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The Best Propaganda Money Can Buy Can't Convince Americans to Like Trump's Iran War
Only about a quarter of respondents to a new poll think the US should have gone to war with Iran, and that the US is winning.
Sep 01, 2026
A new University of Massachusetts-Amherst opinion poll, conducted August 21-26, finds profound American disillusionment with President Donald Trump, with his Iran War, and with its economic fallout in their lives.
Apparently the Ellison family’s attempt to drum up support for Donald Trump and his Iran War by buying up CBS News and gutting it as a respected news organization was a costly failure. Likewise, Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp and his various pro-Trump organs, from Fox Cable News to The Wall Street Journal, have not pulled the wool over the public’s eyes in the ways that Murdoch hoped. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu boasted of the effort he expended convincing the American people to go to war with Iran, saying he had a thousand hours on US television , but while he may have prevailed on the gullible and avaricious Trump to fall on that country like a ravenous wolf, he did not succeed in altering the views of the American public on the desirability of such a war. The only significant impact of Netanyahu on most Americans has been to convince them that the Israeli government is a combination of genocidal maniacs and welfare queens that Americans should cut off economically and perhaps even militarily.
The UMass poll asked a weighted sample of respondents how well Trump has handled his Iran War. The response of 55% of those asked this question was “not well at all.” Ouch. Another 13% replied “not too well.” So 68%, over two-thirds, think he has done a piss-poor job on his Iran War, which was his war of choice. Two-thirds is the percentage needed in the Senate to impeach and remove a president, so if our representatives actually mirrored public opinion, Trump would be toast.
That question had to do with Trump’s handling of the war. Asked whether they approved of the war on Iran, a majority, 54%, said they strongly or somewhat disapproved, and another 20% were noncommittal, which I would interpret as not actively supporting the war even if they didn’t particularly oppose it. Those statistics yield a picture of a war that nearly three-fourths of Americans either oppose or about which they just don’t care. It isn’t what the commander of a war would want to hear from his own public.
Trump and the Republicans are always campaigning on being the party of business and therefore the party that knows how to handle the economy, but only a tiny minority, 7%, think Trump is handling the economy very well.
A majority think the war was a mistake and question whether it has made the US safer or forestalled an Iranian bomb.
Another way of putting it is that only about a quarter of respondents think the US should have gone to war with Iran, and that the US is winning.
The UMass report on the opinion poll noted that Raymond La Raja, professor of political science at UMass Amherst and co-director of the poll, said, “Americans are overwhelmingly negative about Trump on the Iran situation.” He continued: “Only 1 in 4 Americans thinks he is handling Iran well. The real divide is increasingly between Trump’s hardcore MAGA base and almost everyone else. Among Republicans who identify very strongly with MAGA, 87% approve of Trump’s handling of Iran. But that falls to 58% among Republicans who are ‘somewhat MAGA’ and just 30% among Republicans who say they are ‘not MAGA at all.’ The more loosely attached Republicans are to the MAGA identity, the more skeptical they are of the war.”
Conducting a war in the Middle East, as even the cowboys in the G. W. Bush administration recognized, requires at least some allies. But Americans don’t think Trump plays well with other children. Asked how he has handled working with allies in global affairs, 52% say “not well at all” and 12% say “not too well,” showing that nearly two-thirds view his foreign policy performance negatively.
Based on this sounding, we can further project that Americans are even more angry about the main fallout of the failed war on Iran, which is high inflation. Fully 80% of respondents said that the Iran War has increased the cost of gasoline and groceries. Asked about how Trump has dealt with inflation, 57% responded, “not well at all.” A further 18% said “not too well.” That is 75%, fully three-fourths, who disapprove of his handling of inflation. Trump and the Republicans are always campaigning on being the party of business and therefore the party that knows how to handle the economy, but only a tiny minority, 7%, think Trump is handling the economy very well, and I presume they are wealthy investors in Trump’s casino stock market. The tech-heavy Nasdaq is up 14-16% so far this year.
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Bari Weiss Personally Involved in CBS News Hit Piece on Abdul El-Sayed: Report
"They took a small nugget of news, forced it into something much larger, and messed up," said one CBS News staffer.
Sep 01, 2026
A Tuesday report from Status claims that CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss was personally involved with a widely criticized story that linked Democratic US Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed to the September 11 terrorist attacks.
The CBS piece, which was published on Monday, drew criticism from Democratic lawmakers and progressive journalists for saying that El-Sayed "may be facing the risk of renewed scrutiny and fresh political attack" due to past innocuous statements he'd made about the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
According to Status' sources, Weiss "personally directed" that the story's headline be changed to "specifically mention that El-Sayed, who is vying to become the first Muslim American senator, had deleted tweets referencing" the attacks.
The two deleted posts highlighted in the story were far from scandalous, however. In the first post, El-Sayed called on Americans to unite in a common purpose to combat the Covid-19 pandemic just as they came together after the 2001 attacks, and in the second one he drew attention not just to the victims who died on 9/11, but to all the people who died afterward as a result of the US War on Terror.
Status also reported that Weiss "praised the story during the network's daily editorial meeting Monday, signaling her support for the piece to the entire network."
Weiss' endorsement of the El-Sayed story came despite the fact that senior staffers at CBS raised concerns about it with the network's standards department, Status added.
“They took a small nugget of news, forced it into something much larger, and messed up,” one staffer said.
Another staffer told Status that the story is "shameful" due to its "overt" racism.
One anonymous CBS News staffer similarly told Zeteo media columnist Justin Baragona on Monday that the Weiss-endorsed story was “trash” and “horribly Islamophobic.”
Weiss was installed as CBS editor-in-chief last year after David Ellison, the son of billionaire Oracle founder Larry Ellison, a megadonor to President Donald Trump, acquired network parent company Paramount.
In that time, CBS ratings have collapsed to record lows and Weiss has overseen a mass purge of reporters and staffers at the network's legendary news program "60 Minutes."
Veteran "60 Minutes" correspondent Scott Pelley, who was fired by CBS earlier this year, subsequently accused the Weiss-led management team of instructing him to "inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story."
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Lawmakers, Journalists Rip CBS News Over 'Insane, Blatantly Racist Headline' on Abdul El-Sayed
"The Bari Weiss project... is to revive post-9/11 Islamophobia in mainstream politics," said one critic.
Aug 31, 2026
Several Democratic lawmakers on Monday slammed CBS News for publishing a news analysis linking Democratic US Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed to the September 11 terrorist attacks.
The CBS story claimed that El-Sayed "may be facing the risk of renewed scrutiny and fresh political attack" ahead of the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, which killed over 3,000 people in New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.
The piece cited two deleted El-Sayed social media posts to make its case: One in which he called on Americans to unite in a common purpose to combat the Covid-19 pandemic just as they came together after the 2001 attacks, and another where he drew attention not just to the victims who died on 9/11, but to all the people who died afterward as a result of the US War on Terror.
El-Sayed defended the latter post in an interview with CBS News.
"My point is just to say that what happened on 9/11 is a disaster," El-Sayed said. "It was a terrible attack on our country and our responsibility is also to think about how do we build an America where we are protecting our servicemen and women from being asked to fight wars we have no business fighting that ultimately end up doing harm to people. And we're seeing that right now."
Critics slammed the CBS analysis, which they said unfairly tarred El-Sayed—a Muslim and son of Egyptian immigrants who has repeatedly faced Islamophobic and racist attacks—as a terrorist sympathizer even as he has consistently denounced the 9/11 attacks.
"What an insane, blatantly racist headline," wrote Rep. Yassamin Ansari (D-Ariz.) in a social media post. "Unreal."
Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) also slammed the CBS story as "racist," adding that "targeting Abdul like this is intentional and coordinated."
The Nation's Jeet Heer argued that the CBS News piece reflected the change in management the network has undergone ever since owner David Ellison put Bari Weiss in charge of it.
"To be clear the Bari Weiss project... is to revive post-9/11 Islamophobia in mainstream politics," wrote Heer. "These are profoundly illiberal people, who should be combated not just by the left and progressives but anyone committed to civil equality."
Responding to the network's post promoting the article on the platform X, Zeteo editor-in-chief Mehdi Hasan asked CBS News if it ever considered that "it's super offensive and disgusting and Islamophobic to do a tweet about the potential first-ever Muslim Democratic senator which begins by referencing 9/11?"
Adam Johnson, host of the Citations Needed podcast, highlighted the El-Sayed social media posts flagged by CBS and argued that the network is trying "to scandalize perfectly sensible and humane comments."
Progressive commentator Wajahat Ali said that he's seen a lot of mainstream media articles attacking El-Sayed, but concluded that "this one takes the cake for being so exquisitely racist."
According to Zeteo media columnist Justin Baragona, one anonymous CBS News staffer is also raising concerns about the El-Sayed story, which they called "trash" and "horribly Islamophobic."
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Ellison Takeover of CBS ‘Unquestionably Aided’ White House Epstein Cover-Up: Democratic Senator
Wyden's claims about CBS came on the same day its parent company's CEO, David Ellison, defended the proposed megamerger between Paramount and Warner Bros.
Aug 04, 2026
Sen. Ron Wyden on Tuesday charged that the takeover of CBS by David Ellison, the son of right-wing billionaire Larry Ellison, helped President Donald Trump's White House cover up information about the late billionaire sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Wyden's (D-Ore.) claims about CBS came on the same day his office released a report alleging that top Wall Street banks "looked the other way and allowed Epstein to have ready access to the mountains of cash he used to lure, harbor, and transport his victims."
In a social media post, Wyden revealed that he was interviewed several months ago by former "60 Minutes" correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, where he presented evidence his office had gathered about big banks' role in facilitating Epstein's illicit activities.
The interview never aired, Wyden said, because CBS "subsequently... pulled the segment and fired the reporter."
Wyden added that "the MAGA buyout of media has unquestionably aided the Trump administration’s cover up here."
David Ellison, whose father was a megadonor to Trump's 2024 campaign, assumed control of CBS last year after his media company Skydance merged with Paramount, the network's parent company.
Shortly afterward, Ellison hired right-wing commentator Bari Weiss to serve as CBS News' editor-in-chief, and she has since gone on a firing spree of several longtime "60 Minutes" producers and journalists, including Alfonsi, Scott Pelley, Tanya Simon, and Cecelia Vega.
The Paramount CEO's ambitions for controlling media properties extend well beyond CBS, as his company is currently in the process of acquiring Warner Bros. Discovery, the parent company of both CNN and HBO.
A federal judge last month paused the $110 billion megamerger between Paramount and Warner Bros., citing “compelling evidence that the combined firm resulting from the transaction will possess substantial market share in the wide-release theatrical distribution market,” making it “likely to violate antitrust laws.”
The New York Times on Tuesday published an editorial by Ellison in which he defended the merger and insisted that he could be trusted as a good steward of CNN, vowing to give its news team "independence."
"Our journalists will continue to answer to the facts and to all the people they serve—not to any party or cause," Ellison wrote. "These were founding principles for both CNN and CBS News, for legends like Ted Turner and Edward R. Murrow, and it is exactly that kind of independence that has always fueled the greatness of '60 Minutes.'"
However, CNN media reporter Brian Stelter noted in a Tuesday news analysis that Ellison's Times op-ed made no mention about "upheaval" that Weiss has caused at CBS News, which has led to a decline in ratings at both the network's evening news program and its morning show.
"His first year owning CBS News has been defined by ratings struggles, shakeups, and controversies, mostly stemming from his appointment of Weiss as editor-in-chief," Stelter explained. "I don't hear anyone making the case that CBS News has earned back a whole lot of trust... Ellison's op-ed sidesteps the debate altogether."
Former CNN anchor Jim Acosta similarly expressed skepticism of Ellison's claims in a social media post.
"Ellison appointed Bari Weiss to run CBS News and look at the damage done there," Acosta wrote. "Stands to reason he’ll do the same at CNN. Watch what they do. Not what they say or write."
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Scott Pelley Details Weiss' Push to Air 'State Propaganda' on CBS News
"She was putting a thumb on the scale on behalf of the administration. Constantly looking out for the views of the president."
Jun 08, 2026
Days after being fired from the CBS News program '60 Minutes' for speaking out against the dismissal of several top correspondents and declaring that editor-in-chief Bari Weiss was "brought in to kill" the show, veteran journalist Scott Pelley described in detail the right-wing former opinion columnist's efforts to push for political coverage that centered the White House's point of view—regardless of the facts.
"There was a thumb on the scale for the president’s version of events that I felt was a level of political influence that I had never seen in 37 years at CBS News," Pelley told The New York Times' Lulu Garcia-Navarro Sunday.
Pelley was interviewed after he and his former colleagues spoke out against what fired correspondent Cecilia Vega called "censorship" at the 58-year-old program since Weiss took the helm of CBS News last year. Weiss was installed following a White House-approved merger of parent company Paramount and Skydance Media, owned by the son of President Donald Trump backer Larry Ellison.
The new editor-in-chief, who first gained notoriety as a student at Columbia University when she led a campaign against pro-Palestinian professors and later railed against "cancel culture," arrived at CBS last fall with promises to promote "journalism that reports on the world as it actually is" and that is "fair, fearless, and factual."
But in his interview with the Times, Pelley expanded on his earlier accusation, made in a statement released last week after he was fired, that Weiss had demanded that he "inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story"—revealing that the coverage in question dealt with the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents in Minneapolis in January.
Good was shot in her car by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent after several officers gave her conflicting instructions, and footage of the shooting showed an agent approaching the front of her vehicle as she turned the wheel to the right. Pretti was shot by Customs and Border Protection agents in another incident, after he approached a woman one officer had thrown to the ground. Top administration officials accused both victims of being violent and called Good a "domestic terrorist" while barring state officials from investigating the killings.
Pelley said that before Weiss intervened in the coverage of the fatal shootings, he had pushed to use images "in which we see the protesters acting aggressively."
"I felt it was very important to identify that the protesters themselves were being very aggressive and that they were half of these confrontations," he told Garcia-Navarro. "We also included a picture of Alex Pretti before he was killed kicking out a taillight on a police car and made a point of saying, this is Alex Pretti and this is what he did."
But Pelley's push to get ahead of any criticism that '60 Minutes' was being biased against the agents or the Trump administration didn't stop Weiss from emailing the show's executive producer hours before the story was set to air, asking that producers "make the protesters look more violent" and even promote a false claim about Good that was pushed by the White House.
Pelley said the message from Weiss was, "You need to describe her as driving toward the officer."
This is a devastating interview.
Scott Pelley tells the NYT that Bari Weiss directly put a “thumb on the scale” for Trump over the killing of Renee Good.
Here’s his explanation of exactly what happened. pic.twitter.com/Kh56P1q7rM
— Niall Stanage (@NiallStanage) June 7, 2026
"This is not what you see on the video," Pelley told Garcia-Navarro. "On the video, you see the officer standing slightly off the front of the car. And you clearly see Ms. Good’s wheels turned completely as far as they will go, away from the officer. But he shoots her in the head, kills her."
Pelley said he refused to make the changes, and did not hear from Weiss about the piece after it aired. A CBS spokesperson told the Times that the suggestions Weiss had made "had no political motivation and were proposed solely to make the piece as strong, fair, and accurate as possible."
Pelley told Garcia-Navarro: "My impression at the time was that she was putting a thumb on the scale on behalf of the administration. Constantly looking out for the views of the president. We’re reporting those views. There’s nothing wrong with reporting those views, but it was never enough."
The story on Pretti and Good came weeks after Weiss pushed the show's producers and correspondents to change a segment on Trump's deal with El Salvador under which hundreds of immigrants have been deported to the country's notorious Terrorism Confinement Center after being falsely accused of being gang members.
Pelley's revelation about the exchange with Weiss was called "devastating" by The Hill reporter Niall Stanage, while the grassroots progressive group Our Revolution said Pelley had described "a CBS News editor demanding reporters change facts to match Trump’s version of events to help justify the murder of a US citizen.
"That isn’t news. It’s state propaganda," said the group. "Bari Weiss is not a journalist. She is an asset of the Trump administration. She should be sued and removed and Paramount should answer for installing her."
Scottish historian William Dalrymple added that Pelley's interview revealed Weiss as "a major threat to truthful journalism."
The chaos at CBS has intensified as Paramount Skydance has pushed for a merger with Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns CNN—raising alarm that the cable network could soon see a significant shift toward reporting that blatantly centers the White House's viewpoints.
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Fight the Trump Media Takeover With Tax Credits for Independent Reporting
If 150 million people took advantage of a $100 credit, that would make $15 billion available to support independent media.
Jun 05, 2026
It is terrible to see Bari Weiss, under orders from Trumper owner David Ellison, dismantle "60 Minutes" and the rest of CBS News. CBS was never close to being a paragon of unbiased reporting; the rich always had a disproportionate voice, but the network, and especially "60 Minutes," did much excellent investigative reporting.
The Weiss-Ellison team is explicitly saying that this will no longer be the case under their leadership. Any investigative reporting this crew does will most likely be on President Donald Trump’s political opponents. And the material they present will likely be as distorted as the lies that Trump spouts on a daily basis.
The problem goes well beyond CBS. The Ellison family is also planning to take over CNN through its acquisition of Warner Bros., the parent company. The Trumper trio of Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk own TikTok, Facebook and Instagram, and X, respectively. They do not hide their efforts to use their control of these social media platforms to push their political agenda.
And it goes beyond just outright control. Trump and Brendan Carr, his chair of the Federal Communications Commission, have said that they would use the federal government’s regulatory powers to punish outlets that broadcast material they don’t like. Trump used this threat to extract tribute from both ABC News and CBS News (pre-Weiss) over absurd lawsuits.
The media matter hugely for democracy, much more than campaign financing.
All in all, this is a really bad story. But there are things that can be done other than whine. First, the Ellison’s takeover of Warner is not a done deal. People can protest this monopolization of both movie production and news. Even Trumper politicians can be forced to respond to public pressure. Note the seeming retreat from Trump’s $1.8 billion slush fund for his criminal friends. Giving tax dollars to Trump’s chosen criminals was too much for people to stomach, and the Republicans in Congress were forced to nix it.
There are also a large number of independent outlets that continue to do solid reporting. I would put ProPublica at the top of that list, but there are many others. I would also include The New York Times and NPR, despite my many criticisms of both outlets over the years. And there are dozens of smaller publications, way too many for me to list, that people should look to support. Instead of buying something you see advertised on CBS or any other corrupt media outlet, send the money you would have spent to The Nation, In These Times, Payday Report, or any of a number of other independent outlets.
But we really need to go beyond what people cough up out of goodwill. The billionaires have endless money to push their Trumpian nonsense. The nickels and dimes that ordinary people can afford is not a match. We really need to have government support for independent media, and I’m not talking about going back to the old days with the federal government coughing up $500 million a year (0.007% of the budget) for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
We need an individual tax credit or voucher, modeled on the charitable contribution tax deduction. The difference is that this money would be designated for news outlets, and that it would be a credit (say $100), available to everyone, not a deduction from taxes. This way the money would go to the outlets that people find valuable, not the ones the government has chosen. (There is a question of eligibility, but this has generally not been a major problem in qualifying for tax-exempt status with the Internal Revenue Service.)
This route can make a huge amount of money available to support independent reporting. If it was set up nationally and 150 million people took advantage of a $100 credit, that would make $15 billion available to support independent media. That is roughly 300 times ProPublica’s annual budget.
Needless to say, not everyone will use their credit to support media progressives will like. Some may support tabloid-type reporting on Hollywood figures. Some of it will go to support right-wing Fox News- type propaganda. But if even 20% went to support real news, it would be an enormous boon for independent reporting.
And the great thing about this credit is that it can be done at the state and local level, so we don’t have to wait for the forces of good to retake Washington. There have already been some efforts in this direction around the country. In this respect, it’s worth noting that Katie Wilson, Seattle’s new progressive mayor, is a big proponent. If Seattle or some other progressive city or state led the way, it could set an example for others to follow.
To many, this sort of media tax credit will be a new idea. We all know the old line about intellectuals having a hard time with new ideas. But it is really important that people overcome their difficulties. The media matter hugely for democracy, much more than campaign financing. (Sorry, but it’s a bit nuts to think that campaign ads affect voting, but not what people see between the ads.)
I’ve pushed this scheme for a long time, and maybe it’s not the best plan. But if people have better ideas, put them on the table. Whining over the right’s takeover of the media is not a political strategy.
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Lessons in Resistance From Scott Pelley
We can gain courage from our heroes of this moment: Scott Pelley is unintimidated, telling us bluntly that the new owner and management of CBS tried to force him to lie to us on the air and spin stories so they could please wannabe-Emperor Trump.
Jun 05, 2026
I started in radio news as a teenage reporter at WITL-AM/FM in Lansing, Michigan, then the number one station in the capitol city. I began reporting from the Capitol and City Hall, and was writing and reading the morning newscasts within a year.
The station owner was a hardcore Goldwater Republican, our news director was a liberal but Libertarian-curious Democrat, and I was a long-haired anti-war hippie member of Michigan State University Students for a Democratic Society.
I did the news there for years, and nobody ever told me how to spin it or what to insert or delete. I knew that I couldn’t bias it to reflect my own opinions: the news—accurate, factual, honest information—was sacred.
It was also the cost of our broadcast license, and we all knew it. The widely misunderstood Fairness Doctrine’s main demand was that radio and TV stations “program in the public interest” and that was widely understood to mean straightforward, reliable, faithful-to-reality news at the top and bottom of every hour on radio and an hour-long news block in prime time on TV.
As anti-democracy billionaires continue their march across the American media landscape and pour billions into elections, it falls to us to resist.
We did this—and embraced the Fairness Doctrine—because we knew it was part of the price of freedom, of democracy in our republic. When Thomas Jefferson said he’d rather live in a country with newspapers and no government than in one with a government but no newspapers, he wasn’t knocking government; he’d help create ours and was its president for eight years. He was talking about the vital importance of an honest and free press.
Part of that honesty came from the competition; there were multiple stations in Lansing and most had an in-house news operation like ours, and the ones that didn’t ran the CBS or AP radio newscast twice an hour. Honesty and clarity were essential to get and maintain an audience, as well as hanging onto our license.
Then-President Ronald Reagan ended the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, and now President Donald Trump and his oligarch enablers are trying to bury the entire concept of honest, straightforward news.
Over the past year and a half we’ve watched Brendan Carr, Trump’s hitman at the Federal Communications Commission, go to Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) conferences and brag about how he’s going to assault stations that say things he and Trump dislike. He’s trying to intimidate ABC affiliates into muzzling Jimmy Kimmel—again. And he succeeded in taking down Stephen Colbert.
And a Trump-adjacent billionaire nepo baby has acquired CBS and is systematically stripping it of its journalistic integrity, starting with the evening news and now gutting the nation’s No. 1 news magazine show, "60 Minutes."
Storied journalist and "60 Minutes" reporter Scott Pelley isn’t taking it lying down, even though it’s a virtual certainty that he has the standard non-disparagement clause that most media operations now require for talent, which forbid them to ever speak ill of their former employer should they leave for any reason. He’ll probably get sued for it, but he’s a man committed to the truth.
Trump, David Ellison, Bari Weiss, the billionaire owners of Sinclair, the billionaire Murdoch family’s Fox “News,” the 1,000+ billionaire-owned radio stations across the country, the billionaire-subsidized podcasters, and billionaire-owned social media sites like Facebook and X that have apparently been algorithmically slanted toward Trump’s neofascist movement are all following an ancient script.
Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Hideki Tojo, and Francisco Franco all seized control of the news in their countries in their first year in power. It took both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán two or so years, because they wrote a new script for the takeover: Sue the news outlets and reporters into bankruptcy for “defamation” or “slander,” then have friendly oligarchs take over the outlets.
Orbán even came to CPAC in Dallas to tell Republicans that they should do the same thing as he had done by turning America’s media over to right-wing billionaires. He also told the American CPAC conference in Budapest four years ago, during the Biden administration, that they should do the same in America when Republicans next seized control of the US government.
“Have your own media,” he said. “It’s the only way to point out the insanity of the progressive left. The problem is that the Western media is adjusted to the leftist viewpoint. Those who taught reporters in universities already had progressive leftist principles.”
He added:
Of course, the GOP has its media allies but they can’t compete with the mainstream liberal media. My friend Tucker Carlson is the only one who puts himself out there. His show is the most popular. What does it mean? It means programs like his should be broadcasted day and night. Or, as you say, 24/7.
Thus, this is now the Putin-Orbán-Trump formula:
- Manufacture a crisis.
- Declare an “emergency.”
- Seize powers the Constitution doesn’t grant.
- Bypass Congress.
- Bully or ignore the courts.
- Use masked, secret police and the military against your own residents.
- Send people to foreign concentration camps.
- Build concentration camps within the United States.
- Prosecute lawyers and judges.
- Assert control over universities.
- Merge corporate and state interests.
- Cow the media into silence about your corruption and crimes.
- Then call it all “law and order.”
Trump is 18 months into his project, and he’s already taken down the Voice of America, defunded PBS and NPR, seen the Washington Post and LA Times acquired by sycophantic billionaires, and turned CBS over to a nepo-baby billionaire who’s going after CNN next. As Jefferson pointed out, this is how democracies are fatally corrupted, which is apparently Trump and his billionaire enablers’ goal.
Combine that with a capture of the police and prosecutorial agencies of the government so, like in Putin’s Russia, they can harass and prosecute anybody who dares speak up against their destruction of our way of life and you have the classic formula for turning a democratic republic into an oligarchic dictatorship.
The classic symbol of authoritarian governance dating back to ancient Rome and Caligula—violence as entertainment—will come to the White House as musclebound men will beat each other bloody and senseless for spectacle and the amusement of our 80-year-old “president” on our nation’s birthday.
Masked thugs snatching people off the street without warrants and putting them into concentration camps in violation of the Fouth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Amendments also plays well for the fascist Klan-remnant Republican base, so long as the people they beat, pepper spray, or murder are either dark-skinned or “liberal agitators.”
We’re now way down the road to the complete destruction of America, all in less than two years, as I wrote and warned of in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy in 2020.
The courts are packed with Trump toadies; thousands of lawyers have been purged from government; the FBI is now weaponized against Americans; Blacks and women are being pushed out of senior military commands by an openly white supremacist defense secretary; our history is being whitewashed in national parks, museums, and every federal property; and Trump’s face hangs, 60 feet tall, on multiple federal buildings.
And now they’re coming for the news. If it falls, recovering our republic will be possible—the examples are Hungary with Peter Magyar and Volodymyr Zelenskyy being elected in Ukraine—but very, very difficult. It will take years and cost a fortune both in work, cash, and probably blood, as it did in those two countries.
But we can gain courage from our heroes of this moment. Scott Pelley is unintimidated, telling us bluntly that the new owner and management of CBS tried to force him to lie to us on the air and spin stories so they could please wannabe-Emperor Trump. When they tried to lie their way out of the PR mess Pelley created for them, he immediately called out their falsehoods.
This crisis isn’t limited to CBS: the same nepo-baby billionaire who’s taken over that network also, according to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), now owns, controls, or soon will control:
TikTok, Warner Bros., Paramount, DC Studios, The Discovery Channel, CNN, CBS, HBO, BET, Fandango, Rotten Tomatoes, Nickelodeon, MTV, Cartoon Network, Food Network, Travel Channel, Investigation Discovery, Animal Planet, Comedy Central, Showtime, TBS, TLC, HGTV, and more.
Oligarchy and monopoly are two sides of the same anti-democratic fascist coin. They’re always tied together.
As anti-democracy billionaires continue their march across the American media landscape and pour billions into elections, it falls to us to resist.
To register our discontent with those outlets. To boycott them. To demand that our politicians start breaking up the monopolies that Reagan legalized when in 1983 he ordered the Securities and Exchange Commission, FCC, and Federal Trade Commission to stop enforcing the antitrust laws that went all the way back to the 1890s (leading to three decades of “merger mania”).
Monopolies are destructive, but media monopolies are pure Putin-style poison.
We all must become truth tellers, regardless of whether our platforms are, like mine, on radio, TV, and Substack, or if the place we can make our mark and speak our voice is on social media, the local newspaper’s letters to the editor, financial or volunteer support for a fighting progressive politician, or the town square with a protest sign.
We are all Scott Pelley.
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Fired Scott Pelley Says '60 Minutes' Under Bari Weiss Wanted 'Falsehoods and Bias' Injected
"Incompetence and unprofessionalism in the new management have wreaked havoc," said the veteran journalist as his 37-career with CBS News came to an end.
Jun 03, 2026
Fired by the network where he had worked for nearly four decades on Tuesday night, veteran "60 Minutes" correspondent Scott Pelley said in a statement that he had been directed by the new management team at CBS News, led by editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, "to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story" and also "told to include assertions that are unverified" in his reporting.
What looks like the collapse of "60 Minutes" has played out both behind closed doors at the network in recent months and publicly, with a series of high-profile firings of other longtime journalists and producers at the show. Details of internal meetings have been leaked, revealing serious tension between veteran members of the nation's most-watched television news magazine and Weiss' new management team.
“The leadership of 60 Minutes is no longer recognizable,” Pelley said in his statement, released just hours after Nick Bilton, the show's new executive producer appointed by Weiss last month, announced the firing. “The principles I hold dear are gone, and so I must leave as well."
Bilton said in his statement that Pelley had been “terminated for cause effective immediately," following a contentious staff meeting on Monday in which Pelley accused Weiss, who was not at the meeting, of being "brought in to kill" the program, not save it.
Despite "repeated attempts to have direct conversations with him over the weekend" and earlier on Tuesday, Bilton said, his efforts "to find common ground" with Pelley were not successful. "That was not the path Scott chose," he said.
Pelley's narrative of events was starkly different.
"Last month, 60 Minutes lost its DNA when our entire senior leadership and two of our best on-air correspondents were cruelly fired without cause," Pelley said in a statement sent to several news outlets. "Good people were silenced because they stood up for our audience. They stood for fairness against the forces of political bias; they stood for professionalism against chaos."
“For my part," he continued, "new management has instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story. I’ve been told to include assertions that are unverified. To date, in every case, I have managed to ignore these instructions or refuse them. Recently, politicians have been invited to choose correspondents for interviews on the broadcast. Giving politicians control over 60 Minutes interviews is not how this is done. Finally, incompetence and unprofessionalism in the new management have wreaked havoc. In a case involving one of my stories, the entire program came within 19 minutes of not getting on the air at all.”
Pelley concluded: “I depart after 37 years at CBS with one emotion—a heart brimming with gratitude for the men and women of CBS News who encouraged and enriched my work, very often at the risk of their own lives. I pray for a day when those people and their ideals are honored again—a day when sanity, competence, and courage return.”
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CBS Firings Called 'Straight From an Authoritarian Handbook' and Preview of Paramount-Warner Bros. Merger
The pending Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger "represents an existential threat to the free press, independent media, and free speech in this country and beyond," warned several press freedom groups.
Jun 02, 2026
A coalition of nine press freedom groups on Tuesday warned that last week's firings of top journalists at CBS News' "60 Minutes" were a "grotesque effort taken straight from an authoritarian handbook"—but emphasized that the dismissal of reporters who had pushed back against the Trump administration signaled danger for journalists across the media, particularly as a pending merger would hand control of CNN to the same billionaire family that how runs CBS.
The Coalition for Women in Journalism, Common Cause, Freedom of the Press Foundation, and Reporters Without Borders were among the groups that released a statement saying the firing of "60 Minutes" correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega—as well as two top executives—were meant to "appease a sitting president and dismantle one of the loudest voices in investigative journalism."
But the groups emphasized that "this is only the beginning," considering the fact that Warner Bros. Discovery recently voted in support of a $110 billion proposed merger with Paramount Skydance, owned by David Ellison, the son of President Donald Trump megadonor Larry Ellison. The deal could be finalized as soon as July.
Warner Bros. Discovery owns CNN, and media critics have warned the network could be headed for the same loss of editorial independence that CBS has faced since right-wing former opinion columnist took the helm of the latter network last year following the Paramount Skydance merger.
Since then, newly appointed editor-in-chief Bari Weiss has pulled from the air a "60 Minutes" segment that questioned the Trump administration's explanation for the deportation of hundreds of immigrants to an El Salvador prison, personally booked guests for news programs, and called for programming that appeals to "centrist" viewers.
"Bari Weiss’ shameless actions fulfill the Ellisons’ commitment to President Trump to remake CBS to his liking," said the groups on Tuesday. "Larry Ellison has reportedly promised to do the same at CNN if allowed to take control through the pending Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger. Not because it makes any business sense, but because they seek to control the public discourse."
"We have to make the story heard. It’s what '60 Minutes' would have done; it’s what the Fourth Estate is tasked with doing; it’s what Trump and the Ellisons want to prevent. Don’t let them.”
The groups noted that the firings of Alfonsi, Vega, executive producer Tanya Simon, and executive editor Draggan Mihailovich came as more than 200 journalists and documentarians signed an open letter opposing the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger, citing concerns that the deal "would open the door to improper political meddling in journalists’ editorial decisions," and noting that according to The Wall Street Journal, David Ellison has "promised President Donald Trump 'sweeping changes' at Warner-owned CNN—a frequent target of Trump’s ire."
"Ellison will likely alter CNN’s editorial direction (not to mention meddle with HBO’s documentaries) to be more friendly to the administration, threatening press freedom," said the signatories, including Wajahat Ali, Mehdi Hasan, and Alfonsi.
A separate letter organized by Democracy Defenders Fund has garnered signatures from over 1,000 actors, producers, directors, screenwriters, and other entertainment professionals.
"This transaction would further consolidate an already concentrated media landscape, reducing competition at a moment when our industries—and the audiences we serve—can least afford it," reads the letter, which calls for state attorneys general to block the merger. "The result will be fewer opportunities for creators, fewer jobs across the production ecosystem, higher costs, and less choice for audiences in the United States and around the world. Alarmingly, this merger would reduce the number of major US film studios to just four."
On Tuesday, the press freedom groups warned that the merger "represents an existential threat to the free press, independent media, and free speech in this country and beyond, and should not be allowed to move forward."
"We cannot let this blow to the bedrock of our democracy be lost in the constant barrage of scandal, corruption, and abuse of power," said the organizations. "We have to make the story heard. It’s what '60 Minutes' would have done; it’s what the Fourth Estate is tasked with doing; it’s what Trump and the Ellisons want to prevent. Don’t let them.”
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'She Was Brought in to Kill' 60 Minutes: Scott Pelley Unleashes on Bari Weiss at CBS Meeting
The journalist confronted newly installed executive editor Nick Bilton over the recent firings of two reporters and two top executives.
Jun 01, 2026
Veteran "60 Minutes" correspondent Scott Pelley took aim at the qualifications and intentions of CBS News' right-wing editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, on Monday at an explosive staff meeting that was meant to introduce employees of the 57-year-old news show to its newly appointed executive producer days after several journalists were fired in what Pelley referred to as "Black Thursday."
Weiss, a former New York Times opinion columnist who first gained notoriety for campaigning against pro-Palestinian professors at Columbia University and went on to rail against "woke" progressives and "cancel culture," appointed tech journalist Nick Bilton to lead the program last week after firing two executives and two top correspondents.
Bilton opened the meeting by reading some prepared remarks, but Pelley quickly cut in to tell the new producer that he had "many questions" about the dismissals of reporters Cecilia Vega and Sharyn Alfonsi, executive producer Tanya Simon, and executive editor Draggan Mihailovich.
"I guess you wandered in expecting to read a statement off?" Pelley asked Bilton, his voice reportedly "shaking in anger" at times. "What was wrong with Sharyn Alfonsi?"
Alfonsi and Vega won a prestigious journalism award for a story on President Donald Trump's deal with El Salvador to send immigrants to the country's notorious Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), the abuse detainees have suffered there, and the fact that many of those deported to the prison have not been convicted of crimes and have been falsely accused of being members of violent gangs.
The story was pulled from the air last December after Weiss complained that it hadn't covered the Trump administration's perspective, garnering accusations of censorship, and eventually aired with some editing.
Pelley suggested on Monday that such decisions revealed Weiss' intentions for the broadcast as a whole.
“She’s murdering ’60 Minutes.’ She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it—and she’s doing exactly that,” Pelley told Bilton. “She has no qualifications for her job; you have slender qualifications for this job."
"The changes that she’s made at the ‘Evening News’ have been catastrophic," he added, "so why should we expect that any of this is going to be any better?”
'CBS Evening News' has had declining viewership, "often below 4 million viewers a night," according to NPR, with the broadcast "flagging" since Weiss installed Tony Dokoupil as anchor.
Media critics have warned that Weiss appears to be "running the Trump playbook" at CBS, as Sophia Tesfaye wrote at Salon last week: "Take an institution that still commands public trust, install loyalists with no relevant experience in positions of authority, fire the people who push back, dress the whole operation in the language of reform—fairness, innovation, a new direction—and you dare anyone to prove that what you’re really doing is building a protection racket."
Weiss took the helm of CBS after parent company Paramount's merger with Skydance, owned by the son of tech billionaire and Trump backer Larry Ellison.
Charles Forelle, the managing editor of CBS News and a close associate of Weiss, repeatedly attempted to steer Monday's meeting away from Pelley's criticism of Bilton and the new direction "60 Minutes" appears to be taking, saying at one point that Pelley's line of questioning was "not actually productive."
"It's working for me," replied Pelley.
After Pelley said the network's leadership had been "cruel" in firing veteran journalists from the show, Forelle accused him of being "rude."
"I'm not being rude," he shot back. "You know what was rude? Black Thursday. That was the absolute definition of rudeness. Telling Tanya Simon she had to be out of here at 5:00. Sending Draggon Mihailovich to HR to get fired, because no one could look him in the eye. Not talking about Sharyn Alfonsi's contract. Not talking about Cecilia Vega's contract. Just calling them up and telling them they were fired. That's rude."
"This is a conversation," Pelley added. "That is rude, and you were part of that."
Alfonsi's contract with "60 Minutes" was not renewed; Vega was dismissed despite her contract not being up until 2027. The two journalists spoke out about their firings, with Alfonsi saying, "Journalists willing to challenge authority are being pushed aside in favor of those who will not."
Vega said that "in recent months, my producing teams and I have experienced efforts to insert political bias into our stories."
"60 Minutes" employees applauded Pelley on Monday after Bilton left the meeting, and observers praised the veteran journalist for defending the show and the work of its staffers.
"Scott Pelley told the truth today," said Marc Elias, founder of Democracy Docket. "We need independent media the right wing can't buy."
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