Steve Benen of MS NOW wrote about the censorship of Stephen Colbert’s show by CBS. Since CBS was purchased by the Ellison family, who support Trump, the network is careful to screen out criticism of Trump. Since Talarico is running against Jasmine Crockett, the calculation must have been to undermine him, assuming that Republicans want Crockett as the nominee, not Talarico.
Colbert was already fired by CBS. He’s thus free to say whatever he wants. His last show airs in May.
With just a couple of weeks remaining before Texas’ closely watched Democratic U.S. Senate primary, there’s considerable interest in state Rep. James Talarico, one of the leading contenders. With this in mind, the candidate was scheduled to be on CBS’ “The Late Show” on Monday for an interview with Stephen Colbert, which likely would have been interesting and newsworthy.
Except those tuning in to see the interview were left wanting. Colbert told his audience, referring to Talarico, “He was supposed to be here, but we were told in no uncertain terms by our network’s lawyers, who called us directly, that we could not have him on the broadcast.”
The host went on to note that the network that employs him suggested he wasn’t supposed to talk about the apparent fact that it told him not to have Talarico on the show — which, naturally, led Colbert to talk about it at some length and in considerable detail.
The host, whose award-winning show will end in May, told viewers about the Federal Communications Commission and its newfound interest in an old policy called the “equal-time rule,” which has never applied to news interviews and talk-show programs.
As MS NOW reported about a month ago, however, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr suggested a shift in the policy, declaring that shows hosting political candidates will not automatically qualify as “bona fide news” programs, which are exempt from the equal-time requirements.
And so, Colbert lowered the boom:
Let’s just call this what it is: Donald Trump’s administration wants to silence anyone who says anything bad about Trump on TV, because all Trump does is watch TV, OK? He’s like a toddler with too much screen time. He gets cranky and then drops a load in his diaper.
MS NOW has reached out to CBS and the FCC for comment. This post will be updated if they respond.
It’s worth emphasizing that Colbert did, in fact, interview Talarico — it just wasn’t aired on “The Late Show” as planned. Instead, the program posted the entirety of the appearance on its YouTube channel. (Ironically, the broader controversy likely generated additional interest in the interview beyond the audience it was probably going to receive in the first place, offering a fresh example of the Streisand effect.)
The latest clash between Colbert and CBS comes against a backdrop of allegations that the network is moving to the right under its new corporate ownership, but the comedian’s comments about the incumbent president were of particular interest because of the broader pattern.
Indeed, Trump has positioned himself as the nation’s most enthusiastic critic of late-night hosts in recent months, with the Republican repeatedly taking aim at Colbert, ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel, NBC’s Jimmy Fallon, Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart, NBC’s Seth Meyers and Trevor Noah. A few days ago, the president added HBO’s Bill Maher to the list.
As recently as November, Trump insisted that late-night hosts who mock him are engaged in “probably illegal” misconduct, the First Amendment be damned. Two months later, Carr issued a new declaration related to the equal-time policy, and the month after that, Colbert wasn’t allowed to show viewers of his television show an interview with a Democratic Senate candidate
I thought of canceling my subscription to The Washington Post when Jeff Bezos blocked the editorial board from endorsing Kamala Harris for President in 2024.
But I didn’t because there were so many writers whose work I appreciated, both opinion writers and news reporters. .
I have a special connection to The Washington Post.
I worked as a copyboy for The Post in the summer between my junior and senior years in college. It was a menial job but I loved it. It was a badge of honor (in my mind) to work there.
When my book The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Chiice Are Undermining Education was published, Valerie Strauss of The Post decided to give the book maximum exposure. First, she interviewed me for Book TV, then she wrote a glowing review.
I read The Post everyday and enjoyed the reporting, the editorials, and the opinions.
But now, it is impossible to remain a subscriber after Jeff Bezos cut the heart out of the paper. Since he realized how vengeful Trump is, he became Trump’s sycophant. He hired a Murdoch guy as publisher. He hired a conservative as editor. He fired 1/3 of the news writers. He laid off bureau chiefs all over the world. His focus now is politics and national security.
As one ex-staffer put it, he murdered The Post. What was once was a great liberal (but not leftwing) newspaper is now a conservative paper. No more investigative reporting if the kind that toppled Nixon. No more deeply researched reporting from other nations.
He cut the heart out of the newspaper I loved to read for decades.
Jeff Bezos left a loyal reader like me no alternative. I canceled. There are so many other sources of news today that I don’t need to read a newspaper that sold out its principles.
Ruth Marcus started her career at The Washington Post in 1984. She rose through the ranks and eventually became an editorial writer, a columnist, and deputy editor of the editorial page.
She wrote in The New Yorkerabout why she ultimately quit:
I stayed until I no longer could—until the newspaper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, issued an edict that the Post’s opinion offerings would henceforth concentrate on the twin pillars of “personal liberties and free markets,” and, even more worrisome, that “viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.” I stayed until the Post‘s publisher, Will Lewis, killed a column I filed last week expressing my disagreement with this new direction. Lewis refused my request to meet. (You can read the column in full below, but—spoiler alert—if you’re craving red meat, brace for tofu. I wrote the piece in the hope of getting it published and registering a point, not to embarrass or provoke the paper’s management.)
Is it possible to love an institution the way you love a person, fiercely and without reservation? For me, and for many other longtime staff reporters and editors, that is the way we have felt about the Post. It was there for us, and we for it. One Saturday night, in May, 1992, the investigative reporter George Lardner, Jr., was in the newsroom when he received a call that his twenty-one-year-old daughter, Kristin, had been shot and killed in Boston by an abusive ex-boyfriend. As I recall, there were no more flights that night to Boston. The Post’s C.E.O., Don Graham, chartered a plane to get Lardner where he needed to go. It was typical of Graham, a kindness that engendered the loyalty and affection of a dedicated staff.
Graham’s own supreme act of loyalty to the Post was his painful decision to sell the paper, in 2013, to Bezos, who made his vast fortune as the founder of Amazon. The Graham family was hardly poor, but in the new media environment—and under the relentless demands of reporting quarterly earnings—they were forced, again and again, to make trims, at a time when investment was needed. Instead of continuing to cut and, inevitably, diminish the paper that he loved, Graham carried out a meticulous search for a new owner with the resources, the judgment, and the vision to help the Post navigate this new era. Bezos—the “ultimate disrupter,” as Fortune had called him a year earlier—seemed the right choice.
For a long time, she writes, Bezos was a hands-off manager. During Trump’s first term, Bezos supported the newspaper’s editorial opposition to Trump’s 2016 election and its tough coverage of the chaotic Trump term.
She liked Bezos: In my experience of that time, Bezos came off as charming, smart, and unpretentious.
In 2020, the Washington Post endorsed Biden.
In 2024, Bezos stopped the editorial board from publishing its endorsement of Kamala Harris. The man Bezos selected as publisher was Will Lewis, a Brit who had worked in Rupert Murdoch’s media empire. Lewis defended the non-endorsement. Two opinion writers resigned, most signed a letter to Bezos objecting to his decision. Some 300,000 people cancelled their subscriptions.
After the election, Bezos seemed to fawn over Trump, defending him at every turn, donating to his inauguration fund. Two months after the election, Bezos offered Nelania $40 million to produce a documentary about her life in the White House. Many saw it as protection money.
Bezos defended his new view about Trump by saying that Trump had grown, was more deliberative since his last term. He told a reporter from The New York Times that Trump “is calmer than he was the first time and more confident, more settled.” Marcus said Bezos displayed “willful self-delusion.”
In early January, before the Inauguration, a cartoon by Pulitzer Prize-winning Ann Telnaes depicting the billionaires bowing to Trump was rejected by the editor David Shipley on grounds that it slduicated a column already published. Marcus thought this was an example of “obeying in advance,” that would not have happened if Bezos were not in charge.
Then came the order from Bezos on February 25, 2025, to editorial writers that The Post would publish only editorials and opinions that supported “free markets and personal liberties.” Those with opposing views would not appear in The Post.
No editorial writer had worked under these restrictions before. Marcus submitted a piece objecting to the restrictions; the publisher (Will Lewis) rejected it. She was stunned.
She tried to see him, but was told, “The decision is final.”
Marcus wrote:
So, too, was mine. I submitted my letter of resignation on Monday, to Bezos and Lewis. “Will’s decision to not run the column that I wrote respectfully dissenting from Jeff’s edict—something that I have not experienced in almost two decades of column-writing—underscores that the traditional freedom of columnists to select the topics they wish to address and say what they think has been dangerously eroded,” I wrote. “I love the Post. It breaks my heart to conclude that I must leave.”
The Washington Post that she had known and loved for forty-one years was dead.
Glenn Kessler is the relentless fact-checker who spent many years at The Washington Post and now writes his own blog at Substack, still fact-checking.
He wrote recently about Jeff Bezos’s plan to lay off a large number of staff at the venerable newspaper. News of the impending cuts circulated for days. When it finally happened, journalists were shocked by the depth of the cuts. One third of the writers lost their jobs. The sports section was eliminated. Foreign coverage was slashed. Local reporting, a Post specialty, was cut hard.
As things now stand, one of America’s most consequential newspapers is in a death spiral, accelerated by Jeff Bezos. It is not often that we witness the destruction of a great institution by those entrusted with its care.
Ashley Parker, a former reporter for The Washington Post, wrote in The Atlantic about “The Murder of the Washington Post.”
Over recent years, they’ve repeatedly cut the newsroom—killing its Sunday magazine, reducing the staff by several hundred, nearly halving the Metro desk—without acknowledging the poor business decisions that led to this moment or providing a clear vision for the future. This morning, executive editor Matt Murray and HR chief Wayne Connell told the newsroom staff in an early-morning virtual meeting that it was closing the Sports department and Books section, ending its signature podcast, and dramatically gutting the International and Metro departments, in addition to staggering cuts across all teams. Post leadership—which did not even have the courage to address their staff in person—then left everyone to wait for an email letting them know whether or not they had a job. (Lewis, who has already earned a reputation for showing up late to work when he showed up at all, did not join the Zoom.)
The Post may yet rise, but this will be their enduring legacy.
“You’re right. I did lose a million dollars [on the newspaper] last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars next year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I’ll have to close this place in…sixty years.”
—Charles Foster Kane, speaking to his ex-guardian, in Citizen Kane (1941)
[Diane’s note: if Jeff Bezos subsidized the Post at $100 million a year, he would run out of money in 2,500 years, or 4526, that is, assuming that he wasn’t growing his wealth at the same time.]
When Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post in 2013, his net worth was about $25 billion. Now, as he prepares to order devastating layoffs at the newspaper, his net worth is about $250 billion — even after giving one-quarter of his Amazon shares to his ex-wife, MacKenzie Scott.
Bezos is a businessman, and the Washington Post is not a charity, so I understand the inclination to demand that losses be stemmed. The newsroom should be able to stand on its own feet. But even if the losses are still around $100 million a year — the figure announced a couple of years ago — for a person of Bezos’ wealth, that would mean he’d have to close the place in…2,500 years.
I don’t think the layoffs have much to do with saving money. Amazon, after all, just spent $75 million buying and promoting a documentary about Melania Trump. It’s about power and influence in Donald Trump’s second term.
After Trump won the first time in 2016, I was among a small group of reporters and editors invited to have lunch with Bezos. With a booming laugh and big smile, he said he wanted to hear war stories about covering the wild Trump-versus-Clinton campaign.
At one point, someone asked if he was concerned that Trump would seek retribution against his other businesses. (I’m writing this from memory, not notes, so I won’t use quotation marks.) Bezos acknowledged that Trump would assume any negative story about him had been ordered up by Bezos, because that’s what Trump would do if he owned a newspaper. But he said that wasn’t our problem. We only had to write the best stories possible; he could handle the heat if Trump got mad.
Those were comforting words at the time. As far as I know, Bezos has never interfered with any news coverage during his 13 years as owner — even stories critical of Amazon or coverage of Bezos’s personal life, let alone politics. For many years, he didn’t even appear to get very involved with the editorial page, even though, as owner, he could dictate whatever opinion-page policy he wanted.
As Bezos predicted, Trump in his first term often fumed about the “Amazon Washington Post” — they are not connected — and his administration took actions that were costly to Bezos. The Pentagon gave a $10-billion cloud-computing contract to Microsoft, and Amazon sued in 2020, saying Trump intervened because of his anger at The Post. (In 2022, the Microsoft contract was scrapped, and the business was split among four firms, including Amazon.)
Yet Bezos was unbowed. He embraced and promoted a new slogan — Democracy Dies in Darkness — that seemed aimed directly at Trump’s administration. He boosted the size of the staff and increased the ambitions of The Post. He appeared to embrace the idea, dare I say, that he was the steward of a public trust.
Presidential-level threats disappeared with Trump’s defeat in 2020, though Joe Biden was no fan of the tech industry. But when Trump ran again and the Democrats were on the ropes, Bezos’s calculation changed. He could afford Trump’s first term; a second could be ruinous, especially as Elon Musk, his main rival in the space business, embraced Trump.
I used to think billionaires had enough “fuck-you” money to do what they pleased. But in Trump’s creeping autocracy, and with his campaign of retribution, billionaires have too much to lose.
Mark Zuckerberg of Meta spent $100 million to fund fact-checking around the globe. But once Trump was elected, Zuckerberg pulled the plug on funding U.S. fact-checkers, shutting many down. Bezos scrubbed a planned newspaper endorsement of Kamala Harris and announced a rightward shift in the opinion pages, leading hundreds of thousands of subscribers to cancel their subscriptions. That, of course, likely increased the losses.
If there was ever a time for a news organization to need help from a billionaire, it’s now — when AI is killing search traffic and new ways to attract readers are needed. This is when investments are required, not cutbacks.
Even before Trump re-emerged, Bezos appeared to have grown less interested in The Post. The New York Times capitalized on subscriber growth during Trump’s first term to make acquisitions that expanded its reach (The Athletic, Wordle). The Post made no such moves. Subscriber growth stalled, then slipped. Bezos lavished attention on his new love, Lauren Sánchez, whom he married last year in Venice in a $50-million extravaganza. He also spent $500 million on the most expensive superyacht in the world — twice what he paid for The Post.
Unlike Scott — who has given away more than $19 billion to 2,000 non-profit organizations— Bezos has set aside a pittance of his net worth for philanthropy. Many Post reporters hoped Bezos would simply give the newspaper to his ex-wife, believing she had a greater sense of social responsibility (and none of his corporate conflicts).
No longer engaged, Bezos appears to have embraced a crude calculus: laying off staff and trimming the sails of a once-great news organization sends a message to an audience of one at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, even if the decision ruins the lives of scores of talented reporters and editors.
After all, since the election Bezos has worked hard to ingratiate himself with Trump —making a $1 million donation (via Amazon) to the inaugural fund., dining at the White House, visiting Mar-a-Lago and, according to Trump, solving “a problem very quickly.” (Amazon had planned to list the cost of tariffs with products, but canceled that after Trump called Bezos.)
Trump views any news that is not favorable as “fake news.” He couldn’t have been happy with The Post’s aggressive coverage last year of the dismantling of the federal government, which led to an FBI raid on a reporter’s home in January. But Trump views Bezos as trying to make the newspaper “more fair,” as he put it in a March interview with Clay Travis. “I think it’s great,” Trump gushed. “It’s such a difference between now and the first…He’s really trying to be more fair. But they actually did a couple of bad articles that everybody said, ‘This is crazy.’”
In another interview, with Sharyl Attkisson, Trump said, “I’ve gotten to know him and I think he’s trying to do a real job. Jeff Bezos is trying to do a real job with the Washington Post. And that wasn’t happening before.”
And so far in the second term, not once has Trump referred to the “Amazon Washington Post.”
In looking around, trying to learn more about Sharyn Alfonsi, I came across a commencement address she delivered at the journalism school at the University of Mississippi. It is hilarious!
She offers an abundance of wit, mingled with great career advice for aspiring journalists.
You get insight into the character of the “60 Minutes” reporter who spoke out and stood up to her bosses when they censored her reporting about CECOT, the terrorist prison in El Salvador.
As Dan Rather said, Sharyn Alfonsi is “One Courageous Correspondent.”
Dan Rather, legendary newsman, spent decades at CBS. Now, in retirement, he continues to have good sources at the network. In his blog “Steady,” he explains the back story of the censorship of the “60 Minutes” expose of inhumane conditions at the prison in El Salvador to which the Trump administration sent alleged terrorists.
CBS News “60 Minutes” correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi is walking the walk.
What she has done for journalism in the last two days is about as important, and courageous as it gets. With her cherished journalistic institution threatened, and her career on the line, Alfonsi is sounding the alarm that “60 Minutes” is sliding further into an increasingly irretrievable and dark place.
The Steady team spoke to sources inside the broadcast today to find out exactly what happened when the new CBS News boss, Bari Weiss, spiked a highly promoted piece at the last minute.
On background, we learned that Alfonsi and producer Oriana Zill de Granados had for months been working on a story about the Trump administration’s illegal deportations of Venezuelan migrants to CECOT, a maximum-security prison in El Salvador.
They interviewed former inmates about the brutal and torturous conditions inside the notorious prison. This is the place where Trump sent hundreds of Venezuelans he alleged were terrorists with gang ties. Human Rights Watch found that the 252 men were subject to “arbitrary detention and enforced disappearance.”
As part of the reporting, they repeatedly asked the White House, the Department of Homeland Security, and the State Department for comment, but received no response. That is no surprise since this story would be another black mark on Trump’s draconian immigration agenda.
Last Thursday, after the story had been fully fact-checked and legally vetted by CBS lawyers and its Standards and Practices team, the piece was screened for a fifth and final time for CBS News executives. Weiss was supposed to attend but did not.
She did, however, screen the story several hours later. At 11:50 p.m. Thursday, Weiss emailed the broadcast’s executive producer, Tanya Simon, outlining a few issues she had with the piece that she called “incredibly powerful.”
On Friday morning, Alfonsi made several changes to the script to address Weiss’s concerns, believed it was ready for air, and recorded her in-studio introduction
The listing of Sunday night’s “60 Minutes” pieces was released, which included Alfonsi’s “Inside CECOT.” Promos began to air, including on social media. The “Inside CECOT” clip on Instagram quickly racked up 4 million views, significantly more than usual.
But by Saturday morning, something changed. In an unprecedented move, Weiss reached out to Simon again. Her biggest issue now was the lack of response from the Trump administration. It was the first time she raised this concern.
“I realize we’ve emailed the DHS spox, but we need to push much harder to get these principals on the record,” Weiss wrote. She even provided phone numbers for Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s immigration policies, and border czar Tom Homan.
Not long after, Weiss killed the story, though promos kept running and the piece was still listed as airing.
Late on Sunday afternoon, just three hours before air time, “60 Minutes” posted an editor’s note on social media: “The broadcast lineup for tonight’s edition of 60 Minutes has been updated. Our report ‘Inside CECOT’ will air in a future broadcast.”
Within two hours, Alfonsi sent an email to her fellow correspondents and the production team that worked on the piece. “Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices. It is factually correct. In my view, pulling it now — after every rigorous internal check has been met — is not an editorial decision, it is a political one,” she wrote.
She continued, “Our viewers are expecting it. When it fails to air without a credible explanation, the public will correctly identify this as corporate censorship. We are trading 50 years of ‘gold standard’ reputation for a single week of political quiet.”
Alfonsi then addressed Weiss’s issue with the administration’s decision not to respond. “Government silence is a statement, not a VETO. Their refusal to be interviewed is a tactical maneuver designed to kill the story. If the administration’s refusal to participate becomes a valid reason to spike a story, we have effectively handed them a ‘kill switch’ for any reporting they find inconvenient.”
Alfonsi is the definition of courage. Kudos to her for speaking truth to power. The hard-won reputation of America’s most trusted television news program, and a big-time money maker for Paramount, is suddenly on the line.
During the CBS News morning editorial call on Monday, Weiss defended her decision. “I held a ‘60 Minutes’ story because it was not ready… We need to be able to get the principals on the record and on camera.”
Nothing happens in a vacuum in Trump World. The killing of the CECOT piece is no exception.
In August, David Ellison, the scion of Oracle founder and Trump supporter Larry Ellison, purchased CBS parent company Paramount. The acquisition by Ellison’s Skydance needed administration approval, which Trump’s regulators signed off on to the deep-pocketed Ellisons.
They signed off only after CBS agreed to settle a specious lawsuit in which Trump accused the network of deceitfully editing a “60 Minutes” interview with Vice President Kamala Harris during the presidential campaign.
As per usual, Trump’s warm and fuzzy feelings toward his sycophants was fleeting.
“For those people that think I am close with the new owners of CBS, please understand that 60 Minutes has treated me far worse since the so-called ‘takeover,’ than they have ever treated me before,” Trump posted on social media last week.
Friday night, at a rally in North Carolina, Trump said, “I love the new owners of CBS. Something happens to them, though. ‘60 Minutes’ has treated me worse under the new ownership… they just keep hitting me, it’s crazy.”
How Trump feels about the Ellisons is especially important right now as Paramount Skydance attempts a hostile takeover of another media giant, Warner Bros. Discovery. And once again, the Ellisons, who have been major donors to Trump, need governmental approval.
The president’s hatred of the revered news magazine seems to have been rekindled by a recent Lesley Stahl interview with the president’s newest nemesis, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Right after that interview aired, he posted, “THEY ARE NO BETTER THAN THE OLD OWNERSHIP. Since they bought it, 60 Minutes has actually gotten WORSE!”
Not coincidentally, “Bari Weiss got personally involved,” with stories about politics after the Greene interview, a “60 Minutes” insider told CNN.
This brings us back to Alfonsi’s piece, which had the unfortunate luck of being scheduled to air the evening before David Ellison upped his bid for Warner Bros. Discovery. Staying in Trump’s good graces is, well, paramount at the moment.
The day Skydance bought Paramount was a dark day for CBS News and journalism as a whole. When Weiss, with no television reporting or news production experience, was installed as CBS News editor-in-chief, my heart sank again.
If the Trump administration doesn’t want to comment, they won’t, and didn’t. It happens dozens of times a day, every day to every journalist trying to cover this facts-adverse administration. No amount of wishing, or asking, or begging will make it happen. Weiss’s knee-jerk reaction was just an excuse.
The day has been filled with talk of journalists walking away from “60 Minutes.” As one insider told us, we have got nothing left but our integrity.
What happened to Alfonsi’s piece is no less hard to take even though anyone could see it coming. The barbarians are no longer at the gate. They have breached the walls and are now running the show.
Disney announced that it was bringing back the Jimmy Kimmel show, starting tomorrow.
He was suspended for saying that the killer of Charlie Kirk was a MAGA adherent. He was wrong. No one knows the motive of Tyler Robinson, who had not been identified or arrested when Kimmel spoke.
If everyone who made a mistake was suspended from the screen, not many people would be left. The news could be announced by robots using AI. Comedians would disappear.
Disney released this statement:
“Last Wednesday, we made the decision to suspend production on the show to avoid further inflaming a tense situation at an emotional moment for our country,” the Walt Disney Company, ABC’s parent company, said in a statement.
“It is a decision we made because we felt some of the comments were ill-timed and thus insensitive,” the statement said. “We have spent the last days having thoughtful conversations with Jimmy, and after those conversations, we reached the decision to return the show on Tuesday.”
The outcry against Kimmel’s suspension was so loud that Disney backed down. His removal was seen as a test of the guarantee of free speech in the First Amendment to the Constitution.
Public protest mattered!!
Now what about the teachers, members of the military, and others who have been suspended or fired for not saying the “right” words about the murder of Charlie Kirk? The suppression of speech has been widespread and over-the-top, based on political passions and prejudice.
There was a time long ago when the FCC would block the merger of two major television networks. Too much consolidation is not healthy for democracy. But under Brendan Carr, the prospect of a megabillionaire buying two networks is possible because he’s a friend of Trump.
The most stunning revelation occurs in the last paragraph.
Inside the halls of Hudson Yards, and across CNN’s bureaus worldwide, staffers have been anxiously whispering about the suddenly real possibility of yet another corporate takeover. The network, which has already changed ownership twice in the past decade and weathered multiple leadership shakeups, may soon be thrust into another period of upheaval as the Ellison family prepares a bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, the David Zaslav–led conglomerate that owns CNN.
An Ellison takeover would be unlike anything CNN has seen in its 45-year history. Since acquiring Paramount, David Ellisonhas sought to steer CBS News into more Donald Trump-friendly waters, installing a MAGA-leaning ombudsman to review complaints of bias and moving to acquire Bari Weiss’ The Free Press with plans to install her as editor in chief, or something close to it. WBD already dialed back CNN’s aggressive, Jeff Zucker-led Trump reporting when it took over the network as its parent company in 2022, but an Ellison regime could go much further. In such a scenario, it’s likely that the anti-woke, anti-D.E.I. Weiss, who has spent years bashing the mainstream press, would not only wield influence at CBS News, but would ultimately be handed editorial authority at CNN itself.
According to nearly a dozen current employees and people familiar with the mood inside CNN, that prospect has unnerved network staffers, who harbor deep unease at the idea of reporting to Weiss. The fears have only deepened by the expectation that Ellison would pursue cuts if he merges CBS News and CNN—which I understand would be the plan should he acquire WBD—to eliminate redundancies.
Mark Thompson, CNN’s chief executive, has certainly picked up on the palpable fear in his newsroom, and has spent the past week attempting to steady the ship. I’m told that he has spoken privately with senior staff and on Monday phoned into the company-wide morning editorial meeting from London, urging calm and focus. When the Ellison family’s plan leaked to the press last week, Thompson also addressed the matter in an all-staff memo, signaling the seriousness in which CNN’s leadership is digesting the situation.
“News about potential consolidation and where our broader sector is headed is an everyday part of our industry,” Thompson said in the memo, obtained by Status. “I therefore suggest that you take this story and any subsequent similar ones with a sense of proportion. The best way we can safeguard CNN’s future as an outstanding independent global news provider is to take our own destiny in our hands and execute our own strategy as energetically and successfully as we can. Our predecessors never let speculation about changes of parent company ownership–and there were more than a few–distract them from the task of building a successful CNN and I don’t think we should either.”
Still, Thompson’s reassurances have hardly erased the anxiety, given that an Ellison takeover would be no ordinary change of corporate hands, a la AT&T’s purchase of the WarnerMediaassets. Many staffers were already worried by WBD’s existing plan to spin off CNN and other linear networks into a separate company by early next year, which would be led by notorious cost-cutter Gunnar Wiedenfels. “Keep calm and carry on doesn’t cut it in this context,” one staffer told me this week. “People are very worried,” said another, noting that Weiss “seems to have a lot of preconceived and incorrect notions about CNN.” A third added bluntly, “No one knows what the hell to expect.”
“It’s quite something for an organization that has constantly been on pins and needles for several years now, wondering what new change will come next,” that staffer continued, underscoring the constant uncertainty.
There’s also a strong sense of déjà vu. CNN is preparing to launch its second standalone streamer next month, as we previously reported, just three years after Zaslav pulled the plug on CNN+ following the WBD takeover. Thompson stressed in his memo last week that CNN’s streamer will launch “on time and on budget,” no matter the speculation swirling around the company. “Indeed, we plan to double down on the whole digital plan and execute it as soon as we can,” he told staff in his memo. But if Ellison gains control, the fate of CNN’s digital strategy could be rewritten, just as it was when Zaslav gained the keys to the castle.
Of course, the necessary caveats do apply. The Ellison family may be preparing a bid, but they have yet to submit a formal offer. It also goes without saying that if the family does make a play for WBD, corporate transactions take time to shake out. And even if the WBD board immediately accepts an offer, it would still take several months to close and then more time for the Ellison family to determine next steps for the company’s pile of assets. Nevertheless, WBD’s board may not ultimately have much of a say in the matter, given its members have a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders. If they receive a good offer, it’s difficult to see how they’d reject it.
In truth, CNN’s future may soon be beyond the control of both Thompson and Zaslav. While Zaslav may hope to gin up interest from rival bidders, it’s hard to imagine there are other companies that would wish to swallow WBD’s entire portfolio of assets whole, never mind whether they have the ability or desire to outbid the Ellison family, which is said to be preparing a cash offer after seeing their wealth surge nearly $100 billion last week. For CNN staffers who never quite adjusted to WBD ownership and might still yearn for the Zucker years, the reality is sobering: yet another transformation may soon be on the horizon, one that could redefine the network’s identity in a much more significant way.
The Ellison family saw its wealth surge by nearly $100 billion in the last week. Think about it.
Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, has recently been contending with Elon Musk for the title of world’s richest man. Both have wealth in the neighborhood of $350-400 billion. I mean, really, who cares? I can think of so many ways they could do something good for others with all that moola-boola, but no! They are on a power trip. Instead of feeding hungry children or endowing a hospital or funding wells in African villages, they buy self-aggrandizing toys.
Elon Musk wants to build a rocket to Mars and control the world’s satellite communications systems.
Larry Ellison bought CBS. He’s a friend of Donald Trump. CBS cancelled Stephen Colbert’s show. Colbert ridicules Trump. His show will be on the air until May so he has months in which to make jokes about Trump.
Larry Ellison is already a major stakeholder in CBS and Paramount. Now CNN, HBO and a major share of TikTok are in his sights. If all goes as anticipated, this tech billionaire, already one of the richest men in the world and a founder of Oracle, is poised, at 81, to become one of the most powerful media and entertainment moguls America has ever seen.
For the rest of us, the effect of Mr. Ellison’s gambit could be every bit as consequential, if not more so, than what happened a generation ago when Rupert Murdoch brought his brand of Down Under snark and cynicism to create what has become Fox News, intensifying our political polarization.
Mr. Ellison’s expected incursion into Hollywood and Big Media, if successful, could also go well beyond what other tech moguls like Jeff Bezos and Marc Benioff have attempted through their acquisitions of The Washington Post and Time magazine, respectively. For those men, the acquisitions were more like expensive hobbies.
Mr. Ellison is up to something very different: transforming himself into a media magnate. Along with his son, David, he could soon end up controlling a powerful social media platform, an iconic Hollywood movie studio and one of the largest content streaming services, as well as two of the country’s largest news organizations. Given Mr. Ellison’s friendship with, and affinity for, Donald Trump, an increasingly emboldened president could be getting an extraordinarily powerful media ally — in other words, the very last thing our country needs right now.
This consolidation of the news media is not good for democracy. What will freedom of the press mean if billionaires control the news?
Diane Ravitch's blog 