtime Trump backer Larry Ellison – clearly in the catbird seat as Warner Bros. Discovery kicks off a process to sell itself this week, according to a government official with direct knowledge of the matter.”
Larry Ellison’s hire of Bari Weiss, a shameless right wing troll with no serious journalism experience, is part of a plan to turn CBS into a right wing propaganda platform that’s friendly to Trumpism and Netanyahu (the latter being particularly important to Ellison). Ownership of Warner Brothers would also give Ellison control of major outlets like CNN and media mainstays like HBO.
If Ellison is able to also secure his talked about co-ownership of TikTok with Rupert Murdoch, there’s potential here to turn this amalgamation of outlets into something decidedly worse that Fox News/WSJ/New York Post as it pertains to right wing propaganda. Much like Fox News, the goal is clearly to build a new state media propaganda machine, financed by lower brow infotainment fare (see the Ellison’s $7.7 billion acquisition of MMA rights).
But that’s easier said than done. Warner Brothers wants more than $60 billion, and Paramount/CBS is facing potential rival bids from the likes of Comcast (NBC Universal), Apple, and Netflix. Companies that may or may not be willing to back off their pursuits as a favor to our mad, idiot king.
Even if the acquisition happens, the kind of merger debt created by Ellisons’ acquisition spree almost always results in disastrous post-merger outcomes. It’s what cooked AT&T’s attempted domination of video advertising with its own acquisition of Time Warner, leading to no limit of industry chaos, layoffs, shittier product, and consumer price hikes. AT&T wound up running for the exits.
There’s also no indication that this weird combination of nepobabies (David Ellison) and fail-upward brunchlords (Bari Weiss) will have any luck with their domination play. There are limited appetites for journalism that kisses right wing billionaire ass, given that’s a well-saturated market. They’re likely to not just struggle with the evolution in new media, but accelerate traditional media’s collapse.
With any luck there will be some creative, hungrier opportunists, with actual ideas, waiting in the wings prepared to take full advantage.
That has involved chasing pointless “growth for growth’s sake” megamergers, imposing bottomless price hikes and new annoying restrictions, undermining labor, and cutting corners on product quality in a bid to give Wall Street that sweet, impossible, unlimited, quarterly growth it demands.
Last week Warner Brothers announced it was up for sale; ushering forth yet another acquisition or merger after literally two decades of terrible, harmful mergers (AOL, AT&T, Time Warner, Discovery) resulting in endless price hikes, layoffs, and dysfunction. And if as on cue, the company announced they’d be once again hiking prices on their HBO (Max Extreme Plus) streaming video service:
“HBO Max’s ad plan is going from $10 per month to $11/month. The ad-free plan is going from $17/month to $18.49/month. And the premium ad-free plan (which adds 4K support, Dolby Atmos, and the ability to download more content) is increasing from $21 to $23.
Meanwhile, prices for HBO Max’s annual plans are increasing from $100 to $110 with ads, $170 to $185 without ads, and $210 to $230 for the premium tier.”
The move comes after Warner Bros CEO David Zaslav spent much of last month whining about how the company’s streaming service was “way underpriced.” Despite the fact the company has raised prices every year for the past three years. Zaslav himself has been endlessly criticized for his soaring compensation package that’s never been commensurate with any sort of actual leadership skill.
Again: these are executives all out of original ideas, boxed in by Wall Street’s demand for impossible, endless growth. They can’t deliver consumers and labor what they want (better pay, better product, lower prices, better customer service), so execs have to resort to financial trickery, price hikes, and megamergers to goose stock valuations and provide significant tax relief.
They’re not building or improving anything, they’re just engaged in an elaborate shell game where they shuffle things around and pretend they’re savvy deal makers.
If you’re not familiar with what happens next: Warner Brothers is sold (probably to Larry Ellison and Paramount/CBS, which is already laying off people from its latest merger). The massive debt load triggers even more layoffs and additional price hikes, the quality of the overall product continues to deteriorate, and annoyed customers flee to fee alternatives, including piracy.
At that point the executives responsible blame everything but themselves (generational entitlement! VPNs!) until companies are finally forced to face evolutionary disruption by more convenient, cheaper alternatives, at which point the execs responsible have taken their bag and failed upward to other companies. And the cycle repeats itself all over again.
U.S. media mergers always follow the same trajectory. Pre-merger, executives promise all manner of amazing synergies and deal benefits. Post-merger, not only to those benefits generally never arrive, the debt from the acquisition spree usually results in significant layoffs, lower quality product, and higher rates for consumers. The Time Warner Discovery disaster was the poster child for this phenomenon.
“Major job cuts have been expected even before the Skydance Media-Paramount Global deal closed, as part of Ellison and his team’s goal of slashing upwards of $2 billion in costs. Previously, the company had been targeting layoffs by early November. The new round of cuts is expected to eliminate around 2,000 jobs in the U.S., with additional layoffs internationally.
I’m sure the longstanding employees at CBS and Paramount are particularly thrilled about the Ellisons overpaying for Bari Weiss’ blog, then promoting a woman with no real experience in journalism to be the new head of CBS News. As we’ve noted, that effort to bring even more right wing trolling and billionaire-ass kissing to a fairly saturated media market is likely to be a major headache.
The Ellisons, in their bid to dominate U.S. media, also have their eye on acquiring whatever is left of Time Warner, which is expected to cost them somewhere around $60 billion. Historically these kinds of media domination plays never end well (just ask AT&T), so you can expect significantly more layoffs as this weird combination of fail-upward brunchlords and nepobabies try to navigate a tumultuous market they don’t really understand.
It used to be that companies planning for harmful, pointless mergers had to at least make a fleeting effort to justify the pointless consolidation. But during the Trump era all you have to do is kiss the idiot king’s ring and any and all pointless consolidation gets the green light. All of the costs of those harms will, of course, be borne by consumers and employees in the months and years to come.
And because we’ve let our journalism and media consolidate in the hands of just a few billionaires — the media’s coverage of itself generally doesn’t honestly reflect any of this, propping up billionaire efforts to keep making the same mistakes over and over again for some tax cuts and a temporary stock boost.
I’ve written a lot about the AOL–>AT&T–>Time Warner–>Discovery mergers simply because I think they perfectly encapsulate the pointless, destructive incompetence at the heart of modern media consolidation, and the cannibalistic nature of Wall Street’s obsession with illusory quarterly growth propped up by smoke, mirrors, and complex accounting.
All so some overpaid execs could nab some tax breaks and short-term stock boosts and put “savvy dealmaker” on their resume — before failing upward to the next bad idea.
Mass U.S. media is the purest form of enshittification. And because nobody in this chain of dysfunction is financially incentivized to learn from experience, we’re about to do it all over again.
“David Ellison’s mission: grab Warner Bros Discovery before it splits. The freshly minted media mogul behind Paramount is considering various options, including possibly bypassing the board of the HBO and CNN owner and going straight to shareholders instead. To tempt them will probably cost about $60 billion.”
Ellison is on an acquisition spree (CBS, CNN, TikTok) trying to build a major modern media giant with a decidedly right wing bent (see the whole Bari Weiss fracas). Which isn’t great for a media and journalism environment already dominated by right wing billionaires trying to blow smoke up their own asses.
I’d like you to play a little game with me. Pluck any of the hundreds of stories of Time Warner’s latest likely sale from the newswires, and see if they there’s any mention of the disastrous recent history of Time Warner Discovery and AT&T’s mergers under the leadership of CEO David Zaslav. Or the terrible real-world impact this sort of consolidation always has on market health, labor, or consumers.
You (usually) won’t see it because consolidation creates a media that’s too broken and feckless to honestly report on itself. Instead you get a lot of journalistic-simulacrum that kind of mimics the look and style of journalism, but is just as hollow as as a jack-o-lantern.
Time Warner will be sold, again. The resulting debt will result in all manner of cost cutting from the acquiring company to pay off unmanageable debt (see: CBS already firing employees en masse). The executives responsible will profit from short term stock boosts and tax breaks, but will be nowhere to be found when layoffs abound, prices, soar, customers flee, and the whole thing starts to unravel. Again.
But however bad past media mergers of this type have been, you should prepare for everything to get much, much dumber now that the U.S. government has eviscerated whatever was left of regulatory independence and our already flimsy dedication to antitrust reform.
That’s going to result in all manner of massive, harmful deals we couldn’t have imagined previously across telecom, media, and tech, as oligarchs try to goose earnings and dominate the entirety of modern media. With zero functional regulatory oversight. In a country controlled by unhinged zealots.
The student journalists say that University administrators didn’t like the student paper’s decision to increasingly criticize University President Pamela Whitten’s decision to coddle the authoritarian Trump administration, or, at best, remain silent as the Trump administration and state leaders take direct aim at free expression, the First Amendment, and any curriculum teaching about race or gender discrimination.
“We have the benefit of being fully independent of the university. We own our own press,” said Kyle Charters, publisher and news adviser for the Exponent. “We were more than willing, with our extra freedom being an independent student organization, to help out.”
“Both our publications have had their run-ins with their respective universities this summer and fall,“ Charters said. “While we’re pretty significant rivals — and while I might not be rooting for their football team tomorrow — we do have something in common, and we’re happy to have that camaraderie.“
Earlier this year Republican state leaders in Indiana passed a sweeping new legislative package designed to undermine civil rights and free speech protections across college campuses. As usual, this was portrayed as some sort of serious efficiency improvement, but like all MAGA attacks on academia, it was really about silencing criticism of right wing ideology and crushing civil rights reforms.
Not only does that generally not happen, but the destruction of free speech, democracy, justice, and academic rigor while you slept is not always something that can be fixed after the storm has passed; something you can ask countless global survivors of authoritarianism about.
Indiana University officials are trying to pretend that their silencing of the student paper’s print edition is simply an act of modernization; but local student journalists and editors at both universities say they’ve faced relentless pressure to eliminate any criticism of the Trump administration or the cowards that are making Trumpism so effective at destroying civil rights, free speech, and the rule of law.
Like many broader mainstream media outlets, what academic administrators want is a sort of pseudo-news that’s devoid of anything that might upset anyone (think of a Ken Doll with all the important bits sanded off to a smooth hump). A sort of feckless simulacrum of journalism that focuses on “safe” issues that, most importantly, don’t upset right wing Americans:
“According to an Oct. 7 email the IndyStar obtained, Rodenbush passed on guidance from the Media School administration that the IDS’s print publication should solely focus on a special theme, such as homecoming or fall sports, and contain “no other news at all, and particularly no traditional front page news coverage.”
“Let’s pretend reality doesn’t exist so nobody with wealth or power gets upset” is no way to go through life. The student resistance to this is a refreshing act of courage and solidarity. Especially in comparison to the broader traditional U.S. journalism industry, which is increasingly being hollowed out by right wing billionaire zealots looking to silent criticism of corporate, billionaire, and authoritarian power.
