President Donald Trump returned to CBS News’ 60 Minutes program on Sunday night for the first time since he left office in 2020 — and since he corruptly leveraged a nuisance lawsuit to force the network’s parent company to shell out millions of dollars as the apparent price for securing federal approval for a merger.
The president, amid his typical stream of false claims, praised the network’s new ownership under Trumpy media mogul David Ellison and Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss, who made her name partly by attacking “wokeness.” The remarks demonstrate his glee in putting the U.S. information ecosystem under the thumb of compliant and supportive oligarchs — an Orbanization process that appears very much underway.
“60 Minutes paid me a lotta money,” Trump told Norah O’Donnell, referencing the lawsuit settlement, in a portion of the interview that did not air during the program. “And you don’t have to put this on, because I don’t wanna embarrass you, and I’m sure you’re not. You have a great – I think you have a great new leader, frankly, cause the young woman who’s leading your whole enterprise is a great — from what I know. I don’t know her, but I hear she’s a great person.”
“But 60 Minutes was forced to pay me a lot of money because they took her answer out that was so bad, it was election-changing, two nights before the election,” he continued, with a typically deranged gloss on CBS News’ editing of an interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris that aired in October 2024. “And they put a new answer in. And they paid me a lot of money for that. You can’t have fake news. You’ve gotta have legit news. And I think that it’s happening.”
“I see good things happening in the news,” he concluded. “I really do. And I think one of the best things to happen is this show and new ownership, CBS and new ownership. I think it’s the greatest thing that’s happened in a long time to a free and open and good press.”
Trump is patently uninterested in “a free and open and good press.” He wants media institutions to be more like Fox News, supporting his interests, protecting him from negative stories, and praising his every action as a historic success. And he believes that goal is served via a CBS News run by Ellison — the son of his close friend and political supporter Larry Ellison, who is the founder of Oracle and one of the richest people on the planet — and Weiss, whose Free Press outlet functions as a permission structure that moves centrists into his coalition.
But suborning CBS News is closer to the beginning than the end of Trump’s plan for the U.S. news media. David Ellison now seeks to purchase Warner Bros. Discovery — and the Trump administration is suggesting it might use state power to box out other bidders so that Ellison can secure control of the CNN parent company. The president’s reported motivation for the move is that he “wants favorable coverage” from CNN, one of WBD’s assets, and apparently thinks an Ellison takeover would have that result.
It’s all very much happening in the open.
The New York Post’s Charles Gasparino has reported that WBD is trying to generate a bidding war, but Ellison is unwilling to “overpay” because he “is being advised that US antitrust concerns and personal gripes will be a major stumbling block for rival bidders – and that, on that front, Paramount Skydance will have the backing of President Trump.”
Ellison reportedly benefits from his father’s friendship with Trump and from the president’s willingness to use federal regulators to quash another bid (from Brian Roberts-led Comcast) due to his loathing of the potential bidder, with a Gasparino source explaining in his October 22 piece that Trump “hates” Comcast and Roberts, so “just try getting that deal through his people.”
Gasparino reported on October 23 that an anonymous Trump administration source effectively warned WBD’s board that the administration would happily use its power to ensure the company goes to a Trump supporter. From the report:
“Who owns Warner Bros. Discovery is very important to the administration,” a senior Trump administration official told On The Money. “The Warner board needs to think very seriously not just on the price competition but which player in the suitor pool has been successful getting a deal done.
“And that points to the Ellisons,” the senior administration official added.
And Gasparino’s October 31 piece explained what this is all about: “Trump wants WBD in the Ellisons’ hands, and insiders say it’s because he wants favorable coverage from its CNN news channel, which has been accused of anti-MAGA bias.”
But the Ellison purchase isn’t a done deal yet, and the prominent media analyst Rich Greenfield has concocted a strategy Comcast’s Roberts could use to get regulatory approval from the Trump administration for his company’s bid. It involves leaning into Trump’s total and open partisan corruption of the process by promising to install Erika Kirk, the widow of Turning Points USA founder and close Trump ally Charlie Kirk, as editor-in-chief of a “combined NBC/MSNBC/CNN” outlet.
For Greenfield, Trump’s praise of CBS’ new leadership is proof of concept for the plan.
“If Comcast wants to merge NBC Universal with Warner Bros Discovery, President Trump just gave Brian Roberts a clear roadmap for how to change NBC News’ leadership/direction,” he posted on X in response to a clip of the president’s comments.
In September 2024, New York Times Publisher A.G. Sulzberger warned that Trump takes as his model Hungary’s autocrat Victor Orban, who has “effectively dismantled the news media in his country” as “a central pillar of Orban’s broader project to remake his country as an ‘illiberal democracy.’”
Sulzberger explained the methods Orban had used to dominate the Hungarian press:
His country is a democracy, so he can’t simply close newspapers or imprison journalists. Instead, he sets about undermining independent news organizations in subtler ways — using bureaucratic tools such as tax law, broadcast licensing and government contracting. Meanwhile, he rewards news outlets that toe the party line — shoring them up with state advertising revenue, tax exemptions and other government subsidies — and helps friendly businesspeople buy up other weakened news outlets at cut rates to turn them into government mouthpieces.
Within a few years, only pockets of independence remain in the country’s news media, freeing the leader from perhaps the most challenging obstacle to his increasingly authoritarian rule. Instead, the nightly news and broadsheet headlines unskeptically parrot his claims, often unmoored from the truth, flattering his accomplishments while demonizing and discrediting his critics. “Whoever controls a country’s media,” the leader’s political director openly asserts, “controls that country’s mindset and through that the country itself.”
Just 14 months later, Trump is publicly praising a news outlet that one of his allies has taken over, his administration is privately laying the groundwork for that ally to gobble up another outlet, and the plausible strategy for someone else to win the bidding war involves committing to turning it into a propaganda venue for the president. We are moving down a dark path.
Great Job Media Matters for America & the Team @ Media Matters for America Source link for sharing this story.
