Skydance chief executive David Ellison, right, and his father, Larry Ellison. Photo in the public domain.
A few weeks ago I lamented Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, which brings CBS News and CNN under the same corporate roof, writing, “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.”
This week I’m choosing to be optimistic, although I’m well aware that my relatively sunny take on this week’s events might prove to be unrewarded. Mainly I’m encouraged that David Ellison, the head of Skydance (as the renamed company is known), has decided to keep Mark Thompson as chief executive of CNN.
Click here or on image to watch on Contrarian Boston.
We’re back with another edition of “Beat the Press with Emily Rooney,” hosted by Contrarian Boston. Our lead topic this week is Donald Trump’s illegal ban on three news organizations, which seems to keep popping up even though it’s been knocked down in court.
Our other topics: the debut of Trump TV, which at one point was drawing an unimaginably minuscule audience of about 500 viewers; and why The Boston Globe’s story about a lesbian bar (sub. req.) that’s struggling with its longtime masking requirement went viral — and brought several thousand new subscribers to the Globe. Our guess is that it’s all about the revolutionary praxis.
We round out the show with our panel’s Rants and Raves. Mine is for California Attorney General Rob Bonta and Gov. Gavin Newsom, who folded on the Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery lawsuit when Paramount major domo David Ellison threatened to move his operations out of the state. Their cowardice delivers CNN into the same MAGA-friendly hands that are wreaking havoc with CBS News.
David Ellison, right, and his billionaire father, Larry Ellison, are now calling the shots at two major news organizations — CBS News and CNN. Photo in the public domain.
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?
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.
Katie Kingsbury, the opinion editor at The Times, said in a memo to her staff that Mr. Douthat made the case for “a religiously serious, intellectually restless conservatism.”
“He was right about things early, wrong about things honestly and never, not once, boring,” she added.
Douthat is incredibly boring, and I find it hard to imagine that Kingsbury disagrees. I also doubt she’ll have much trouble finding a more engaging conservative to replace Douthat if that’s what she wants to do. She might consider Kevin Williamson of The Dispatch, who, like Douthat, is a conservative Catholic, and whose recent takedown (sub. req.) of JD Vance’s book “Communion” is both hilarious and devastating.
As for Douthat, I thought perhaps CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss and “60 Minutes” executive producer Nick Bilton were planning to use him as a commentator. Nope. He’ll be a full-fledged correspondent, despite having no television experience and, as far as I know, no reporting background.
Click here or on image to watch on Contrarian Boston.
On the latest episode of “Beat the Press with Emily Rooney,” we take a long look at the implosion of “60 Minutes,” the 58-year-old CBS News staple that has been torn apart by Bari Weiss and her choice to run the program, Nick Bilton.
Why did CBS executives fire Scott Pelley? What are we to make of Pelley’s claim in a New York Times interview that Weiss tried to inject bias and at least one falsehood into his report on the killings of Minneapolis protesters Renee Good and Alex Pretti at the hands of federal agents? What’s next for “60 Minutes,” which not only continues to be a ratings leader but actually grew over the past year? Does the new Trump-friendly owner, David Ellison, care about any of this?
Also: World Cup watch parties and our panel’s Rants and Raves. With Emily in the moderator’s chair; our host, Scott Van Voorhis of Contrarian Boston; Lylah Alphonse of The Boston Globe, and me. Our producer extraordinaire is Tonia Magras of Hull Bay Productions.
Extra! Extra! What would Andy think? Check out this special edition of “Beat the Press” in which Emily and her brother, Brian Rooney, talk about how their legendary father would be reacting to the meltdown of “60 Minutes.”
Nicholas von Hoffman and James Kilpatrick debate the fate of Richard Nixon at the height of the Watergate scandal in 1973.
I’m nearly 70, and I’ve never been a regular viewer of “60 Minutes.” I think of it as a show that my parents watched. Still, the dismantling of the highly rated program at the hands of David Ellison’s designated flunky, Bari Weiss, and her designated flunky, Nick Bilton, has been alarming for anyone who cares about investigative journalism — or, for that matter, democracy.
Follow my Bluesky newsfeed for additional news and commentary. And please join my Patreon for just $6 a month. You’ll receive a supporters-only newsletter every Thursday.
I had to laugh at the clueless outrage of conservative commentators over Scott Pelley’s wonderfully hostile confrontation with Bilton. “When a child throws a tantrum, they’re punished,” clucked Isaac Schorr at Mediaite. “When a journalist throws a tantrum, they wait to be called stunning and brave.”
On the brand-new edition of “Beat the Press with Emily Rooney,” we analyze media coverage of the war against Iran.
In other topics, we examine the implications of Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, which will put CNN in the hands of Trump-friendly executives Larry and David Ellison, and the failure of Bari Weiss — who may soon be running CNN in addition to CBS News — to hang on to a Jeffrey Epstein associate. We also give the hairy eyeball to AI’s ongoing encroachment into journalism and weigh in with our Rants and Raves.
Apologies for the delay, but the full episode of “Beat the Press with Emily Rooney” is now up. Our host, Scott Van Voorhis of Contrarian Boston, has posted it in four pieces at his YouTube Channel.
Our topics: Tony Dokoupil’s less than inspiring debut as anchor of the “CBS Evening News”; a crisis in media trust; and the return of Brian McGrory as editor of The Boston Globe following Nancy Barnes’ abrupt departure.
The newly revived “Beat the Press with Emily Rooney” is back with its second story.
This time around, Emily, Scott Van Voorhis and I take on Tony Dokoupil’s embarrassing debut as anchor of the “CBS Evening News.” Dokoupil has, among other things, both-sides-ed the unprovoked killing of Renee Good at the hands of ICE agent Jonathan Ross, sucked up to Marco Rubio, and interviewed White House border czar Tom Homan while failing to ask him about the brown paper bag with $50,000 cash inside.
We have reached the let’s-hope-Canada-beams-in-news-that’s-being-censored-in-our-own-country stage of authoritarianism.
On Monday afternoon, the “60 Minutes” story on mostly Venezuelan detainees being sent to a notorious prison in El Salvador — canceled by CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss — popped up on Canada’s Global TV app. It was taken down a short time later because of copyright issues, but it’s been showing up here and there on social media ever since. I’m hoping this broadcast-quality version, on Yashar Ali’s newsletter, The Reset, will stick around for a while.
As you’ll see, detainees, many of whom have not been accused of any crime other than being in the U.S. illegally, say there were subjected to beatings, torture and sexual abuse during their time in the CECOT prison. As for Weiss’ complaint that the story did not include any comment from the Trump regime, here’s what we hear toward the end of Sharyn Alfonsi’s report:
The Department of Homeland Security declined our request for an interview and referred all questions about CECOT to El Salvador. The government there did not respond to our request.
We’ve been having a debate on Facebook over whether it’s fair to say that Weiss “canceled” the story given that she has said she wants to run it after it’s re-edited. I contend that it was canceled, not delayed, because it was scheduled to run on Sunday evening and it wasn’t. Also, Weiss has made it clear that if the story does run, it won’t be what you see here.
As Alfonsi said, to cancel the story for lack of White House comment even though they were given an opportunity to weigh in is to hand a “veto” to the very officials that “60 Minutes” was trying to hold to account. As I tell my students, you need to give people you’re reporting on a fair chance to respond — but you can’t let it drag on for so long that their silence is used to kill the story.
