David Ellison and Shari Redstone
What Does Donald Hate Trump More – Free Speech… or Worse… a Free Press?
The White House pressroom is populated today by a majority of MAGA friendly “journalists,” often those who gush with support for his Lordship, Donald Trump, touting his obviously failing policies as wild successes, and even those “no way to make them look good” economic and political setbacks as either “Biden’s fault” or “expected transitional downturns on the road to the best America ever.” Gone is the Associated Press over their refusal to use the term “Gulf of America” for that body of water that borders our nation from Florida to Texas. As with most autocrats, their opinions are “facts,” their choices and edicts are the only “right thinking,” and those who disagree are either stupid, wrong or traitors. Trump even looks to make money by suing companies with federal licenses or in need federal approvals, who simply do not accept that right thinking. Trump is always looking for excuses to repress the American press unless their reportage reflects his views; facts have left the building.
And of late, he seems to love Oval Office meetings with heads of state, surrounded by administration and rightwing news media sycophants, to humiliate and showcase his power… from hapless Ukraine President Zelenskyy (February 28th) to South Africa’s President on May 21st. Even as the President of the United States justified breaking his own immigration rules by admitting Afrikaners (white) with a fast track to citizenship based on an entirely discredited “white genocide” conspiracy theory, he refused to accept South African President Cyrill Ramaphosa’s substantiated denial of that charge.
Ramaphosa explained: “‘It will take President Trump listening to the voices of South Africans.’… Mr. Trump was ready with his response. ‘Turn the lights down and just put this on,’ he told his aides…. A booming video mash-up began to play, including footage of people calling for violence against white farmers in South Africa. One clip showed white crosses planted alongside a rural road stretching far into the distance, which Mr. Trump said were part of a burial site for murdered white farmers. The crosses were actually planted by activists staging a protest against farm murders.” NY Times, May 21st. That much of the footage wasn’t even from South Africa did not matter. Trump is loathe to allow facts and logic to denigrate white Chrisitan nationalism. And HIS press cooperates.
Even as Donald Trump’s rise to fame has been based substantially on mass and social media, his Trump 1.0 statement that the media were the “enemy of the people” has only been amplified in Trump 2.0, not only as a political mantra… but as a source of cold hard cash for the most corrupt president in US history, using administration loyalists willing to trample the rule of law for fear of being fired. The horrifying reality is that this tact is working. As media’s connection to mega-wealthy media barons is dependent on federal licenses or approvals, these overlords of established news organizations, from Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post and media holdings, to publicly-traded companies (like Disney which owns the ABC television network and several local stations) that face Trump’s 1st Amendment-trampling lawsuits, litigation that Trump could never win in a bona fide trial, and fork over millions of dollars – de facto bribes.
For example, as the December 14th Associated Press reported: “ABC News has agreed to pay $15 million toward Donald Trump’s presidential library to settle a defamation lawsuit over anchor George Stephanopoulos’ inaccurate on-air assertion that the president-elect had been found civilly liable for raping writer E. Jean Carroll.” It was a lawsuit that ABC could easily have won.
With the pending sale of Paramount Global (which owns CBS), where Shari Redstone is the controlling shareholder, to David Ellison’s Skydance Media, subject to merger approval by several federal agencies, there is pressure on Redstone to settle a $20 billion Trump lawsuit against CBS News based some normal editing of a “60 Minutes” interview segment featuring his campaign rival, then-Vice President Kamala Harris. Looming over that Paramount sale is required FCC approval, since there are broadcast assets involved, and SEC review, which examines all such larger M&A deals. But host of HBO’s Last Week Tonight (May 18th), John Oliver, points out how the system really works today: “The FCC, which is supposed to be an independent commission, is now headed by the Trump appointee Brendan Carr who immediately spoke on Fox News about how he would be helping to enact the president’s agenda. Oliver said this is ‘not what your job is supposed to be’ calling Carr ‘obsequious’.” Shari was intimidated.
Indeed, Trump’s threat of using government agencies against media opponents has been very successful. His tools? The FCC, SEC, FTC, IRS and the DOJ. As the media-mogul pressure against their “independent” news operations mounts, news media executives are resigning in protest. CBS is only a more recent example. “The head of CBS News stepped down Monday [5/19], marking the second high-profile departure from the organization within the past month as its parent company contends with a $20 billion lawsuit from President Donald Trump and an $8 billion merger.
“Wendy McMahon said in a memo that her time atop the stalwart news brand has been ‘a privilege and joy,’ but that the past few months had been ‘challenging.’ She joined CBS from ABC in 2021 and took over as CEO of CBS News in 2023. ‘It’s become clear that the company and I do not agree on the path forward,’ McMahon wrote in a memo to CBS News staff. "It’s time for me to move on and for this organization to move forward with new leadership.’… McMahon's departure comes just weeks after Bill Owens, the longtime top producer at ‘60 Minutes,’ left after he said the newsmagazine had lost its journalistic independence.” NBC News, May 19th
I’m Peter Dekom, Trump’s new media-crushing autocratic buddies – folks like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele – must be fiercely proud of their protégé, DJT.
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