A key goal of Donald Trump’s second term has been to use government power to place important media properties in the hands of loyalists who will bend coverage to the president’s will. Yesterday, the Trump-approved management at CBS duly held back a 60 Minutes report about the administration’s treatment of migrant detainees deported to El Salvador.
Although many of Trump’s goals to reindustrialize the economy or prosecute his enemies have floundered, his plan to corrupt the media is starting to work.
During his first term, Trump’s efforts to get the media to do his bidding consisted mostly of endless whining, punctuated by regular threats of nuisance lawsuits and the occasional actual suit. In his second term, he has seized upon a more effective tool. Most large media properties have owners, and those owners have business that relies on the federal government. Trump has made clear that the price of cooperative regulatory policies from his government is giving him friendlier coverage.
[Franklin Foer: CBS and CNN are being sacrificed to Trump]
The president has not even bothered to conceal the terms of his transaction with the billionaires Larry and David Ellison. Over the summer, the Trump administration approved a merger that gave the Ellisons control over Paramount, CBS’s parent company. After the merger was announced but before the administration approved of it, CBS agreed to settle one of Trump’s groundless lawsuits (against CBS News for the way 60 Minutes edited an interview with Kamala Harris, a standard journalistic practice). But Trump wanted more than money. He wanted influence over CBS’s coverage of his administration, and he believed its new owners would give it to him.
“Larry Ellison is great, and his son, David, is great. They’re friends of mine” he told reporters in October. “They will make the right decisions. They’re going to revitalize CBS—hopefully, they’ll bring it back to its former glory.”
That same month, David Ellison appointed Bari Weiss, editor of the neoconservative publication The Free Press, to run CBS News. Trump praised the move in his own 60 Minutes interview. “I see good things happening in the news. I really do. And I think one of the best things to happen is this show and new ownership,” he told Norah O’Donnell. “I think it’s the greatest thing that’s happened in a long time to a free and open and good press.”
Weiss has held the job for only a few months, but Trump expects results quickly. Friday night, speaking at a rally in North Carolina, he complained that CBS has not yet changed its coverage of him to his liking. “I love the new owners of CBS,” he announced, before adding, “60 Minutes has treated me worse under the new ownership than—they just keep treating me, they just keep hitting me, it’s crazy.”
Two days later, Weiss, who once decried “self-censorship” at The New York Times, yanked the 60 Minutes segment on deportations that had been slated to run. CNN reported that the story had been screened internally five times, including for Weiss on Thursday, who offered notes but allowed it to move forward, but the segment apparently looked very different to Weiss a few days later. “We determined it needed additional reporting,” a spokesperson for CBS News said in a statement. (CBS did not respond to a request for comment.)
Weiss reportedly explained to her colleagues this morning that the segment “did not advance the ball,” and to do so, “we need to be able to get the principals on the record and on camera.” Because 60 Minutes had already asked the administration for comment and had been denied, this interview requirement would appear to give the Trump administration an effective veto on the piece—all the administration needs to do to keep it off the air is refuse to grant an interview.
[David Frum: Welcome to the Mafia presiden]
According to The New York Times, Weiss “also questioned the use of the term ‘migrants’ to describe the Venezuelan men who were deported, noting that they were in the United States illegally.” In fact, various investigations into the U.S. government’s unconstitutional deportation of hundreds of Venezuelans to El Salvador have found that most of the deportees had no criminal record, and many had broken no U.S. immigration laws, either.
This detail would seem to undercut Weiss’s complaint that the 60 Minutes segment fails to advance the ball. If even the editor of CBS News is unaware that the Trump administration has deported migrants without due process, more coverage of the fact is surely needed.
Those of us outside of CBS lack the benefit of having seen this segment, so it’s impossible to vouch for it. And it is of course at the discretion of a newsroom’s leader to determine what to publish, or air—or not. Still, the visible aspects of the process, however, do not inspire confidence.
Back when she took the job, Weiss wrote a memo to her staff at CBS News stressing her desire to restore the network’s public trust. That is a worthy goal. But after the president praised her appointment, then complained that she wasn’t acting quickly enough to impose pliant coverage, and she almost immediately spiked a critical story on what appear to be dubious grounds, it seems clear that it’s not the public’s trust she is concerned about, but Trump’s.
The post Trump’s Plan to Corrupt the Media Is Starting to Work appeared first on The Atlantic.
