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 was shown the door. The message was received throughout the building with crystalline clarity.
And who was waiting in the wings to accept the keys to Murrow’s kingdom? David Ellison, the 42-year-old son of Oracle founder Larry Ellison, a man whose estimated $240 billion fortune made him, briefly, the richest person on Earth. David is what one might charitably call a “nepo CEO”—a term that sounds more clinical than “trust-fund mogul” but means approximately the same thing. He dropped out of USC film school to appear in Flyboys, a $60 million World War I drama that bombed so spectacularly it should have ended his Hollywood ambitions. Instead, daddy’s billions allowed him to pivot from in front of the camera to behind the checkbook. Skydance Media was born, bankrolled by family money, and now David owns one of America’s most storied news divisions. Why not?
The Ellisons’ relationship with Trump is not merely cordial—it is transactional in ways that should make anyone who cares about press freedom reach for the smelling salts. Larry Ellison hosted a six-figure-per-person fundraiser for Trump at his Rancho Mirage estate. He reportedly participated in a post-2020 election call with Lindsey Graham and Sean Hannity to discuss contesting the results. Trump has rewarded this loyalty handsomely: the FCC approved the Paramount-Skydance merger, Oracle was handed the keys to TikTok’s American operations, and the Ellisons are now making a hostile bid for Warner Bros. Discovery. Should that succeed, this one family could soon control CBS News, CNN, TikTok, and who knows what else. Larry Ellison has rhapsodized about a future in which Oracle’s surveillance apparatus watches everyone at all times—”citizens will be on their best behavior because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on,” he told investors. One shudders to imagine what “best behavior” means in this formulation.
Into this arrangement steps Bari Weiss, installed as CBS News editor-in-chief after Paramount paid $150 million for her newsletter, The Free Press, which at the time of purchase had cultivated a grand total of 170,000 paying subscribers. Do the math on that valuation and you’ll find yourself in the realm of absurdist fiction. Weiss, let us be clear, is not a journalist. She is an opinion writer, a provocateur, a culture warrior who has made a career out of decrying “wokeism” from the pages of the New York Times, from which she departed amid claims of internal censorship, and subsequently from the lucrative Substack ecosystem. Her qualifications for running a broadcast news division include precisely none of the things one might expect—no experience in television news, no background in editorial leadership of a major newsroom, no apparent interest in the grinding, unglamorous work of original reporting.
What she does have is an ideology that pleases the new owners and a willingness to execute their vision. Within weeks of her arrival, she killed a 60 Minutes segment about Venezuelan deportees just hours before it was to air, overruling her own correspondent and standards team because, she insisted, Trump administration officials hadn’t been given sufficient opportunity to comment. The correspondent, Sharyn Alfonsi, told colleagues the decision was “political, not editorial.” CBS dissolved its race and culture unit—formed after George Floyd’s murder—without fanfare. A senior producer covering climate was let go in a round of layoffs that hit women in leadership roles with suspicious precision. “I’ve lost a lot of friends,” one CBS staffer told Variety. “A lot of really great writers and a lot of really great journalists have lost their jobs to pay for Bari’s six bodyguards and $150 million deal. And I think that’s bullshit.”
Which brings us to Tony Dokoupil, the freshman anchor of CBS Evening News, whose first week behind the desk has been a masterclass in how not to introduce yourself to a skeptical nation. Dokoupil stumbled over the teleprompter on his first broadcast and inexplicably introduced himself twice within 80 seconds. His ratings promptly cratered—viewership down 11.4 percent in four nights, with the key advertising demographic fleeing at an even more alarming 19.4 percent clip. His first week averaged 4.17 million viewers, compared to the 4.91 million his predecessors John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois drew in their debut week. And yet somehow, Dokoupil had the audacity to compare himself to Walter Cronkite, who commanded audiences of 30 million in his prime.
But the richest irony in Dokoupil’s disastrous launch was his New Year’s Day manifesto railing against “legacy media” for privileging “the perspective of advocates” over “the average American,” for putting “too much weight in the analysis of academics or elites, and not enough on you.” This populist posturing might land differently if Dokoupil didn’t share a four-floor Brooklyn townhouse in one of the borough’s most exclusive enclaves with his wife, MSNBC anchor Katy Tur. If he hadn’t attended a prep school charging $53,000 a year. If he hadn’t matriculated at George Washington University and Columbia, where he pursued but did not complete a PhD. In other words: Dokoupil is precisely the kind of privileged elite he claims to stand against, playing as an everyman while living a life utterly disconnected from the viewers he condescends to address.
His Tuesday broadcast featured a 13-minute interview with Donald Trump at a Ford factory, an exercise in access journalism so compromised it was literally drowned out by the factory machinery. The visual metaphor wrote itself: a president holding forth while the din of production makes his words unintelligible, an anchor nodding along, neither man apparently troubled by the fact that the audience at home can’t hear a thing. At the conclusion, Dokoupil made a forced appeal: “You may not agree with everything you hear on this broadcast, but we trust you to listen, and we trust you to decide for yourself.” The desperation was audible. He took a deep breath and signed off: “And that’s another day in America.”
That it certainly is. Another day with yet another compromised newsroom.
What we are witnessing is not merely the decline of a news organization but the completion of a pattern that should alarm anyone who still believes journalism serves a democratic function. Billionaires have discovered that media properties—particularly prestige media properties, the ones that still carry the credibility built up over decades—make useful accessories. They may not be particularly profitable, but they confer legitimacy, offer political leverage, and provide a megaphone for ideological projects. Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post. Patrick Soon-Shiong took the Los Angeles Times. Elon Musk acquired Twitter. Now the Ellisons have CBS.
The difference between CBS News and Fox News was once fundamental: CBS employed journalists who reported facts and sought truth; Fox employed personalities who advanced an agenda and called it news. That distinction has now collapsed. The new CBS exists to serve the interests of its billionaire owners and their political patron. It will offer the appearance of mainstream credibility—the Tiffany Network’s gleaming logo, the heritage of Murrow and Cronkite, the aura of respectability—while functioning as an instrument of propaganda no less insidious than what Rupert Murdoch built at Fox.
Indeed, it may be worse. Fox News is at least what it is - obvious and dishonest. Even its owner, the crypt-keeper of lies and rumors, Rupert Murdoch himself said Fox News was not news. CBS, under its new management, will continue to present itself as something it no longer is: an independent news organization committed to afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted. It will interview presidents in noisy factories and call it access. It will kill unflattering stories and call it editorial judgment. It will platform an anchor who rails against elites from his Brooklyn townhouse and call it populism.
This is the new American press, captured by oligarchs and offered up as tribute to power. Trump didn’t need to destroy the news media—he just needed to buy it, or to reward those who would buy it for him. The Ellisons wrote the check. Bari Weiss cashed it. And Tony Dokoupil reads the teleprompter, when he can manage not to stumble over it.
“And that’s the way it is.”
© 2025 Josh Powell/The Powell House Press. All rights reserved.
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It's a pity