Trump-CBS deal is even worse than you thought | Will Bunch Newsletter

Every so often there comes a moment of clarity about what immigration really means in America, often wrapped in tragedy. The essential work that immigrants do was hammered home last year when six of them perished in the collapse of Baltimore’s Key Bridge. It happened again Monday night when a New York City police officer was gunned down trying to prevent the mass shooting in a Manhattan office tower. Didarul Islam had found the better life his family sought in coming here from Bangladesh, working his way up from security guard to city cop, raising two kids with a third on the way. His loss is one more reminder than immigrants aren’t poisoning America. They are its lifeblood.

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Imagine this: It’s July 29, 2026 — exactly one year from today. And CBS is riding high in the second year of the Trump regime, thanks to its acquisition by the Ellison family’s Skydance Media and to the synergy that was created when the billionaire Trump allies also bought America’s most popular social-media platform, TikTok, while teaming with the conservative-minded website The Free Press and its founder, Bari Weiss.

The television network’s ratings are up, thanks to some tweaking of the TikTok algorithm that boosts CBS’ increasingly youth-oriented stars and programs. At 11:30 p.m., canceled comedian Stephen Colbert has been replaced with The TikTok Hour, mixing the day’s most viral posts with commentary from Weiss — officially, CBS vice president for news strategy — or her stable of stylishly dressed writers.

Not everyone is adjusting well to the changes. Over at the CBS Evening News, a veteran journalist presses his editor on when his big scoop — an allegation of a sexual assault at Mar-a-Lago, on a weekend when President Donald Trump was there — will air. “Never,” the flabbergasted reporter is told. “There is no way we’ll get that past the monitor.”

Just last week in this space, I was writing about CBS’ shock 2026 cancellation of Colbert — the top-rated late night host, albeit in a time when such shows are apparently losing money — and how it sure looked like part of a media capitulation to Trump, the main target of Colbert’s wry but pointed humor. It came just days before the Federal Communications Commission approved Skydance Media’s $8 billion purchase of CBS parent Paramount, and just after Paramount settled Trump’s suit against CBS’ flagship news program 60 Minutes for $16 million.

That’s all bad, but seven days later we now know the future outlook for CBS — once a beacon of news excellence thanks to icons like Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather — is even bleaker than it first appeared.

The FCC chair Brendan Carr — a zealous Trump loyalist — revealed last week that the merger approval agreement included a requirement for a “bias monitor” who will report to the network president on whatever they feel is political slanting of the news. In announcing this in an interview on the conservatively biased Newsmax (the irony is almost unbearable), Carr said that requiring “fact-based” reporting on shows like 60 Minutes — which has won 146 Emmys and 25 Peabody Awards — would probably be “a cultural shock” for them.

“One of the things they’re going to have to do is put in an ombudsman in place for two years,” Carr told Newsmax’s Greg Kelly. “So basically a bias monitor that will report directly to the president [of CBS]. So that’s something that’s significant that we’re going to see happening as well.”

The need to report to Big Brother with what the website Gizmodo accurately described as “a babysitter” seems like definitive proof that the former Tiffany Network has now been pawned to an American dictator, but this last shoe in the authoritarian takeover hasn’t dropped yet.

It’s been reported for months that Trump longtime friend and donor Larry Ellison — one of the world’s five richest people, whose son David runs Skydance Media — is the front-runner to buy TikTok, the addictive Chinese-owned social-media site which under a 2024 law faces a deadline to sell to American interests to keep operating here.

That law, passed by Congress and signed into law by Joe Biden, was supposed to take effect on Jan. 19, or the day before Trump’s inauguration. But the 47th president keeps pushing back the deadline, despite zero legal authority to do so. The White House leverage can aid Trump in steering TikTok to a friendly billionaire, and with Elon Musk out of the picture, attention has turned to Ellison.

This kind of tyrannical syzygy would be a dictator’s dream — shooting lucrative gibberish onto your teen’s iPhone while Grandpa is watching a whitewashed CBS Evening News from his couch. It’s a perfect example of how state control of the media narrative in the 21st century isn’t actually Orwellian censorship, with government workers tossing old stories down a “memory hole.” Instead, the regime’s grip on the media is more like a neutron bomb that leaves institutions such as CBS, the Washington Post or NPR as hollowed-out husks of their former selves.

The signs are everywhere. The Post, which after leading the pack on the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s became every boomer journalist’s dream job, has lost dozens of top journalists in recent months after its owner Jeff Bezos — Earth’s second-richest person — deepened his bromance with Trump and began pushing his news outlet toward capitulation. Other nominally neutral outlets like Axios are so deep in the tank for Trump that the site’s founders published an article that the president’s low approval must mean “voters are tired of so much winning.”

It was not satire.

The international press-freedom group Reporters Without Borders (also known by its French abbreviation, RSF) just marked Trump’s first six months back in office with an article showing how POTUS has tamed the media using seven different techniques learned from other dictatorial strongmen: Lawfare and economic pressure, cronies taking over newsrooms, decimating public media, violence against journalists covering protests, banning certain words and phrases, baseless accusations, and smear campaigns against individual reporters.

“Since taking office six months ago, Trump has matched years of verbally attacking journalists with new, concrete actions to limit press freedom,” RSF’s U.S. executive director Clayton Weimers said. “Many of these tactics are nothing new — it’s the same playbook we’ve seen press freedom predators employ around the world. But it’s clear that Trump has amplified this phenomenon, emboldening and inspiring other leaders to crack down on their own domestic media."

The result? Large traditional media as a source of democratic strength for America is all but comatose, if not already dead, But I also can’t stress this competing point often enough: Corporate pressures can destroy large newsrooms, but many individual journalists want to fight on — even if that means facing down arrest or even death, as our colleagues from Mexico to Gaza have done.

Your job as a citizen is to work harder to find these truth-telling journalists, a growing number of whom have gone solo. Please look for us, or at least listen for the sound of crying babysitters.

Question: How will this look in a couple years for world leaders and broadcasters? Today going along with Trump cautiously gets them by. But Trump will not be here forever. Will they be perceived as fools or will we just forget about it? My hunch is [British PM Kier] Starmer will regret standing next to Trump yesterday. — Dave Urban (@davidjohnurban.bsky.social) via Bluesky

Answer: Dave, I’m a student of media history, and the good news is that the story of the free press in America has always been a tale of reinvention. The New York World and Sun that ruled the “yellow journalism” era are long gone, and some day our grandkids may look at the Times or the Post in the same way. New voices and new outlets will rise up from the ashes of Trump (just as new pols will emerge in the UK and elsewhere). New truth-tellers will thrive, and we won’t live to see their inevitable downfall.

Last week’s question about CBS’ cancellation of Stephen Colbert drew a batch of interesting responses; many shared my view that while late-night talk shows are becoming dinosaurs in the TikTok era, it sure looked like the network also wanted to appease the Colbert-hating Donald Trump. Thomas Long wrote that “the end of Colbert feels more political than not — the timing is too wild, and Trump was ready to jump on the news too fast, for them not to have had him in mind when Colbert was canceled." I also heard from conservative reader Rick Lambrecht, who argued that “Colbert’s show morphed from comedy and satire into a lecturing, overbearing bully pulpit for the left.”

📮 This week’s question: As noted in the item below, Pa. Gov. Josh Shapiro has been raising his profile ahead of the 2028 presidential race. Do you see him as a serious contender? Or is Shapiro too moderate for the current moment? Please email me your answer and put the exact phrase “Josh Shapiro” in the subject line.

As Josh Shapiro raises his profile as a potential front-runner in the Democratic Party’s 2028 presidential race, a bewildered observer could argue that the Pennsylvania governor is wildly inconsistent. But there’s also a case that Shapiro is very consistent in the image he seeks to create: a Democrat who punches the hippies on his left while indulging the political right, even a notorious extremist.

Shapiro made some news last week by becoming the latest member of his party’s elite to raise doubts about the young, energetic and left-wing Democratic nominee for mayor in New York City, Zohran Mamdani. Mamdani’s upset victory in the June primary was fueled by young voters excited by his message around affordability of rent and childcare. But Shapiro told a questioner at a Lewiston, Pa. event that he’s more concerned about what he sees as a failure by Mamdani — a vocal supporter of Palestinian rights — to rein in supporters’ more extreme comments about Israel that Shapiro described as “blatantly antisemitic.”

“Leaders have a responsibility to speak and act with moral clarity,” Shapiro said in arguing that Mamdani must condemn comments such as calls to “globalize the intifada.” The governor added: “I don’t care if you’re a Republican or Democratic leader or a democratic socialist leader.”

But just a couple of days later, Shapiro worked to burnish his image as a Democrat who supports certain gun rights by talking up the rollback of Pennsylvania’s Sunday hunting ban on a radio interview with 1970s-rock-star-turned-right-wing extremist Ted Nugent. As critics were quick to point out, Nugent’s recent past is marked by some blatant antisemitism that dwarfs the manufactured Mamdani crisis. The “Cat Scratch Fever” song man once called Michael Bloomberg the mayor of “Jew York City” and blamed gun control on prominent Jewish-Americans. Shapiro did not raise this in what by all accounts was a friendly interview.

The bizarre pivot from his controversial Mamdani comments to his cozy chat with Nugent proves only one thing: Shapiro believes the Democrats’ path out of the wilderness veers right. It’s understandable and admirable that, in a moment of clearly rising antisemitism, the governor stands as a powerful voice. A man who may soon bid to become America’s first Jewish president was the victim in April of a horrific firebombing attack that targeted him and his family in the Harrisburg governor’s mansion. Over the fraught 22 months since the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, Shapiro — supporter of a two-state solution — has walked the tightrope of criticizing the right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu while also urging the end of pro-Palestinian protest encampments.

But as Israel’s ceaseless assaults on Gaza, including gunfire at food distribution sites as more Palestinian children succumb to a growing famine, are making top Democrats’ high-wire act on the Middle East increasingly look like a road to nowhere. Not only does attacking Mamdani while the 33-year-old New Yorker is showing how Democrats can win back alienated young voters look like terrible politics, these attacks sound small when compared to monstrous moral crimes taking place in Gaza.

The New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, who is Jewish and who has been a key Mamdani ally after losing to him in the mayoral primary, said it much better than I could. “Josh Shapiro won’t help keep Jews safe in NYC or Pennsylvania by feeding Trump’s narrative about our Democratic nominee for mayor,” Lander told Politico. Dissing Mamdani to the backbeat of a Ted Nugent guitar riff is a wildly off-key reading of the current political moment.

There are many times when culture explains the zeitgeist much better than our tangled and confused politics — none more so than when arguably the greatest gymnast of the 21st century, America’s Simone Biles, struggled with her routine and her state of mind at the COVID-delayed Summer Olympics in Tokyo four years ago this week. I wrote that Olympic athletes and “their problems are also emblematic of what’s become the key post-pandemic battleground for figuring out happiness or even the meaning of life — which is the workplace." Read why in my July 29, 2021 piece: “In an America of ‘suicide shifts’ and toxic work culture, Simone Biles speaks for all of us.”

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