Tag: Rob Bonta

On the new ‘Beat the Press,’ we dissect Trump’s media ban and marvel over the Globe’s lesbian-bar story

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.

Our host, as always, is Emily, joined by Contrarian Boston‘s Scott Van Voorhis and Jon Keller of WBZ-TV and me. Our producer extraordinaire is Tonia Magras of Hull Bay Productions.

Bringing CBS News and CNN under one Trump-friendly roof is a disaster for freedom of the press

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?

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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.

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