The Foxification of CBS News

The first step in creating an authoritarian regime is to control the news media: CNN is next

News logos public domain; image smashup by author

“I wake up in the morning, and I don’t recognize anything. I feel like I went to sleep three years ago and somebody hijacked the… As if all the reasonable people took a plane to Europe and left us behind.”

Ever feel that way these days?

That’s a line from George Clooney’s Broadway version of “Good Night, and Good Luck,” a play (and movie) about CBS News’ Edward R. Murrow’s battle against Joe McCarthy.

The line is delivered by Clark Gregg as Don Hollenbeck, an associate of Murrow’s and a fellow broadcaster. The two are chewing the fat over a coming confrontation with McCarthy in which Murrow plans to use McCarthy’s words against him.

McCarthy, like someone else we know, carried within him a library full of contradicting positions while he stalked the nation with eviscerating hatred.

Similarities to our current condition shouldn’t be surprising. One of McCarthy’s closest confidants was a man named Roy Cohn, Donald Trump’s mentor.

Cohn, if you’ve never heard of him, was a master manipulator who cut his teeth as a young lawyer working dirty tricks for McCarthy’s team of attack dogs, who defamed hundreds of people in a bizarre effort to root out “communists” from American society. Many careers were ruined until Murrow helped bring him down.

CBS News in those days had internal pressures from advertisers who didn’t want CBS’s news division to stir up too much of a storm. Murrow was under constant pressure from his boss and wartime (WW2) friend Bill Paley, who built CBS News but depended on advertisers to keep it afloat.

Advertising has always been the Achilles heel of American journalism. When oligarchs with strong political views don’t own a news organization outright, they can pressure it to spin news their way by threatening to withdraw their advertising account from the news organization’s coffers.

I’ve never been someone who gets upset if an “institution” dies. I guess if one of those institutions were baseball, I’d mourn, but generally, it’s just evolution. Things change, they improve, they disappear.

Normally, I wouldn’t grieve over the loss of CBS News any more than I’d grieve over losing any other compromised news entity. But this is like saying that I won’t vote in an election because both political parties are compromised by corporations.

This argument gets old in a society that isn’t interested in change. If we want to complain about corporate power but ignore the solution to the problem, we’re just screaming into the night air to make ourselves feel better.

Who do you know who wants to replace capitalism with real socialism, where workers own the means of production? Probably close to zero. Until that number changes, all the complaints about corporate power will be both muted and moot, which gives me a good chance to use both words in one sentence but offers no satisfactory solution.

So, yes, I grieve because there was a time when CBS had relative integrity within the context of the system it covered. It wasn’t even that long ago. I grieved when Kamala lost.

I grieve because I feel like the reasonable people all flew to Europe and left the rest of us behind.

Time of death: July 7, 2024

CBS died on July 7, 2024. That was when a media organization nobody aside from cinephiles knew about, Skydance Media, announced that it had agreed to acquire Paramount Global to form a $28 billion megamedia firm.

Skydance, not even twenty years old at the time of the merger, was basically the progeny of Larry Ellison, by way of another unfortunate oligarchy birthing incident that begat his son David. David grew into an adult, then formed Skydance because he liked movies.

Skydance quickly formed a production and distribution partnership with Paramount Pictures. Little did unsuspecting fans of Star Trek realize that every time they dropped a few dollars for the newest Star Trek reboots, they were helping to finance the end of CBS News.

It didn’t take long for Ellison and Skydance to gain street cred in Hollywood, which was trying to move on from the dominance of Harvey Weinstein after his Hollywood walk of shame.¹ The company cranked out hits like the Mission Impossible franchise and the sequel to Top Gun.

Ellison specialized in creative financing deals, such as one with Apple TV’s streaming service that guaranteed Skydance $25 million for each film.²

Ellison makes more money in any given minute than most of us make in a lifetime, but unlike the politician he supports, Trump, he seems to do it legally.

Ellison’s company bartered and clawed its way to an eight-billion-dollar purchase of Paramount, which by that time also owned CBS.

The FCC, now managed by sycophants at the Trump regime, approved Skydance’s buyout in July, shortly after Paramount bent the knee to the grifter in chief to the tune of $16 million. That’s the amount Trump sued the CBS TV show 60 Minutes for airing an interview with Kamala Harris, who had the temerity to point out his many flaws.

Paramount paid up.

When Paramount coincidentally and abruptly pulled the plug on Stephen Colbert’s late-night TV show, a few folks wondered if there was any possible way there might be a connection with the concurrent FCC approval process.

The FCC is helmed by a fella named Brendan Carr, the new chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), who was originally nominated as an FCC commissioner by Trump in 2017.

Carr wrote Project 2025’s chapter on media policy as envisioned by Maga. He is also a member of the Federalist Society,³ which is part of a shadow government that has installed several United States Supreme Court justices and often actively solicits favorable outcomes through bribery, which I wrote about way back in August 2024:

The Federalist Society’s War Against Americans

It wasn’t until Carr signed off on the Skydance acquisition of Paramount that the regime gave its final okay. Carr and the regime demanded two things in return for the merger’s approval:

1. A full reversal on DEI

2. The installation of a monitor who will watch for socialist teachings (my words).

3. Cancel Colbert (?) (Yes, that’s three things in total, but I didn’t count it formally because I’m making an assumption about the Colbert thing)

The merger put a Trump supporter in control of another major American news organization. Right-wing supporters now control or own:

• Paramount/CBS

• Fox Corporation (Murdoch Family): Fox News, Fox Business, and various local Fox affiliates.

• News Corp (Murdoch Family): The Wall Street Journal, New York Post, HarperCollins (a major book publisher), and other news properties.

• Sinclair Broadcast Group: Owns 185 TV stations⁴ in 86 markets, and was a major player in blocking Jimmy Kimmel during a brief First Amendment kerfuffle.

• Salem Media Group: Conservative radio stations and digital properties like HotAir.com, RedState, and PJ Media.

• Newsmax Media: The bonkers Newsmax TV, known for some of the craziest Maga and right-wing commentary around.

Right-wing podcasters like Joe Rogan and Candace Owens have also swarmed Spotify.

There’s also a massive spiderweb of right-wing YouTubers, independent podcasters, and even nutso Substackers adding to the media mix.

Curiously, after the merger was approved, Paramount announced a $1.5 billion deal with the creators of South Park, which promptly launched some comic relief regarding Trump’s micropenis.

This is not much different than the early days of Rupert Murdoch’s ownership of Fox, when Homer Simpson would tease liberals with comic relief while Murdoch was building a right-wing news network that brainwashed enough people to eventually account for more than 70 million Trump voters.

Ellison responded like you would expect, by naming a broadcasting neophyte with Maga tendencies, Bari Weiss, to run CBS News as Editor-in-Chief.

Before being named Editor-in-Chief of CBS, Weiss had worked as an op-ed and book review editor for The Wall Street Journal, then moved on to the New York Times, where she earned enough of a reputation for bullying underlings that she resigned with a scathing letter directed at the New York Times for having the audacity to check into the charges.

This gained the admiration of far-right jingoists like Ben Shapiro, and a legend was born.

She founded a Substack called The Free Press, using a name that tricked a lot of people into thinking it was. Much money was made.

Ellison’s new company, Paramount Skydance, paid Weiss $150 million for The Free Press and installed her as the CBS News chief in October 2025.

(Hey, David, I’ll sell Ruminato to you for $150,000, but I won’t work for you unless you give me full, independent control of CBS News. And Oracle. Talk to dad about this. Tell him it’s urgent.)

Weiss had no broadcasting experience, but as we’ve learned with Maga, experience is not key to running the show. Subservience to the cause is. Weiss promptly destroyed CBS’s 60 Minutes brand by pulling a story she didn’t like, then installed a cardboard cutout named Tony Dokoupil as the CBS’s Nightly News’ newest anchor.

Nobody younger than fifty cares who the CBS news anchor is because nobody under fifty watches the damn thing, but Dokoupil still made headlines (more like subheads) in media journals in stories about the obsequious and limp broadcasts that followed.⁵

As the Poynter Institute’s Tom Jones (no, not that Tom Jones, sillies!) reported:

Dokoupil has had a series of questionable moments, from stumbles over which story was airing next to a cringeworthy and bizarre “salute” to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and comments about the anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Dokoupil said on air, “President Trump today accused Democrats of failing to prevent the attack on the Capitol, while House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries accused the president of ‘whitewashing it.’”

Media reporter Oliver Darcy wrote for his Status newsletter, “Dokoupil’s breathtaking both-sides framing of an attack carried out by a mob of ardent Trump followers sparked swift and widespread criticism, both inside and outside CBS News.”

Dokoupil yesterday responded to the greatest opportunity of his career, interviewing the mad clown, by asking a few softball questions for thirteen yawn-inducing minutes. The clown blathered on unchallenged about ending eight wars and other nonsense, while the roar of the factory floor where the interview took place nearly smothered the interview.

This occurred in the same building where a bossy union worker yelled at the mad grifter, calling him a “pedophile protector,” which reportedly elicited a little finger wag from Herr TrumpEpstein:

Disclaimer: I don’t know if that pic is real. I got it from a sketchy source on the interwebs and it looks like someone may have attached a small hand to his sleeve.

I don’t know if this occurred before or after the interview, but if before, I would have been all over that if my name was Tony, grilling him with tough questions like: “ ‘Sup with that?”

Dokoupil’s reaction to all the criticism of his tiny tenure as news anchor is straight out of the Fox playbook. Negative press over his performance is the result, he said, of media reporters’ reliance on “academics or elites.”⁶

Weiss has told the few remaining journalists who haven’t left CBS News that she doesn’t want the company to merely report the news, she wants it to be the news.⁷

Seems to be working.

In a memo to staffers, she wrote:

“Let’s make sure every single night has something with viral potential. … The goal for this road show is not to deliver the news so much as it is to *drive the news*. We need to *be the news* for these 10 days.”

Netflix to the rescue?

The demise of CBS is bad enough, but the Trump regime isn’t satisfied with that. The demented don is now actively urging David Ellison to make a big move for Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns a jillion media properties, including CNN.

Ellison did so through Skydance, but the offer was rejected by the Warner Bros. Discovery board.

Netflix then surprised everyone by making a better offer, which Warner Bros. Discovery accepted.

Netflix, of course, is also owned by tech bros, but its programming is considerably more leftish than Trump would like, as is the content of HBO, which is one of Trump and Ellison’s targets at Warner Bros. Discovery.

Larry Ellison, David’s daddy, has stepped into the fray, guaranteeing a cash payout for Warner Bros. Discovery. Paramount has sued Warner Bros. Discovery to get its way.

Trump, meanwhile, has urged the Ellison boys on like a demented cheerleader, hoping that another suite of media properties can become Foxified.

What a mess.⁸

The boss of it all

I’ve often said that Trump is no longer the master of his domain, and that Susie Wiles, his chief of staff, seems, at least to me, to be directing Version 2.0 of the Mad Clown show.

Her eleven interviews with Vanity Fair magazine solidified my opinion on this. But why her?

We won’t get clues why until this regime collapses upon itself, and it will, but my guess is that she’s got Roy Cohn’s instincts. She thinks like he did, so Trump keeps her around.

A master manipulator, which she almost surely is, can even implement ideas and make it look to someone like Trump that they were his. She’s fine with that. She doesn’t want to take credit for anything; she just wants to terrorize the nation. Someday, perhaps we will discover what she thinks the nation did to her to deserve her relentless wrath.

The nation’s media landscape has taken a full swing back into the Roy Cohn era. The Trump regime is trying to consolidate the media industry into one large mouthpiece for their policies, and they are using Roy Cohn’s tactics to do it.

No wonder so many of us are scoping flights to Europe.

Thanks for reading! Don’t forget the footnotes if you are looking for sources.

Footnotes

1. Halpert, Madeline. “Harvey Weinstein Found Guilty of Sexual Assault after New York Retrial.” Bbc.com. BBC News, June 11, 2025. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn7z3gezdjro.

2. Donnelly, Matt. “Apple, Skydance Megadeal Is One of the Richest Pacts in Hollywood.” Variety, February 23, 2022. https://variety.com/2022/film/news/apple-skydance-mega-deal-david-ellison-1235188364/.

3. “Brendan Thomas Carr | the Federalist Society.” 2019. Archive.org. July 10, 2019. https://web.archive.org/web/20191106205126/https://fedsoc.org/contributors/brendan-carr.

4. Sinclair, Inc. “TV Stations at Sinclair Broadcast Group,” July 11, 2025. https://sbgi.net/tv-stations/.

5. Poynter Institute. “CBS News’ Reset Raises a Hard Question: Who Is This For?” Mailchi.mp, 2020. https://mailchi.mp/poynter/cbs-news-reset-raises-a-hard-question-who-is-this-for

6. Grynbaum, Michael M, and Benjamin Mullin. “‘We Need to Be the News’: Inside Bari Weiss’s Bumpy Revamp at CBS.” The New York Times, January 13, 2026. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/13/business/media/cbs-evening-news-bari-weiss.html.

7. The New York Times, ibid

8. The situation is still unresolved. Netflix made a full cash offer late last night (Jan 13, 2026). The Ellisons are working on a hostile takeover. Like I said, it’s a mess.