CBS News Get’s All Foxy
How Trump and his Billionaire Buddy Ellison Killed Another Cog in the Machine of Democracy.
It is a thrill to watch the death of CBS News unfold in real-time, particularly when the pallbearers keep insisting the corpse is merely resting. CBS News—the house that Murrow built, where Cronkite once told a nation the truth about Vietnam and they believed him—has completed its transformation into something that might look like journalism if you squint hard enough and don’t ask too many questions. It is now no more a legitimate news organization than Newsmax with better production values, or Fox News without the blonde battalions. The veneer remains; the soul has been liquidated.
The math of this particular catastrophe is simple, if stomach-turning. Donald Trump filed a frivolous lawsuit against CBS over a 60 Minutes interview. Paramount, desperate for FCC approval of its merger with Skydance, paid him $16 million to go away—a sum CBS itself declined to characterize as anything other than what Stephen Colbert memorably called it on air: “a big fat bribe.” For his candor, Colbert wa…
