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FCC Chair Ripped Over 'Unlawful' Plan to Hand 'Public Airwaves to Billionaire Buddies' of Trump
The lone Democrat on the FCC said Brendan Carr's plan would "destroy local newsrooms, silence community reporting, and drive-up costs for the American families."
Jul 15, 2026
Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr announced Wednesday that his agency will soon vote to repeal a decades-old rule aimed at limiting consolidation among television broadcasters, a move that press freedom organizations say would be disastrous for journalism and American democracy.
Carr, a loyalist of President Donald Trump, outlined his proposal in an op-ed for the far-right online publication Breitbart, claiming his plan would "restore balance to the broadcast airwaves." But Anna Gomez, the lone Democratic FCC commissioner, warned in a fiery statement that "this unlawful effort to hand control of the public airwaves to billionaire buddies of this administration will destroy local newsrooms, silence community reporting, and drive-up costs for the American families who depend on local stations for news and emergency alerts."
Carr said the FCC will vote on August 6 on his proposal to eliminate a rule barring any single TV broadcaster from reaching more than 39% of US households—a limit designed to constrain television conglomerates. The FCC, which has a two-to-one Republican majority, is likely to approve the plan.
But Gomez argued in her statement on Wednesday that Carr's proposal is illegal, noting that "Congress wrote that specific [39%] number into federal law in 2004, and it did so on purpose."
"This is not the first time the FCC has tried to move on this issue," said Gomez. "In 2003, the commission raised the cap to 45% under its own authority. Congress stepped in within months, rewrote the law to set the cap at 39%, and made clear the FCC did not have the authority to change it. An FCC vote to raise the cap now would be unlawful, as it would mean doing the exact thing Congress has already said the commission cannot do."
Politico noted that Carr's proposal "marks a likely victory for the National Association of Broadcasters and its members such as Nexstar and Sinclair, which would be freer to pursue mergers that would breach the cap."
Earlier this year, the FCC approved Nexstar's $6.2 billion acquisition of rival TV company Tegna. A federal judge blocked the merger deal in April pending resolution of a legal challenge. If the merger is finalized, the new media conglomerate would reach roughly 80% of US households, blowing past the statutory 39% limit that Carr is now working to remove.
"Just as the FCC had no power to waive a congressional statute to grease the skids for Nexstar’s merger with Tegna, it has no power now to completely obliterate the limit Congress set," Matt Wood, vice president of policy and general counsel at Free Press, said in a statement on Wednesday. "The national cap remains good policy. It promotes competition, localism, and diversity in broadcasting, incentivizing stations to preserve local newsrooms and local-journalism jobs instead of duplicating stories nationwide and passing that off as local news."
"But whatever the law’s merits may be," Wood added, "the key point is that Brendan Carr cannot undo the limit that Congress set just because he feels like it.”
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Defense of Nixon's Watergate Crimes Is JD Vance 'Telling on Himself,' Say Critics
"He’s insinuating that his own regime has so normalized corruption and lawlessness that past corruption and lawbreaking schemes now seem minor."
Jun 26, 2026
At an event for the Richard Nixon Foundation on Thursday, Vice President JD Vance suggested that if the 37th president's Watergate scandal had happened today, it would barely make the news, let alone destroy a presidency.
But his critics say that's only because President Donald Trump has totally "normalized" corruption.
During a speech at the Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, California, Vance celebrated that the "historical legacy" of Tricky Dick, whose name has functioned as a shorthand for presidential lawlessness since his resignation in 1974, "is enjoying a bit of a renaissance, and, I think, deservedly so."
"If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story," Vance said. "The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy."
He said the way the "deep state took down Richard Nixon" was "not all that different from what the same groups of people, the same institutions tried to do to Donald Trump in the first Trump administration."
Vance also said he personally identified with Nixon: "Young senator, vice president, writes a bestselling book, is hated by the media. It kinda sounds like JD Vance," he said. "I've always liked Richard Nixon."
The vice president was correct that, as Trump adopts a similar philosophy of boundless executive authority, there is a concerted effort among Republicans to rehabilitate the image of Nixon—who infamously declared in a 1977 interview with David Frost that "if the president does it, that means it's not illegal."
Christopher Rufo, an intellectual architect of crusades by the so-called "New Right" against liberal cultural institutions, in 2023 cast Nixon's presidency as "a blueprint for counterrevolution—the last hope for restoring the American republic,” praising his efforts to use lawfare to destroy left-wing groups.
Vivek Ramaswamy, a 2024 Republican presidential candidate who is now running for governor of Ohio, has called for a "revival of Nixonian realism" in foreign policy, citing his "unapologetic American nationalism" and hyperfocus on US interests at the expense of moral concerns.
During a speech at the National Conservatism Conference in 2021, Vance himself cited Nixon's declaration that "the professors are the enemy" to say that the next Republican president would need to “honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country."
Some critics described Vance's downplaying of Watergate's severity on Thursday as a sign of historical ignorance or willful deception.
"Let’s remember what Nixon actually did," said Rep. Mike Levin (D-Calif.). "Operatives tied to his reelection campaign broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters to plant listening devices. Then Nixon personally orchestrated the cover-up. The 'smoking gun' tape caught him ordering the CIA to shut down the FBI’s investigation."
"Nixon weaponized the IRS and FBI against his political enemies, authorized burglaries of private citizens, and fired the special prosecutor investigating him in what is called the Saturday Night Massacre," continued Levin. "When the Supreme Court ordered him to release the tapes, the vote was unanimous. Even his most loyal defenders walked away once they heard his own words."
"JD Vance works for the most corrupt president in American history," Levin said. "So of course he wants you to believe Watergate was nothing."
Political scientist and author Michael McFaul suggested that Vance was not aware of how bad he sounded.
The fact that Watergate would probably be a mere blip, McFaul said, "is a tragic indictment of [Vance's] administration," and it's "amazing to me that’s not obvious to him."
Others saw it not as a feint from Vance, but as a boast about everything the Trump administration has gotten away with.
"'We do a Watergate twice a day' is a crazy way to confess your own corruption," said Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) in response to Vance's comments.
Amid a litany of other scandals during his second term, Trump has openly used the presidency to make nearly $4 billion since returning to office, accepted lavish gifts from foreign countries while rewarding them politically, and attempted to appropriate taxpayer money to reward his allies. He's pardoned donors and supporters who committed crimes while pushing the Justice Department to target enemies. His administration has brazenly defied the law and the courts to carry out mass deportations of immigrants without due process. And he has carried out hundreds of extrajudicial assassinations and launched multiple illegal wars of aggression without congressional approval.
"Vance is telling on himself," said The Lever editor-in-chief, David Sirota. "He’s insinuating that his own regime has so normalized corruption and lawlessness that past corruption and lawbreaking schemes now seem minor."
John Culver, a retired CIA analyst, said that Vance is "right" that Watergate would no longer register with the public today, "but not for the reasons he thinks."
He blamed modern corporate-controlled media for numbing the public to outrageous political scandals that would have once enveloped a presidency.
Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos "would have fired" Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the journalists who broke the Watergate scandal, "a year earlier," Culver said. "The [New York Times] journos would save it for their book."
He said, "Trump has a Watergate-scale scandal every month, and media billionaires distract, distract, distract.”
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Why the Mainstream Media Should Stop Using the ADL as Their Go-To Antisemitism Source
The group uses dubious reporting methods and tends to conflate right-wing racial extremism with pro-Palestine speech and activity.
Jun 14, 2026
More than a decade ago, a video (Mondoweiss, 8/7/14) showed Jodi Rudoren, then The New York Times‘ Jerusalem bureau chief, having a casual and friendly meeting with Abe Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League. The cozy relationship in the video was telling enough, but when the video captured Foxman complaining that the “Arabs” had taken over a famous New York City hotel, and Rudoren shrugging it off, many skeptics viewed this as a window into the Times’ pro-Israel bias.
The recently deceased Foxman (Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 5/12/26), famous for promoting the pro-Israel viewpoint and insinuating that critics of Israel were antisemitic, wasn’t Rudoren’s source in this video; they were pals.
Emmaia Gelman’s new book, The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State, is a history of the group, framing it not as a racial justice organization but as a deputy sheriff for the US empire. Gelman shows how the ADL crafts a narrative for the public that pushes Western imperialism rather than equality. In recent years, the ADL’s main focus has been smearing criticism of Israel or support for Palestinian human rights as Jew hatred. As the group (4/4/23) says, “anti-Zionism is indeed antisemitism.”
The book is loosely part of the #DropTheADL campaign, which encourages both progressives and schools to stop citing the group as a source on political extremism, because of its “racist and right-wing” track record. The movement has had limited success: The delegates of the nation’s largest teachers union, the National Education Association, voted to sever ties with the ADL, a move that was overruled by the union’s governing board (Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 7/21/25).
Over the decades the ADL has established itself as a one-stop research depot for media when it comes to antisemitism.
When major newspapers write about the definition or prevalence of antisemitism, they frequently look to the ADL (New York Times, 2/27/28, 12/10/23, 10/6/24; Washington Post, 10/27/21; Wall Street Journal, 5/6/26; USA Today, 4/22/25, 5/6/26). In the Times obituary for Foxman (5/10/26), the paper wrote:
One reason Mr. Foxman was consulted by journalists and academics was that he made sure his organization could back up its claims with facts and statistics.
Gelman’s research challenges that record, arguing that ADL documentation of antisemitic incidents lacks context, allowing the group to “conflate small ambiguous acts like some kid writing a swastika on their desk with burning a synagogue,” Gelman told FAIR. That’s where their research “got fudgy” and “showed spikes” in antisemitism, leading to reporting filled with “stark terms without context.”
Bulwark of the West
Why is the ADL so influential? In Gelman’s telling, the ADL worked hard in the early days of the Cold War as a news source for Washington, DC officials. It blanketed congressional offices and newsrooms with briefings, newsletters, and press releases, making it a go-to source for civil rights information. Its stances neatly aligned with pro-US Cold War policy, unlike other other civil rights organizations, which anti-communists tended to view with political suspicion.
The book documents much of this history, including how the ADL produced influential media of its own:
One measure of the ADL’s reach into political culture was the ADL Bulletin, a glossy, often chatty magazine of news features and insider tidbits on domestic and international civil rights issues. The Bulletin started the decade with a paid circulation of 150,000—already a major publication, matching about 11% of the concurrent circulation of the New York Times. By 1967 it had grown to nearly 169,000 subscribers.
In particular, she cites the organization’s role in changing US perception of Israel after the 1967 war, establishing the Israeli side as the West’s bulwark against a Soviet-aligned Arab alliance. The group’s
reporting heralded a new project of blanketing US media with articles about Israelis as salt-of-the-earth Westerners, mixing human interest with political argument, and flatly denying Palestinian dispossession.
In the 1970s, the ADL created the radio series Dateline Israel, which “was distributed at no cost to thousands of radio stations and reportedly aired on 500 stations,” where “episodes presented Israel as bustling, hopeful, modern.” Gelman adds:
Dozens of 15-minute radio segments highlighted Jewish ingenuity, character, and desire for peace. They highlighted an ostensible pluralism alongside grateful and supportive Arabs who welcomed colonization.
‘A Bit of Selection Bias’
Gelman wants to see news organizations stop using the ADL as a go-to source, not just because of what she sees as dubious reporting methods, but because the group tends to conflate right-wing racial extremism with pro-Palestine speech and activity.
It’s a long road ahead, she said. “We have progressive media moving away from the ADL,” she said. “What’s left is the legacy media and the big-reach media. The only way I can see that shifting is if journalists themselves begin to revolt.”
Part of the problem is that over the decades the ADL has established itself as a one-stop research depot for media when it comes to antisemitism. Last year, for example, when FAIR asked the Southern Poverty Law Center about a rise in antisemitic and white supremacist content on social media networks like Facebook, a media handler suggested FAIR send its request to the ADL.
There are small signs of change. In a long interview with ADL head Jonathan Greenblatt, New York Times writer Lulu Garcia-Navarro (8/9/25) asked the leader about “young Jews who might self-describe as anti-Zionist or have problems with the state of Israel at the moment.” Greenblatt dismissed them, comparing them to “Hispanic people who support President Trump’s policies at the border.” “There are Blacks for Trump,” he added.
When the writer continued to press this issue, he bit back:
What polls are you seeing? I understand anecdotally you may have heard it from some people. I believe there may be a bit of a selection bias there. Have you gone to any of the mainstream synagogues in New York City, the ones with the largest membership, and asked them? I would encourage you to go to 92nd Street Y. Go to the West Side JCC. Go to Central, Park Avenue, Rodeph Sholom, go to KJ. Go to all these large Jewish synagogues and ask where their young people are.
Later that year, the Forward (11/21/25) reported that “younger Jews are more than twice as likely to identify as anti-Zionist than the overall population.” A Washington Post poll (10/6/25) taken in September 2025 found only 36% of Jewish Americans aged 18 to 34 saying they were emotionally attached to Israel, while 50% of Jews in that age group said that Israel has committed genocide.
A 2026 poll by the Jewish Voter Resource Center found 44% of Jewish Americans under 35 supported a democratic, binational government in Israel-Palestine elected by both Jews and Palestinians—”even as most major Jewish organizations classify calls for a single state as an expression of antisemitism,” the Forward (5/27/26) reported.
But in his interview with the Times, Greenblatt redefined which Jewish opinions mattered to him: not just pro-Israel opinions, but those of monied religious congregations in upper Manhattan, an elite that towers above Jewish communities elsewhere. The exchange makes the leader seem woefully out of touch.
He and his group still enjoy a kind of media access the rest of society can only dream about. But the pushback from the Times reporter is a small signal that some outlets are beginning to look at this group more critically.
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How Western Media Normalizes Israel's Ethnic Cleansing in Lebanon
Like in Gaza, where genocide proceeds apace in spite of a declared ceasefire, the media tend to report “ceasefires” in Lebanon without caring to highlight the fact that it’s not a ceasefire when Israel is still pummeling the country and massacring people.
Jun 12, 2026
In October 2024, one year into Israel’s genocidal war on the Gaza Strip and attendant assault on Lebanon, the Israeli army did a thing. It invited journalists from major Western corporate media outlets on an incursion into Lebanon’s ravaged south, accompanied by Israeli military personnel who would interpret the wreckage in Israel’s favor—not that the Western media have ever required much assistance in this regard.
Reporters from the New York Times, Washington Post, Associated Press, Reuters, BBC, Fox News and a handful of other special guests signed up for the cross-border sortie. It was, as Habib Battah and Christina Cavalcanti note in an investigation for the Public Source (8/27/25), an “awkward hybrid between a traditional embed and the kind of all-expense-paid publicity trip that journalists refer to as junkets, freebies and dog-and-pony shows.”
Never mind that it is entirely illegal for journalists or anyone else to enter Lebanon from Israel—what’s one more illegal invasion from a country that has been invading Lebanon pretty much since its founding? As Battah and Cavalcanti emphasize, these media professionals were also embedding themselves “within a national project of extraordinary transnational violence,” hosted by an “extrajudicial occupying military power—a critical point that all of them would fail to mention in their coverage.”
The Israelis certainly hit the jackpot with the coverage, as reporters excitedly discovered boots and helmets allegedly belonging to Hezbollah—clear proof that the group had been plotting a nefarious attack on Israel. New York Times Jerusalem correspondent Isabel Kershner, an old pro at conducting preemptive journalistic strikes on Lebanon, did not disappoint with her dispatch (10/13/24), “Just Over the Border From Israel, a Hezbollah Cache of Explosives and Mines.”
And in report after embedded report, Israel’s chosen journalists faithfully transmitted the tiresome and counter-logical notion that Hezbollah was somehow the aggressor in the arrangement—as opposed to the army that was busily slaughtering thousands of people in Lebanon while implementing a scorched-earth strategy.
‘Urgent evacuation warnings’
While the October 2024 embed was one of the more preposterous embodiments of Western corporate media’s special relationship with Israel, outlets continue to do a fine job of sanitizing Israeli brutality even when their reporters are not physically viewing the region from inside an Israeli armored vehicle. Since March of this year, Israel has killed at least 3,613 people in Lebanon and displaced 1.2 million, obliterating entire villages and otherwise expanding the ecocidal policy honed in the Gaza Strip.There has been no remotely comparable destruction on the Israeli side, and a recent Reuters article (5/31/26) that had attempted to suggest some symmetry now comes with the preface: “This May 31 story has been corrected to remove a reference to tens of thousands of Israelis being displaced by Hezbollah fire, in paragraph 3.”
Like in Gaza, where genocide proceeds apace in spite of a declared ceasefire (FAIR.org, 10/21/25), the media tend to report “ceasefires” in Lebanon without caring to highlight the fact that it’s not a ceasefire when Israel is still pummeling the country and massacring people, all the while setting the stage for a massive land grab with its creeping so-called “evacuation orders.” These “evacuations” have been focused on the Shiite demographic, with Israel warning Christian and Druze communities not to allow Shiite neighbors to take refuge in their towns (New York Times, 4/1/26).
Lebanese journalist Habib Battah, co-author of the aforementioned Public Source investigation, suggested to me that such orders might be more accurately termed “ethnic cleansing directives.” But that, of course, would be way too much for corporate media outlets to handle—and so it is that we learn about Israel’s “urgent evacuation warnings” and “large-scale evacuation orders,” as though it’s some sort of public service announcement, fire drill or other fundamentally legitimate Israeli undertaking, rather than entirely illegal in addition to downright psychopathic. From a legal and moral perspective, after all, you can’t just go around ordering people in other countries out of their homes, oftentimes only to bomb them when they comply.
Then there’s the matter of the “Yellow Line” or “security zone”—more terminology borrowed from Gaza (FAIR.org, 5/19/26)—which denotes the portion of south Lebanon that Israel is currently illegally occupying. But Israel has never been very good at staying within the lines, and its latest “evacuation orders” spanned no less than one-fifth of the entire country, far beyond its own unilaterally appointed Yellow Line.
As Battah remarked to me, the media’s acceptance and deployment of such arbitrary vocabulary creates “artificial structures” and a sense of orderliness, when in reality “there’s no yellow lines, there’s no yellow, there’s no colors—these are just illegal invasions.” And because media are committed to sanitizing Israel’s behavior rather than questioning it, “colonization becomes normalized.”
‘A warning to residents’
The eagerness of journalists to do Israel’s bidding is all the more confounding given that Israel is currently the No. 1 killer of journalists in the world. A recent Associated Press article (5/29/26), for example, reduced the pulverization of Lebanon to simply “ongoing fighting in southern Lebanon between Israeli troops and Hezbollah fighters.”
A June 4 Reuters writeup blamed Hezbollah for having “rejected” the latest US-mediated “ceasefire” plan—which, mind you, would basically have given Israel the green light to seize south Lebanon outright. Reuters refrained from referencing the thousands of Lebanese casualties since March, but did allow Israel the usual space to defend its depredations: “The Israeli military, in a warning to residents of the south, said it was continuing to target Hezbollah facilities.”
This is not to say that corporate media do not report on the destruction, displacement and killing in Lebanon; they do—and sometimes even sympathetically. But the refusal to paint a consistent and properly contextualized picture of what is actually going on in the country means that they mostly just end up legitimizing Israel’s war crimes.
Imagine for a moment that Hezbollah had just killed thousands of Israelis in three months and occupied northern Israel. In doing so, it laid waste to 5,000-year-old cities, and bombed the fuck out of everything from homes to ambulances to World Heritage sites to university students to environmental activists who protect sea turtles. Suffice it to say we’d be hearing a lot more about the utter barbarity of it all—and that Hezbollah wouldn’t be allowed to claim ad nauseam that it was targeting “military facilities.”
Almost three years into a genocide that has officially killed nearly 73,000 Palestinians and given Israel every opportunity to blind the world with its true colors, it is no short of an abomination that Israeli officials are still permitted to insist—with little to no media pushback—that they only target “terrorists” and “terrorist infrastructure.” If Israeli officials were to claim that two plus two equals eight, or that Elvis Presley was living in a cave in Madagascar, would the corporate media also report such information with a straight face?
By taking Israel’s word for it, journalists wind up essentially validating mass killing and occupation—as in the corrected May 31 Reuters piece that straight up makes the case for Israel’s seizure of a 900-year-old castle that lies nowhere near the imaginary colored line:
The advance into Beaufort Castle has granted Israeli troops a vantage point over much of southern Lebanon and northern Israel, from which attacks have been launched towards Israeli residential areas.
‘Iranian proxy on its borders’
Of course, willful media decontextualization and omission of relevant history facilitates the conversion of Israeli propaganda into “news.” One handy trick is to always, always, always remind audiences that Hezbollah is a “powerful Shia group supported by Iran,” as the BBC (5/28/26) puts it.
On March 13, CNN ran an analysis datelined Tel Aviv that bore the headline: “The War That Never Ended: Israel Seizes Moment to Finish Fight Against Hezbollah, Iran’s Proxy in Lebanon.” The analyst proceeded to justify Israel’s belief that “it needs to establish a strong military defense to protect civilians from the Iranian proxy on its borders.”
But while invoking Hezbollah’s support by Iran is practically a requirement for Western media reports, it is never deemed necessary to qualify Israel’s own orientation in any way—like, I dunno, “The war that never ended: Genocidal psychostate backed to the hilt by global superpower seizes moment to finish fight against Hezbollah.”
As for why this fight started in the first place, the media can somehow never summon the energy to explain that Hezbollah owes its very existence to Israel’s apocalyptic 1982 invasion of Lebanon that killed tens of thousands of Lebanese and Palestinians, prompting the group’s formation. Indeed, Israel’s lengthy history of invading Lebanon—not to mention its 22-year occupation of the south of the country, which ended in its ignominious eviction by the Hezbollah-led Lebanese resistance—would seem to be pretty crucial context in terms of understanding the current war. But those journalists who do bother to provide a bit of background do so in as ambiguous and cursory a fashion as possible, as in the New York Times’ explanation (6/3/26) that “Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Shiite militia group, has been in conflict with Israel, on and off, for decades.”
A May 13 NBC News intervention headlined “Amid Ceasefire, Israeli Forces Ramp Up Destruction of Homes in Southern Lebanon” offers a roundabout summary of Hezbollah’s origins: “The group, formed in the early 1980s as a civil war consumed Lebanon, was created with support from Iran and sought to expel Israeli forces from Lebanese territory.” The piece went on to discuss some details of the present destruction in south Lebanon, including footage from a video posted to X on April 24 in which
two excavators can be seen destroying solar panels in the Christian border town of Debel, where a photo last month showed a soldier taking what appeared to be an axe to a statue of Jesus.
In a statement to NBC News that can be safely filed under the can’t-make-this-shit-up category, the Israeli army “said…that the damage to the solar panels was not in line with its values, and that disciplinary measures had been taken.” Here’s praying that corporate journalists might someday have the balls to take Israel to task on more existential matters.
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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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We Must Demand Coverage That Doesn't Fan the Flames of War With China
Western media is trying to make it sound like war was China’s idea, when it’s the US that has been actively preparing for it for the last decade.
May 31, 2026
This month, the world watched as US President Donald Trump wrangled up his bro-squad of capitalist billionaires and chartered them across the world to China. We watched in disbelief as the China-hating Trump administration paraded around Beijing gawking at beautiful ceilings and giant rose bushes. “China is beautiful,” Trump said.
All the while, the top US oligarchs met with Chinese officials, hoping to find openings they could us to slither into China’s large, booming markets and siphon off even more wealth that they most definitely don’t need. Fortunately, China just wasn’t that interested.
Even though nothing much came of the meetings, all the China hawks in Washington were on the edge of their seats, anxious that better relations with China would risk their favorite justification for raising the military budget to an unprecedented $1.5 trillion. But we need to prepare for war with China by 2025… no, 2027… wait, maybe 2030? Forever?
Mainstream media had a lot to say about the meeting. The Guardian was especially deceptive, with one article titled:
This is the kind of headline we’ve come to expect from outlets like the New York Post, whose credibility is on par with a spam email. In fact, they did have a similar article:
It’s not a huge surprise that Western media is trying to make it sound like war was China’s idea, when it’s the US that has been actively preparing for it for the last decade. It’s part of their strategy to use misleading headlines to stoke fear about China, so nobody pays attention to the war-antagonizing behavior of the United States.
When President Xi Jinping speaks about the “Thucydides Trap,” he is warning the US against treating war with China as inevitable and instead urging it to pursue diplomacy and cooperation. Many US policymakers, however, continue to frame China’s rise primarily as a military threat, expanding military posturing across the Asia-Pacific in an effort to preserve US dominance even at the risk of escalation.
It’s reported that Trump and Xi also talked at length about the US war on Iran. This conflict—as well as US military actions in Venezuela—is also tied to the broader US confrontation with China. Both countries possess major oil, gas, and critical mineral reserves and have become important economic partners to China. By targeting two of China’s key energy suppliers, the US is attempting to limit China’s access to the resources, while hoarding them for itself (and Israel).
The US war on Iran has been a disaster, which is one of the reasons Trump is in China, hoping for concessions. It’s not just energy dominance the US is worried about. While oil and gas prices are skyrocketing around the world, Iran has made an exception for Chinese oil tankers, which trade with Iran using the Chinese yuan. For decades, US global power has depended on the petrodollar system, which keeps global energy trade tied to the US dollar and gives the US enormous economic warfare abilities. But China’s continued purchase of Iranian oil using the yuan, along with growing efforts by countries across the Global South to trade outside the dollar system, threatens to weaken that dominance.
The global order is clearly shifting toward a more multipolar world. The question is whether the US will respond with diplomacy or attempt to preserve unipolar dominance through military confrontation with China. To prevent escalation, we must reject the idea that war between great powers is inevitable. And we must also demand media coverage that accurately and credibly covers the role the United States is playing in escalating tensions. That includes news outlets like The Guardian, which clearly prioritize painting China as the villain over credible and in-depth reporting.
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'Let's Call This What It Is: Censorship': Fired '60 Minutes' Journalists Speak Out
Cecilia Vega, one of several journalists ousted from the show, said many of her colleagues "have had to fight to maintain editorial independence" under CBS News' new Trump-aligned corporate owners.
May 29, 2026
A group of veteran “60 Minutes” journalists was fired on Thursday as CBS News’ recently installed right-wing editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, moves to reshape the network in her image. Some of the ousted employees are describing their mass firing as a clear act of political “censorship.”
News had already broken earlier this week that correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi was on the way out after more than ten years on the flagship news program, after she'd publicly criticized Weiss' decision to delay her story on the Trump administration's deportation of immigrants to a notorious Salvadoran torture prison, the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), late last year.
But Alfonsi's departure was rumored to be part of a larger shakeup by Weiss, who has been accused of molding the network into a mouthpiece for the Trump administration following the government-approved acquisition of CBS's parent company, Paramount, by billionaire David Ellison, owner of Skydance.
On Thursday, the hammer finally fell. In addition to the formal firing of Alfonsi, The Washington Post reported that Weiss had also fired Tanya Simon, who’d worked on the show for a quarter-century and had recently taken on the role of executive producer. Correspondent Cecilia Vega—who had also covered CECOT for the network before Weiss' arrival—was canned as well, even though her contract was not set to expire until March 2027. So was executive editor Draggan Mihailovich.
In a memo to staff on Thursday, Weiss and CBS News President Tom Cibrowski said the firings were the result of them “building a show that thrives in the 21st century.”
“That requires a new approach,” they said, outlining their goals of “expanding ‘60 Minutes’ beyond a one-hour television broadcast, deepening its role across CBS News, and holding everything we produce to the ambition, fairness, and fearlessness that have defined ‘60 Minutes’ at its best.”
To fill the role of executive producer, Weiss brought in a network outsider, Nick Bilton, a former technology columnist at The New York Times and producer of documentaries for HBO and Netflix. Weiss called him “one of the most entrepreneurial journalists of our time and the perfect leader for one of the most entrepreneurial news brands of all time.”
Though Weiss reportedly viewed Simon as a “bad leader” who “couldn’t control the staff,” according to one source who spoke anonymously with The New York Post, Simon announced her departure with warm words for those who’d continue working on “60 Minutes.”
“While leadership has decided it is time for a new chapter—I want to be unequivocally clear about one thing: It has been an immense privilege to lead this broadcast, and I could not be prouder of what we have built, fought for, and delivered together over the last year," Simon said in a statement published Thursday. "'60 Minutes' has always been more than just a broadcast: It is an institution built on independence, grit, and rigorous search for the truth.“
But Vega gave a more candid explanation for her and her colleagues' firings.
"In recent months, my producing teams and I have experienced efforts to insert political bias into our stories," she said in a statement Thursday. "Reporting teams have held back on submitting story pitches about important news topics out of fear of the internal repercussions."
"Let's call this what it is: censorship, both imposed and self-driven," she continued. "It is dangerous for the show and dangerous for democracy."
Vega's criticisms mirror those made earlier this week by Alfonsi, who said her firing was "a deliberate choice to penalize a journalist for refusing to sanitize factually accurate reporting."
In December, Weiss abruptly pulled Alfonsi's story featuring the testimony of some of the men who were tortured in the CECOT prison shortly before it was set to air, citing a lack of commentary in the segment from Trump administration officials, who had repeatedly ignored the journalists’ requests for an interview. At the time, Alfonsi said Weiss had effectively given the government a “kill switch” on critical reporting. The segment eventually went to air the next month with some editing.
Following her ouster on Thursday, Vega described her own efforts to oppose what she viewed as politically-motivated meddling by network higher-ups.
"I held the line and refused to incorporate suggestions that offend the conscience," she said. "I know from many conversations with colleagues that many producing teams and correspondents working on the show today have had to fight to maintain editorial independence with regularity."
“I am far from the only ‘60 Minutes’ correspondent who has asked herself, ‘What is my personal red line? How much can I push back before I pay the price?'" Vega added.
She said she was proud of her work at '60 Minutes' and cited her reporting on CECOT for the program, which won a DuPont Columbia journalism award, as one of her finest achievements.
Weiss' overhaul of '60 Minutes' comes as Ellison eyes the merger of Paramount with another major media conglomerate, Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns CNN.
President Donald Trump has said it's “imperative” that any acquisition of Warner Bros. includes CNN and has publicly denounced a rival bid for the company by Netflix.
Earlier this week, Reuters reported that antitrust regulators at the Department of Justice appeared ready to approve a $110 billion takeover by Paramount following meetings with Ellison and other company executives.
A group of journalists—including tech reporter Kara Swisher, former CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta, and NBC News legal analyst Katie Phang—warned at an event hosted earlier this week by a coalition of press freedom groups that, especially in the wake of Alfonsi's firing, the government-approved consolidation of media posed a dangerous threat to the future of journalistic freedom.
“I think what’s happening right now is pretty dangerous,” Acosta said. “To essentially announce the departure of Sharyn Alfonsi from 60 Minutes is a very in-your-face move by some people who don’t care very much about the First Amendment.”
“Folks need to use a little bit of their imagination here to recognize what may be coming down the pike,” he said, warning that the Trump administration was building a “strange oligarchical empire… attempting to do state media.”
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Veteran 60 Minutes Journalist Says 'Wall Has Come Down Between Editorial Independence and Corporate Interests'
"Journalists willing to challenge authority are being pushed aside in favor of those who will not," said Sharyn Alfonsi, who spoke out last year against Bari Weiss’ censorship of a segment on the Trump administration’s use of a Salvadoran torture prison.
May 27, 2026
A veteran "60 Minutes" journalist says CBS News' new right-wing corporate ownership is pushing her out of the network for "refusing to sanitize accurate reporting" that offends the Trump administration.
The contract at the network for Sharyn Alfonsi—a correspondent who has contributed to CBS's flagship news show since 2015—expired on Saturday, according to the New York Times, six months after the network's editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, abruptly pulled a segment Alfonsi had reported about the Trump administration's use of the notorious Salvadoran torture prison CECOT to detain immigrants deported without due process.
At the time, Alfonsi said Weiss—the former head of the right-wing Free Press who'd been installed just months earlier by CBS's new owner, the Trump-aligned billionaire David Ellison—had spiked her segment for "political" reasons, identifying it as an act of "corporate censorship."
On Wednesday, she confirmed in a statement that her more than 20 years working on the show would be "drawing to a close." She said her efforts to communicate with the network about renewing her contract following the dispute "were met with absolute silence from network executives."
"The message could not be clearer," she said. "My time at '60 Minutes' is apparently over."
"In the coming days, network leadership may attempt to hide behind corporate euphemisms like 'modernization' and 'restructuring' to explain away my departure," she said. "Don't be misled. This was not a routine corporate transition; it was a deliberate choice to penalize a journalist for refusing to sanitize factually accurate reporting, and it sends a chilling message to the entire newsroom."
The "60 Minutes" piece included interviews with some of the more than 200 Venezuelan and Salvadoran men sent to the prison camp by the Trump administration last year, the vast majority of whom had no criminal records, according to CBS.
n those interviews, the men described being subjected to degrading torture on a daily basis, being deprived of basic food, water, and medical care, and being completely cut off from their families and legal representatives.
Weiss claimed she halted the story because it did not include interviews with White House, State Department, and Department of Homeland Security officials behind the policy, which the journalists had repeatedly requested without response. Alfonsi said that by letting their silence act as a veto, Weiss was effectively giving the government a "kill-switch" for inconvenient reporting.
Following widespread criticism both within the network and from the public, the CECOT segment aired in full a month later, though it included more caveats emphasizing the administration's allegations that the detainees had gang affiliations and downplayed the lack of violent convictions.
The apparent ouster of Alfonsi this week comes as Weiss is reportedly pushing for a “shakeup” of “60 Minutes” similar to those she’s made to “CBS Evening News” and other programming.
Critics have noted the markedly more hawkish tone the network has taken under Weiss in favor of President Donald Trump's regime change wars in Venezuela and Iran, while giving Israeli leaders like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ample uninterrupted airtime to justify the bombardments of Gaza and Lebanon with little note of the resulting humanitarian catastrophes.
According to reporting in Puck earlier this month, some sources at CBS believe that Alfonsi's departure could spawn a wave of resignations from the network.
"Fearless, independent reporting has always been the defining standard at 60 Minutes," Alfonsi said on Wednesday. "Today, CBS management is abandoning that mission, choosing access journalism over accountability and protecting power rather than scrutinizing it."
"The wall between editorial independence and corporate interest at CBS is being methodically torn down," she added. "Journalists willing to challenge authority are being pushed aside in favor of those who will not."
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Sportswriting and the Decline of the US Empire
Reading about sports is another way of understanding where our world is heading.
May 27, 2026
When Chinese leaders claim that the American empire is in decline, I immediately assume their analysts are decoding dispatches from ESPN, The Athletic, and columnist Shams Charania. After all, it’s in sportswriting, I’ve come to think, that the songs of the canary in the all-American coal mine couldn’t be clearer. If the games we play and watch reflect our past and present lives, then the coverage and commentary about them may help predict our future.
American sportswriters have been cheerleaders for empire since the early 20th century, when Bat Masterson decided that shooting people in Dodge City wasn’t fulfilling enough for a man of his talent and ambition. Yes, that Bat Masterson. He came East and, as a boxing columnist for the New York Morning Telegraph, became a new sheriff in the emerging industry I’ve come to call SportsWorld.
Opinionated and self-righteous, he was an early singer of those canary songs that, for the next hundred years, would both forecast and reflect Jock Culture’s impact on American life. The words might change, but the melody remained. The billionaires who now own and run sports were the robber barons of Bat’s time, and the gambling that helped fuel his Gilded Age is now institutionalized as the proud partner of all the major leagues (whatever the sport may be).
Writing this in the twilight of my own sportswriting career, I find it remarkably easy to trace a path from those early oligarchs to the robber barons who now run American sports, and from the early sports bettors who fixed the 1919 World Series to the FanDuel and DraftKings proposition bettors who are changing the climate of our games—and even perhaps to the Kalshi and Polymarket prediction market gamblers whose wagers on wars may someday (if they haven’t already) help start them.
If my Chinese spies are any good, they understand that more than 100 years after Bat Masterson died writing about boxing, the clues extracted from sportswriting also pertain to the games our government is playing.
The major sports of Bat’s era were fiercely segregated expressions of the Jim Crow backlash that continued to fight a version of the Civil War. Keep in mind, for instance, that baseball, the anointed national pastime, was Whites Only until Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. Most white sportswriters had then stayed silent on the issue and so supported the racism of the owners who ran their clubs like plantations and of the white players who didn’t want any job competition from Negro Leaguers.
Black newspaper sportswriters and Lester “Red” Rodney, who wrote for the Communist Daily Worker and died in 2009 at the age of 98, were then counterpoints to the mainstream. He was one of the most outspoken advocates of racial desegregation in major league baseball. Early in his life, the focus on sports integration had been boxing, a sport that had gone to great lengths to ensure that a Black boxer would never become the world heavyweight champion (then considered a symbol of all-American manhood). When Jack Johnson took that crown in 1908, sportswriters, including such luminaries as novelist Jack London, called for “white hopes” to reclaim it. If Chinese spies had been on the job then, they would have noted this country’s overwhelming racism.
White (and Black) Positions
The National Football League’s color barrier was breached in 1946, but it was replaced by pro football’s version of Jim Crow, or “positional segregation.” Again, sportswriters tended to go along with the establishment dictum that roles like quarterback and center were for leaders and thinking men, and so reserved for whites only. This delayed the appearance of the first starting Black quarterback until 1968. Meanwhile, Blacks were considered more fitted for the “natural” or “athletic” roles of defensive back and running back. Coaching, of course, is still a white man’s prerogative in a league whose rosters are now about 70% Black.
Sportswriters bring this up from time to time, but never in a sustained enough way to effect real change. And while sportswriters and players might seem like natural allies, they have generally been willing to go along to get along on their separate tracks, especially in shaky times. Sports journalists, of course, tend to work for the corporate media, often the broadcasters of sports events (if not for the media outlets of various sports leagues). Historically, pointing out discrimination is no road to success, since all the owners of sports teams belong to the same white billionaires’ club, ready to boycott activists. Athletes, with their typically short shelf lives, are wary of antagonizing the people who pay their salaries and might help employ them after their games are over.
All of that was pretty much set in the days of creation. Bat Masterson’s peers and spawn, the scriveners of the Roaring 20s, were rewarded for “godding up” athletes as commercial celebrities in the booming new sports markets, particularly college football and the Olympic Games. The most famous of the early mythmakers was sports columnist Grantland Rice. In print, on radio, and by newsreel, he gilded the likes of home-run king Babe Ruth, boxer Jack Dempsey (also known as “the Manassa Mauler“), golfer Bobby Jones, and Notre Dame coach Knute Rockne, who ironically died in a 1931 plane crash on his way to work on a Hollywood movie.
While they erected a predominantly white male pantheon, those sportswriters insisted on proclaiming the righteousness, meritocracy, and character-building nature of their subject. Even the skeptics who snidely mocked the demigods when they failed did so in a way that maintained their importance as signifiers of the best in the best of all worlds.
When it came to the post-World War II generation of sportswriters, two spirited tabloid journalists, Jimmy Cannon and Dick Young, dominated. Cannon dubbed the Black heavyweight champion Joe Louis “a credit to his race, the human race” when that seemingly quaint phrase actually meant something in a Jim Crow world. He also mocked his fellow sportswriters as “the vaudevillians of journalism.”
Dick Young led those vaudevillians from the Olympus of the press box, where he and his companions dispensed lofty punditry all the way down to the sweaty locker rooms where they began to buttonhole athletes and coaches for quotes. Young also ran blind items in his gossipy New York Daily News columns that alluded to jock shenanigans on and off the field.
His cracking of the sports curtain presaged a 1950s and 1960s sports reporting populism that proved to be a turning point in Jock Culture, inspiring the “Chipmunks” (so labelled by Cannon for their constant press box chatter), a new breed of smart, more progressive young men (and they were still mostly men) who saw themselves as real journalists capable of being fair-minded, clear-eyed, humorous, and honest. Chief among them were Leonard Shecter and Larry Merchant of the New York Post, and Stan Isaacs of Newsday.
Business Models
That was about when I arrived on the scene in New York in 1957, during what came to be known as the Great Betrayal. Two of the three New York baseball teams, the Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers, moved to California. That decision proved smart economically and it did finally make the national pastime truly national, but it also woke fans to the realization that, while sports might be sacred rites to them, they were businesses to their ever-wealthier owners.
At the time, sportswriters (except for those in New York who lost jobs because of the move) were not particularly emotionally disrupted by those moves because they knew that sports was, above all, a business, even if that was their own little secret—and a surprisingly corrupt business at that. After all, unmarked brown envelopes stuffed with cash were regularly handed out to sportswriters (along with free tickets to games and expensive Christmas presents).
I was lucky then to be working for The New York Times, which paid all my expenses. Most sportswriters, however, got their travel money and meal money from the teams or the promoters of the events they were covering—and an honest reportorial job could be considered an ungrateful act to be punished with loss of access (and cash).
If the reactions of most sportswriters to the activism of athletes were all too often unsupportive, their reaction to their more daring colleagues was disgracefully weak.
In those days, players and reporters usually stayed at the same hotels on the road while traveling together on trains (and later chartered planes). Sportswriters often drank and night-owled with the players and coaches, but that easy access came with a price. We were all supposed to be on the same team. “Sports of the Times” columnist Arthur Daley referred to his newspaper colleagues all too accurately as “lodge brothers.” They were all male, all white, and (with the exception of a few athletic and journalistic superstars) pretty much in the same financial class. There was a community of interest, and the fans were the rubes at the carnival.
When I first began covering the Yankees in the 1960s, Manager Ralph Houk took me aside to ask if I was going to be “a booster or a ripper.” He was not satisfied with my lame promise to be “fair-minded.” He coldly said, “We’re all in this together.”
But the expulsion of the scribes from that sweaty Eden had already begun. In 1958, it was reported that Houk, then a coach, had scuffled with pitcher Ryne Duren on the train coming back from winning the American League pennant. Such family squabbles, drunkenness, or screwing around had, in the past, rarely been reported. And even the New York Post‘s Leonard Shecter, like other reporters, initially turned a blind eye to what had happened. But a hint of the story by a cityside reporter on another paper made that position unsustainable. So, Shecter told his editors what he knew—that Duren, probably drunk, had gotten rowdy. Houk, while subduing him, had accidentally cut him over the eye with his World Series ring. The Post editors then blew the story into a wild melee with front-page and back-page headlines.
“With one dispatch,” wrote Alan Schwarz, 50 years later in The New York Times, “Shecter had violated a sacred code that had existed in the 100 years of newspaper coverage of baseball.”
A dozen years later, Shecter would do it again, although more mindfully. He had become a beacon of hard-nosed honesty, the curmudgeonly scourge of entitled jocks and sycophantic sportswriters. He persuaded a bright, politically progressive Yankee pitcher, Jim Bouton, to write an honest account of his life in the big leagues, which included a scene of Yankee star outfielder Mickey Mantle leading his teammates in “beaver-shooting” (hotel expeditions in search of naked female guests).
Bouton’s 1970 bestseller Ball Four would prove to be his valentine to baseball. It would enrage sportswriters because it exposed their Faustian bargain of silence for access as well as baseball officials because it broke open the world they thought they controlled. It fueled the coming decades of adversarial relations between sportswriters and their subjects and an internal rift between rippers and boosters.
Enter Ali
At the same time, television was, for the first time, giving athletes direct contact with their fans. They were no longer dependent on the pencil press as intermediaries. No athlete took greater advantage of that than boxing champion Muhammad Ali, perhaps the first athlete to take control of his own narrative.
Most of the senior scribes of the 1960s attacked Ali, first for his breezy lack of respect for their eminence, then for his pugilistic unorthodoxy (particularly the way he leaned back from punches rather than “slipped” them over his shoulders), and finally for his politics, especially for declaring himself a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War. While younger sportswriters (like me) were besotted by the early Ali, our elders like Cannon and “Red” Smith attacked him as unpatriotic and ungrateful for the opportunity to become rich and famous that America had offered a poor Black boy.
And that would prove to be a running theme (however subtly expressed) of the disapproval of all too many establishment sportswriters for those athletes labelled rebels—from Ali to Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who protested and demonstrated with Black power salutes at the 1968 Olympics, to Curt Flood’s failed attempt to unlock baseball’s reserve clause on player contracts, to San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick taking a knee against racism and police brutality during a game.
If the reactions of most sportswriters to the activism of athletes were all too often unsupportive, their reaction to their more daring colleagues was disgracefully weak, particularly when an emerging cohort of women sportswriters tried to gain equal access to locker rooms for post-game interviews. It took a 1978 lawsuit by Sports Illustrated‘s Melissa Ludtke to begin to truly open the doors that were already so open to their male equivalents.
It’s not even as if the boys had been too busy breaking two of the biggest stories of the late 20th century, sports or non-sports, the use of performance-enhancing drugs and the epidemic of brain damage among football players. Actually, the boys were too busy yet again reinventing their craft, this time by using the internet to imitate Bill Simmons, who taught them that sportswriting was not so much about covering games as expressing one’s own emotional reaction to those games.
I suspect my Chinese intelligence analysts were already moving beyond all of this to concentrate on the most consistent obsession of establishment sportswriters (as well as of the establishment itself): Follow the money (and yes, we’re indeed talking about millions or even billions of dollars). After all, stories about the recent bonanza of endorsement money for college athletes and the scandals linked to the explosion of sports gambling sites proliferated and a new breed of “transactional” sportswriters like Shams Charania of ESPN, whom you met at the beginning of this ramble, were prepared to cover such things in our present billionaire world of sports (and, of course, nonsports).
Shams is himself one of the country’s highest-paid sportswriters because he can beat the opposition, sometimes by minutes, in reporting trades, salary disputes, and coaching changes. While he specializes in the National Basketball Association, he’s a model for the “analysts” and “insiders” throughout sports journalism today. Pumping their popularity is the insatiable need of gamblers for fresh information.
If my Chinese spies are any good, they understand that more than 100 years after Bat Masterson died writing about boxing, the clues extracted from sportswriting also pertain to the games our government is playing, and reading about sports is another way of understanding where our world is heading. The clues are no longer within the games, the players, or even the roar of the crowd. They are in the clubhouses of the billionaires who recently traveled with President Donald Trump to China to grease the wheels for transactions to come, not to mention those who actually own the teams.
In Trump’s ballpark, it’s all in the deal.
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Forget Citizens United, If We Don't Have Independent Media We're Done For
If progressives are going to have any hope of competing with the billionaires’ candidates, we need to ensure that the Trumpers don’t control the portion of the media not currently in their possession.
May 24, 2026
I was briefly sent into a rage last week, throwing ketchup against the wall, when I saw that one of the Murdoch sons was buying up Vox Media. After seeing Elon Musk take over Twitter, Junior Trumper David Ellison take over Paramount and CBS, and now ready to buy Warner Brothers and CNN, and senior Trumper Larry Ellison taking over TikTok, the thought of yet another serious new outlet falling into Trumper hands was pretty appalling.
Fortunately, the buyer turned out to be James Murdoch, the relatively sane Murdoch son. While that is comparatively good news, no one should feel too relieved over this outcome.
It’s good that Vox isn’t being taken over by a right-wing billionaire, but that’s just luck. It could be. There are any number of right-wing billionaires who have the means to buy up just about any media outlet in sight. And once they do, they could turn their new acquisition into another variant of Fox News.
Part of my reason for the ketchup throwing was that I just saw yet another diatribe against Citizens United, with someone attributing the failures of our political situation to this decision. To be clear, I think the decision was bad in both logic and its outcome.
The government creates corporations; how can it not have the authority to limit their political behavior? Individuals and the organizations they create can do whatever they want politically, but leave corporations out of politics. And we certainly saw more money flooding into politics following the Citizens United ruling, but people need to keep their eye on the ball.
Elon Musk contributed close to $300 million to get Trump and other Republicans elected in 2024. That was Elon Musk, not Tesla or any other company he controls. Other billionaires have also contributed millions or tens of millions to political campaigns.
Reversing Citizens United will require a Constitutional amendment, which is impossible for practical purposes in any foreseeable future. Alternatively, it can be reversed through a court-packing scheme, which is only slightly more feasible.
And then after this great victory, Elon Musk can still contribute $300 million to elect his favorite reactionaries and racists. Would we be celebrating? For the rich, contributing to candidates through the corporations they control is a convenience, not a necessity.
As a practical matter, we are not going to be able to limit the amount the rich spend on campaigns. The only plausible route to preserve democracy is through various forms of public financing, like the super-match in New York City that multiplies small contributions by a factor of 8. Alternatively, Seattle has “democracy vouchers” where each voter gets $100 to contribute to the candidate(s) of their choice. These programs can allow candidates to have enough money to be competitive even without relying on rich people’s money.
We need the same approach to the media. Many progressives seem to have the view that campaign spending has a magical impact on people’s voting, as opposed to everything else that people come across in their lives.
If voters heard nothing but Fox News 24/7, it would take an enormous number of campaign ads to get voters to take arguments from a candidate like Bernie Sanders or AOC seriously. If progressives are going to have any hope of competing with the billionaires’ candidates, we need to ensure that the Trumpers don’t control the portion of the media not currently in their possession.
Part of that story depends on trying to block the right-wing takeovers that are still in the works. That includes the Paramount effort to take over Warner Brothers and the Nexstar-TEGNA merger, which would lead to an unprecedented consolidation of local news outlets in the hands of a right-wing media group.
But it is also necessary to develop an alternative stream of funding, like the super match or democracy vouchers provide for elections. One route is a system of journalism vouchers that people can use to support the news outlets of their choice. This can be done at the state or even local level, since this Republican Congress is not about to pass a measure challenging the power of the rich.
Building up alternative media to challenge the views being pushed by Trumper media is a long and uphill battle, but it is essential if we’re going to preserve democracy. And the first step is recognizing the need for the battle and getting people to stop worrying about Citizens United. If we’re going to undertake a tough fight, we need to be sure we get something important if we win.
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