My students and I were talking this morning about press freedoms in the U.S. and in other Western democracies. How, I asked, could countries like Britain, Canada, Germany and France ensure such freedoms in the absence of something like the First Amendment?
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The answer is that they can’t, at least not as comprehensively as we do. Libel protections and the right to publish information about criminal trials, government secrets and the like are in fact more robust here than they are in other countries. Yet according to the Press Freedom Index published by Reporters Without Borders, the U.S. ranks just 64th, behind Botswana but ahead of Panama. Norway is No. 1.
How can this be? A large part of the explanation came Monday, when the last remaining legal opposition to Paramount’s $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery melted away, transforming two behemoths into one super-behemoth. Nearly all of this corrupt (as in the sense of rotting flesh, not whether it’s legal) transaction involves entertainment properties, which is where the money is. But what many of us really care about is that CNN is moving under the same corporate umbrella as CBS News.
You know the backstory. Paramount acquired CBS in the first year of Donald Trump’s second presidency, with the skids greased by $16 million paid to settle a baseless lawsuit Trump had filed over the way “60 Minutes” edited an interview with Kamala Harris. Paramount’s chair and CEO, David Ellison, put Bari Weiss in charge of CBS News, including “60 Minutes.”
Weiss, whose politics might be described as anti-anti-Trump (please, God, spare us from Trump-curious contrarians) and who had no prior television experience, has presided over a journalistic and ratings disaster. It’s so bad that you’d like to think Ellison won’t hand her the keys to CNN, but it seems probable that he’s going to dictate a Trumpier direction for the news organization. Expect to see CBS News and CNN sharing talent as well.
The immediate upshot is that two of the three major cable news outlets — CNN and Fox News — are now in the hands of executives who are friendly to Trump, with MS NOW the only holdout. (“Friendly” barely begins to describe it in the case of Fox.) What’s more, one of the Big Three broadcast television networks, CBS, is also in Trump’s orbit. Needless to say, if we had actual antitrust enforcement in this country, such concentration could not take place.
What paved the way for Monday’s news was the capitulation of California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who was leading an effort by a number of state attorneys general to stop the merger. Bonta, to be fair, was in a difficult situation: if he’d stood on principle, Ellison was threatening to move Paramount out of state, costing California 58,000 jobs and $21 billion annually, according to an economic analysis cited by the New York Post.
At the media news site Status, Oliver Darcy reports (sub. req.) that Bonta’s critics are especially unhappy that the deal he struck calls for no structural changes (such as selling CNN) and is grounded entirely in behavioral rules such as how many movies Paramount promises to make. Among those behavioral rules is the establishment of an editorial advisory board that will assess the journalistic independence of CBS News and CNN. Good luck with that. As Darcy writes:
Not only will CNN need to be walled off from potential interference by Ellison, but it will also need to be protected from possible meddling stemming from the Middle East. The Saudis, Qataris, and Emirates will own 49.5% of the newly combined company, a proposal that allows for an astonishing stake of foreign ownership of a U.S. media company, requiring special clearance by the Federal Communications Commission, led by the Trump-friendly Brendan Carr.
Such advisory boards have been set up following other mergers, including Rupert Murdoch’s acquisition of The Times and The Sunday Times in the U.K. in 1981 and of The Wall Street Journal in 2007. Joshua Benton of Nieman Lab took a look at how those boards worked out and reported that, in both cases, Murdoch did as he pleased. In the case of the Journal, all he had to do to get around a stipulation that he not fire managing editor Marcus Brauchli without board permission was to hire a publisher who had control of the newsroom, thus marginalizing the editor. Brauchli quit. As Benton wrote, “These ‘independent’ boards are PR gestures, not vehicles for editorial protection.”
After Monday’s deal was announced, outrage was voiced by a number of advocacy groups. Here’s Seth Stern, chief of advocacy for the Free Press Foundation, as reported by The Verge: “The fish rots from the head, and this particular fish is headed by a compromised oligarch with a history of throwing journalists under the bus to advance his business interests.”
Next up is Jessica González, co-CEO of Free Press, a media-reform organization: “Based on all reports, this weak deal contains nothing but unenforceable, empty Paramount promises.”
And the Block the Merger Coalition, comprising a number of organizations led by the Media and Democracy Project: “This is a bad deal for the future of film, entertainment, independent journalism, and a strong democracy in this country. We are disappointed and angry that the interests of average Americans have been trampled to benefit oligarch billionaires.”
I’ll end where I began, with the Press Freedom Index. Why does the U.S. rank just 64th worldwide? There are a variety of reasons, from violence against journalists to low levels of public trust in the news media. But the overarching reason cited by Reporters Without Borders is this:
The US media landscape is relatively diverse, especially online, but ownership of traditional and mainstream media is highly concentrated. Many large media companies are seeking to merge, risking reductions in journalism jobs and weakening media pluralism. President Trump, meanwhile, has tried to pressure these companies to soften their stance on him and install his allies in leadership positions.
Monday was a dark day for journalism and democracy. Yes, there are still many large, independent news outlets reporting on the depredations of the Trump regime. But national broadcast networks and cable news is how a broad swath of the public informs itself. The damage that Trump has done and continues to do is wide-ranging, and we can only hope that we can find our way back once this terrible moment has passed.
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“CBS News and CNN sharing talent” is nothing new. What about Anderson Cooper on 60 Minutes, or their earlier story-sharing activity (which was problematic for other reasons)?
I don’t think David Ellison is as Trumpy as many people believe. He gave almost $1M to the Biden campaign for example. But for purposes of the merger I think he’s been laying low and letting his Trumpier rich dad Larry do a lot of the talking. 60 Minutes has caused a lot of noise but in their two weeks so far I don’t see a big change in their viewpoint. They’ve done a couple of significant stories on Trump that aren’t favorable, and nothing that promotes him the way Trump would appreciate. To me it looks very much like pre-Bari 60 Minutes. David Ellison seems much more into making money and movies than politics. But we’ll see.