“Ellison’s pronouncements that CBS News needs to move more to the political center has led to the perception that the network is trying to placate Trump with more positive news coverage, even as “60 Minutes” has remained tough with its White House reporting.
“60 Minutes” has been under pressure since October 2024, when Trump filed a $20-billion lawsuit against CBS over an interview conducted with then-Vice President Kamala Harris. That suit was settled to clear the regulatory path for Skydance Media’s acquisition of Paramount.
Paramount also has faced blowback over the decision by CBS to cancel its Trump-bashing late-night host Stephen Colbert ahead of the FCC approval of its merger with Skydance Media.
…
From a business standpoint, “60 Minutes” is a curious target for a revamp. The program is one of the most profitable hours on the CBS prime-time schedule while retaining its status as television’s most prestigious journalism operation.
While the ratings for “60 Minutes” get a boost from a lead-in from high-rated late-afternoon NFL games, it remains one of the few network shows that viewers make an appointment to watch. The program’s ad revenue, which research firm iSpot pegged at $67.5 million in 2025, has remained steady in recent years even as traditional TV continues to lose ground to streaming.
But Weiss believes the “60 Minutes” brand name has to do more than just draw a big audience on Sunday night, a point she stressed in her note to staff that was obtained by The Times.”
Democrats have a difficult media arena because Republicans have a synergistic bullshit ecosystem that globs onto the same messages and is naturally integrated from biased news to biased think tanks to biased pundits and influencers. It even ropes in people whose content isn’t focused on politics, but they fall for the bullshit, and then become bullshit spreaders themselves, like Joe Rogan.
People say don’t clickbait, but they only click the clickbait, so they are voting with their clicks.
The MAGA right is really good at bullshiting. They don’t express the same principles or beliefs from topic to topic. They claim that Democrats did it first when what a Democrat did was different or not as bad, and when two wrongs don’t make a right. When confronted on a specific and important event, they claim ignorance.
Mainstream media is often biased to the right because they are so concerned about not being considered biased to the left that they overcorrect, and because the right is more likely to repeatedly lie and the mainstream isn’t good at holding their feet to the fire; while they will come hard at a liberal for a softer or/and less misleading actions.
“now that Trump’s president, and getting lots of criticism from the media, he’s started calling speech that he doesn’t like “illegal.”
“They’ll take a great story, and they’ll make it bad. I think that’s really illegal, personally.”
He also threatened TV stations: “They give me only bad publicity…maybe their license should be taken away.”
“There’s free speech, and then there’s hate speech,” said his attorney general, Pam Bondi. “We will absolutely target you…if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.”
They will “target” people?
Trump’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman, Brendan Carr, joined in. When Jimmy Kimmel said nasty and incorrect things about Charlie Kirk’s murder, Carr threatened ABC’s TV licenses, saying, like a mafia boss, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.”
Yet months earlier, he’d tweeted: “Dismantle the censorship cartel and restore free speech rights.”
And years earlier, he tweeted that the FCC does “not have a roving mandate to police speech in the name of the ‘public interest.'”
He was right—then.
But power tends to corrupt.
Once Carr was in power, he no longer supported the speech he’d recently promoted.”
Bari Weiss is now the editor-in-chief at CBS news. She doesn’t have a background in reporting, but opinion. Many claims she and her, now-purchased, organization have made, have been found to be false or misleading by multiple other investigations.
Gavin Newsom tweets in a manner that mirrors Trump’s tweets; Fox News calls it childish for a governor to tweet in such a way while not similarly criticizing the president of the United States. Ridiculous hypocrisy.
When people say MSNBC is on the left and Fox News is on the right, they are misunderstanding what Fox News is. Fox News isn’t an honest conservative news network, it acts as the propaganda arm of the Republican Party. Its creator cynically created Fox News to spread bullshit in favor of his ideology.
MSNBC had a liberal bent, but its hosts don’t go help a current or running president campaign. Each host has his own thing, but there isn’t an overarching propaganda goal to the organization.
Fox News may be unique in the Western World when it comes to a supposed news network designed as a partisan and ideological propaganda arm.
“Paramount, which owns CBS, has agreed to settle a laughable lawsuit in which President Donald Trump depicted the editing of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris as a form of consumer fraud that supposedly had inflicted damages “reasonably believed to be no less than” $20 billion. Compared to that risible claim, the amount that Paramount has agreed to pay—$16 million for legal expenses and a contribution to Trump’s presidential library—is pretty puny. It is also less than the $25 million that Trump reportedly demanded during negotiations with Paramount. It is nevertheless $16 million more than Trump deserved based on claims that CBS had accurately described as “completely without merit.”
This humiliating settlement starkly illustrates how the powers of the presidency can be abused to punish news outlets for constitutionally protected speech. It does not bode well for freedom of the press under a president who has no compunction about weaponizing the government against journalists who irk him.
…
You can judge for yourself whether the editing of the Harris interview qualified as “lying to the American People.” But there is no question that it was protected by the First Amendment, which does not include an exception for journalism that strikes the president as misleading, biased, or unfair. Trump is avowedly determined to use any tools at his disposal to make sure “no one gets away” with covering the news in a way that offends him, which does not seem like a “win” for anyone who values the freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment.”