Trump Continues To Make It Clear He Has CBS On A Leash

from the no-groveling-is-ever-enough dept

By now, it’s pretty clear that right wing billionaire and Trump ally Larry Ellison bought CBS to convert what was left of the news division into lazy agitprop that blows smoke up the ass of wealth and power. Leading the charge is CBS News boss Bari Weiss, an unqualified contrarian Substack troll hired to do things like normalize right wing grifters, and bury stories critical of the administration’s concentration camps.

And even though CBS executives paid Trump a bribe to get their merger approved, and keep demonstrating they’re a loyal lapdog (like airing this extremely dubious story claiming that the ICE murderer of Renee Good suffered internal bleeding from being lightly bumped, which many CBS News employees doubted), the Trump administration feels compelled to remind CBS that they’re little more than an administration lap dog now.

During a recent interview, Trump (correctly) told CBS News anchor Tony Dokoupil that he wouldn’t have a job without Trump’s intervention. Dokoupil , who was clearly hired by Bari Weiss because of this obnoxious late 2024 interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates (where he seemingly defends Israel’s industrialized mass murder of children), has had a disastrous start as CBS Evening News anchor.

The program has been rife with technical errors and continues to see its ratings drop. During the Trump interview, administration press secretary Karoline Leavitt was also caught on a hot mic reminding CBS that they have to air Trump’s ramblings in full or risk being sued (again):

“He said, ‘Make sure you guys don’t cut the tape. Make sure the interview is out in full,’” Leavitt told new “CBS Evening News” anchor Tony Dokoupil, relaying a message from the president ahead of the interview earlier this week. “He said, ‘If it’s not out in full, we’ll sue your ass off.’”

Dokoupil responded with levity: “He always says that!”

Both CBS and the Trump administration have pretended there’s nothing weird or problematic about this exchange. You’ll recall that CBS gave the Trump administration a $16 million bribe to settle lazy and false allegations the network unfairly edited an interview with Kamala Harris. At the same time, right wing agitprop media routinely faces no criticism for misleadingly editing stories every day.

The myth that U.S. journalism suffers from a systemic “liberal bias” is one of the greatest lies ever foisted upon U.S. public discourse. In reality, most U.S. journalism is comprised of center-right corporatists primarily reflecting the financial interests of affluent, white male Conservative ownership. That CBS folded in this way wouldn’t be a surprise to prominent and long-deceased media studies academics.

CBS’ reward for its initial feckless appeasement to the Trump administration was utterly bogus lawsuits, baseless FCC “investigations,” and getting relentlessly attacked in the right wing media as some sort of leftist rag (when again, CBS, if anything, had spent much of the last decade pandering to the U.S. right).

Weiss then threw what was left of CBS’ reputation in the trash by turning it into a Trump apologist rag that grovels before Trump at every possibility, yet you’ll notice that’s still somehow not deferential enough for our mad, idiot king.

There’s a lesson here for anybody who strikes a partnership with this unpopular, extremist administration: there’s simply no bottom once you sell out your principles. And someday, when Trump is dead and gone, the stain will still be there and many people will remember how unprincipled and pathetic you were .

CBS will find it can never be extremist, conspiratorial, racist, or deferential enough to truly appeal to the MAGA base, who already have ample choices for their propaganda. And the rest of the public will simply avoid the network on principle, well aware it threw all ethics in the toilet when it really mattered. And when the “new CBS” collapses in an unwatched heap, its fate will have been truly earned.

Filed Under: agitprop, appeasement, authoritarians, bari weiss, cbs news, donald trump, journalism, karoline leavitt, media, propaganda, tony dokoupil

Companies: cbs