Politics
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April 25, 2025
The newest press scandal reveals how plutocracy props up authoritarianism.
The newest press scandal reveals how plutocracy props up authoritarianism.
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Nonetheless body from Donald Trump’s interview with 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl on October, 25, 2020.
(CBS through Getty Photos)
Since 2016, Invoice Owens has led 60 Minutes—he was solely the third govt producer within the CBS Information present’s historical past. When he addressed his workers on Tuesday in a memo saying his resignation, he started, “The actual fact is that Sixty Minutes has been my life.” This isn’t an exaggeration. Owens has been at CBS Information for 37 years, most of these at 60 Minutes. As is typical for a journalist of his stature, he’s at instances shunted his private life apart within the service of his profession.
Within the memo, Owens recollects, “My son was 6 months outdated, my spouse was pregnant with my daughter and my mom was in a coma after I spent 5 weeks on the battlefield in Iraq with Scott. My 60 Minutes priorities have all the time been clear. Possibly not good, however clear.”
By foregrounding the personal prices of the job at first of the letter, Owens was making express that his departure was no atypical profession transfer: It was a ritual self-sacrifice designed to get the eye of his superiors and disgrace them into righting an amazing mistaken. Owens was killing his profession to make a degree.
Owens believed that 60 Minutes was abandoning fundamental journalistic ideas by caving in to Donald Trump. 60 Minutes has been within the president’s gunsight for months. Trump claims that an interview 60 Minutes aired final October was deceptively edited, and he launched a $10 billion lawsuit for damages carried out by this system. Usually, such a ridiculous declare can be dismissed as a nuisance swimsuit. However CBS, which is owned by Paramount, has been eager to appease the president.
As The New York Instances reviews:
Paramount’s controlling shareholder, Shari Redstone, is desirous to safe the Trump administration’s approval for a multibillion-dollar sale of her firm to Skydance, an organization run by the son of the tech billionaire Larry Ellison. She has expressed a want to settle Mr. Trump’s case….
Authorized specialists have dismissed that swimsuit as baseless and far-fetched. Many journalists at CBS Information—the previous residence of Walter Cronkite and Mike Wallace—imagine {that a} settlement would quantity to a capitulation to Mr. Trump over what they contemplate standard-issue gripes about editorial judgment.
Trump has appreciable energy to punish CBS. As CNN notes“Trump has repeatedly referred to as for the community to lose its license and urged the Federal Communications Fee to punish the broadcaster. Finally, 60 Minutes handed over the complete transcript and video of the contested interview to the FCC, and Trump and Paramount this month agreed on a mediator within the lawsuit.”
CNN went on to say that Owens’s “resignation gives Trump with one other main victory towards the broadcaster.” The query is: Is that this really a triumph for Trump or a pyrrhic victory? In any case, Owens clearly hopes that his sacrifice could have an actual affect and rally journalists to defend the integrity of their career. Whereas Owens’s sacrifice is morally exemplary, it’s unclear whether or not it can work.
Owens crafted his resignation to embarrass his bosses and encourage journalists at 60 Minutes and elsewhere. One CBS worker, talking underneath circumstances of anonymity, informed CNN, “He sacrificed himself hoping it would make our company overlords get up and understand they danger destroying what makes 60 Minutes nice.”
Present Challenge
On this case, the risk to journalistic independence comes from extra than simply Trump. As The New York Instances reviews, “Redstone complained to CBS executives in January a couple of 60 Minutes section on the struggle between Israel and Hamas, and a day later, the corporate appointed a veteran CBS producer, Susan Zirinsky, to a brand new function overseeing the information division’s journalistic requirements.” That is one other case the place the will to protect Israel from criticism overlaps with submission to Trump’s authoritarianism, and as such it parallels the crackdown on campus dissent the place college directors and the Trump administration have been working hand in hand.
With each the colleges and the media, the prevailing financial inequality makes Trump’s autocratic aspirations simpler to meet. Universities are beholden to giant donors who share a lot of Trump’s political opinions, and the identical is true of media firms. Even when the leaders of those establishments disagree with Trump, their financial pursuits make them weak to a hostile presidency. This explains why the billionaire house owners of The Washington Put up and the Los Angeles Instances spiked their newspapers’ endorsements of Kamala Harris.
On Monday, Semafor reported that the media firm Nexstar dismissed a reporter, Olafimihan Oshin, from one among their publications, The Hill, as a way to keep away from a lawsuit from Trump. Oshin had written an article aggregating different information sources with a factual error. The piece acknowledged that Reality Social, Trump’s media firm, misplaced $73 million when it had misplaced $30 million. Usually, this sort of mistake results in a correction, not a lawsuit. A supply informed Semafor that Nexstar was “desirous to keep away from Trump’s wrath” and “agreed to fireplace the reporter in trade for being dropped from the case—which a spokesperson for Nexstar, Gary Weitman, denied.”
These tales add as much as a sample: Company media is bending the knee to Trump. Sadly, Owens might need sacrificed his profession in useless. We would hope he ignites a resistance within the newsroom, but it surely’s simply as possible the submissiveness of the company house owners of media retailers will solely intensify. If that’s the case, Individuals can be properly suggested to show off 60 Minutes and different mainstream retailers. As an alternative, as I’ve prompt earlier than, anybody hoping for trustworthy seems to be at Trump ought to flip to various media sources akin to Democracy Now!, The Lever, Jacobin, and (it goes with out saying) The Nation.
The chaos and cruelty of the Trump administration reaches new lows every week.
Trump’s catastrophic “Liberation Day” has wreaked havoc on the world economic system and arrange yet one more constitutional disaster at residence. Plainclothes officers proceed to abduct college college students off the streets. So-called “enemy aliens” are flown overseas to a mega jail towards the orders of the courts. And Signalgate guarantees to be the primary of many incompetence scandals that expose the brutal violence on the core of the American empire.
At a time when elite universities, highly effective regulation corporations, and influential media retailers are capitulating to Trump’s intimidation, The Nation is extra decided than ever earlier than to carry the highly effective to account.
In simply the final month, we’ve printed reporting on how Trump outsources his mass deportation agenda to different nations, uncovered the administration’s enchantment to obscure legal guidelines to hold out its repressive agenda, and amplified the voices of courageous pupil activists focused by universities.
We additionally proceed to inform the tales of those that combat again towards Trump and Musk, whether or not on the streets in rising protest actions, on the town halls throughout the nation, or in crucial state elections—like Wisconsin’s latest state Supreme Courtroom race—that present a mannequin for resisting Trumpism and show that Musk can’t purchase our democracy.
That is the journalism that issues in 2025. However we will’t do that with out you. As a reader-supported publication, we depend on the help of beneficiant donors. Please, assist make our important impartial journalism attainable with a donation as we speak.
In solidarity,
The Editors
The Nation
Jeet Lord
Jeet Heer is a nationwide affairs correspondent for The Nation and host of the weekly Nation podcast, The Time of Monsters. He additionally pens the month-to-month column “Morbid Signs.” The writer of In Love with Artwork: Francoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Artwork Spiegelman (2013) and Candy Lechery: Evaluations, Essays and Profiles (2014), Heer has written for quite a few publications, together with The New Yorker, The Paris Assessment, Virginia Quarterly Assessment, The American Prospect, The Guardian, The New Republic, and The Boston Globe.
