July 8, 2025
Paramount’s settlement with Trump is a symptom of deep structural rot in our company media system.
Paramount’s $16 million settlement with Donald Trump is a shocking show of bribery, greed, and cowardice. It’s additionally a symptom of deep structural rot in our media immediately—a system during which revenue trumps democracy at each flip.
To evaluate: final October, Trump sued Paramount, the father or mother firm of CBS Information. Trump alleged that the CBS program 60 Minutes deceptively edited an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris to “tip the scales in favor of the Democratic occasion” within the lead as much as the presidential election. From the start, almost all authorized specialists decided that the case was utterly meritless. Media organizations are, in any case, protected by the First Modification, and are each legally and ethically permitted to make routine edits of interviews they air.
Nonetheless, Shari Redstone, the media conglomerate’s controlling shareholder, is in search of to safe regulatory approval for the multibillion-dollar sale of Paramount to the Hollywood studio Skydance. Redstone has appeared keen to settle the case with Trump and orchestrate the merger, democracy be damned. As Senator Bernie Sanders aptly put it: “the Redstone household diminished the liberty of the press immediately in trade for a $2.4 billion payday.”
Ever since the lawsuit was first filed, quite a few journalists and Democratic policymakers spoke out in opposition to this egregious transfer—lambasting each Trump’s laughable costs and Redstone’s lack of precept in failing to contest them.
Trump’s frivolous bullying shouldn’t have been granted a second’s legitimacy. And but right here we’re.
Trump’s authorized chicanery continues his shut adherence to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s authoritarian playbook for undermining the free press: manipulate media legislation, threaten information corporations’ income, and exploit oligopolistic media possession buildings. In brief, weaponize any device at his disposal to beat media establishments into submission in order that every thing appears to be like and sounds like Fox Information.
Present Challenge
This controversy additionally casts gentle on the harmful stranglehold that media conglomerates wield over journalism. Each tentacle of their huge holdings creates but extra conflicts of curiosity and potential for privileging enterprise pursuits over our democratic wants. From the craven capitulation of ABC and now CBS, to the fascistic discourse on X and Fox Information, we’re witnessing company energy over our media run amok, depriving society of a serious test in opposition to authoritarianism. We should always all be alarmed.
And but we shouldn’t be stunned. Within the face of authorities robust arming, profit-seeking media organizations predictably sacrifice their journalistic rules slightly than jeopardize their business pursuits. And whereas particular person journalists would possibly communicate out right here and there, America’s main information media repeatedly fold and fail us. In so doing, they assist weaken public accountability in addition to society’s First Modification protections.
What’s to be finished? Senator Elizabeth Warren is asking for a bribery investigation and guarantees to introduce laws that may “rein in corruption via presidential library donations.” Senator Ron Wyden vowed that he’d be “first in line calling for federal costs” as soon as Democrats retake energy. Extra instantly, Wyden is encouraging state prosecutors to “make the company execs who offered out our democracy reply in courtroom.”
These worthwhile initiatives however, we want even extra bold reforms. Company media establishments are a key a part of the pathologies afflicting our society immediately. This newest assault on the press and its foreseeable give up is exhibit A for why an oligarchic profit-driven media system is dangerous for democracy. These sorts of press failures are usually narrated because the misdeeds of unscrupulous people. However they’re the results of structural options that may’t be understood merely as a “dangerous apples” allegory.
In different phrases, Paramount’s capitulation to Trump factors to a systemic downside in want of a systemic repair. Significant public curiosity protections could be a step in the proper route, however as a substitute of placing regulatory Band-Aids on festering wounds, we must always work towards constructing a new media system primarily based on a distinct logic altogether. Whereas caving to Trump’s extortion is inexcusable, the motivation buildings—together with authorized obligations—at the moment in place, encourage media homeowners to disregard democratic duties to society. Revenue imperatives—to shareholders, buyers, advertisers, and themselves—drive media homeowners to deal with information and data as commodities, not important public companies, and audiences as shoppers slightly than as engaged residents.
We should unveil and confront these logics to grasp the poisonous synergies between a hyper-capitalistic, concentrated media system, and fascistic tendencies below an autocratic regime. Seeing unmitigated commercialism commercialism because the core root of the issue shifts our strategic body from making an attempt to disgrace media homeowners into higher habits to mandating that our information media should serve democracy for us all, not the income of a privileged few.
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As I’ve argued before, a revitalized public media system should stay fastened on our long-term political horizon. Such a system should be “public” in additional than identify solely: it should truly be owned and managed by the communities that media retailers serve. Such a decentralized, federally assured however domestically ruled, infrastructure may higher face up to the forms of authorities seize which might be more and more pronounced in our business media. Whereas this would look completely different from our present public media system, it may probably use that infrastructure as its preliminary constructing blocks.
For the speedy future, we should do all that we are able to to push again in opposition to the additional Trumpification of our media. This contains supporting nonprofit and unbiased media in any way possible, particularly given the ongoing collapse of local journalism. However for the long term, we should set our sights on structural media reform that goes far past defending the established order, chastening company media homeowners, and stopping the fascistic drift of the present media oligarchy. We have to each de-commercialize and radically democratize our media from root to department.
If there’s any silver lining to Trump’s ongoing corruption of our media panorama, it’s that he’s exposing how paper-thin the business media’s dedication to journalism truly is, in addition to how poorly outfitted they’re to safeguard the vestiges of American democracy. As Trump lays waste to what’s left of our media’s integrity, we ought to start planning to rebuild journalism from the bottom up, daring to think about how we would possibly create a really democratic media system out of the wreckage.
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