Anderson Cooper decides to walk away from broadcast TV’s most prestigious news show, 60 Minutes. Stephen Colbert takes his interview with a rising Democratic politician to YouTube instead of his own late-night show. The CBS Evening News anchor presents a misleading version of the network’s own exclusive reporting on Ice arrests. And a news producer writes a farewell note to her CBS News colleagues blaming the loss of editorial independence.
If you connect the dots, the picture of what’s happening at CBS becomes all too clear. That picture comes into even sharper focus once you recall an underlying factor: the network’s parent company is trying to get a big commercial deal done and needs the help of the Trump administration to bring it over the finish line.
“Media capture” is the name that University of Pennsylvania scholar Victor Pickard gives to what we’re seeing unfold before our eyes.
What’s happening at CBS and elsewhere “isn’t a singular breakdown”, Pickard writes in a new analysis.
It’s a whole cascade of layers – media ownership, control and market structure – that “endanger our information and communication systems, our First Amendment freedoms, and our democracy”.
In the CBS situation, the immediate motivation is easy to understand. The network’s parent company, Paramount Skydance, wants to buy Warner Brothers Discovery, which also owns CNN – one of Donald Trump’s favorite punching bags and a news organization he would love to see take the same rightward turn as CBS.