The news media is not popular among Americans. A Gallup survey from February showed 36% of those polled have “no trust at all” in mass media, 33% have “not very much” trust, and just 31% have a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust. So getting the average American to care about the terms of a corporate merger that imposed what Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr described as a “bias monitor” and “ombudsman” on CBS News is a tall order.
But Americans should care — a lot. This move is an affront to the First Amendment and sets the precedent that partisans on the FCC can compel media outlets to accept the authority of a “government-sanctioned ‘truth arbiter’” — as FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez, the lone Democrat on the commission, put it.
You don’t have to like or trust the “mainstream media” to be repulsed by the idea of a thought-police snitch in a news organization scouring for the kind of “bias” that would offend the White House — no matter which party is in power.
Gomez, in an interview with PBS, warned that President Donald Trump’s “administration is weaponizing the FCC as a licensing authority,” and she said that any time the commission has to approve a license request, merger or sale, “I am concerned that you are going to see similar demands for concessions that will lead to censorship.” Gomez added that she’s “concerned that this will breed more corporate capitulation, because the bottom dollar is what these corporations want. They are not protecting their journalists.”
The TL;DR version of how we got here begins with CBS News interviewing then-Vice President Kamala Harris before the 2024 election. One of the presidential candidate’s answers was edited for brevity on “60 Minutes” but broadcast in full on “Face the Nation.” It’s common practice to edit interview footage to fit within broadcast television time constraints (Fox News does it, too). There’s nothing unethical about it, and “60 Minutes” later published the full transcript of the interview, which proved decisively that there was no journalistic ethical misconduct.
Trump, however, sued over the interview, and a conservative group filed a complaint — alleging that the interview was deliberately edited to make Harris look good and deceive voters — which was dismissed by the outgoing Democratic FCC chairman at the end of President Joe Biden’s term in January, but revived by Carr once Trump took office.
The saga came to an ignominious end last week with the federal government’s approval of the $8 billion merger between CBS’ corporate parent Paramount and Skydance — creating a “new Paramount” company. That merger followed Paramount’s capitulation to Trump’s bogus lawsuit with a $16 million settlement. (Trump claims the company promised an additional $20 million in PSAs, but Paramount’s new chairman and CEO David Ellison hasn’t confirmed or denied that claim.) That’s peanuts for a corporate behemoth, but as we’ve seen from law firms like Paul Weiss, universities like Columbia and other corporate media companies like Disney/ABC, cowardice is contagious. And the imposition of a “bias monitor” is the real win for Trump.
Paramount’s new president, Jeff Shell, said the CBS News ombudsman will be a “transparency vehicle” and insisted “we’re not being overseen by the FCC or anybody else.” The FCC’s official approval of the Paramount-Skydance merger said “the now-settled lawsuit filed by President Donald J. Trump against Paramount and CBS News” is “unrelated to our review of the Transaction” and added that the ombudsman “reports to the President of New Paramount,” and “will receive and evaluate any complaints of bias or other concerns involving CBS.” Carr said at an open commission meeting last week that the FCC is in a “trust but verify posture” regarding CBS News.
Everybody’s saying all the right things — that this isn’t about creating a system where the federal government gets to decide what constitutes “bias” or other forms of wrongthink that offend Trump, his administration and his followers. But Carr has made other recent comments that don’t seem to indicate a “just the facts” impartiality. Rather, it sure sounds like he’s a happy soldier in Trump’s culture war retribution blitzkrieg. The chairman told the far-right news outlet Newsmax: “[Trump] smashed the facade that these are gatekeepers that can determine what people think. Everything we’re seeing right now flows from that decision by President Trump, and he’s winning.”
Gomez told me in an email that she’s concerned the CBS News bias monitor’s job will be “to ensure that journalists do not criticize this administration or express views that conflict with its agenda,” calling it a “never-before-seen form of government intrusion into the newsroom” that she says is “in clear violation of the First Amendment and the law.” She added, “To this administration, ‘media bias’ appears to mean anything or anyone it disagrees with.”
Given the lack of trust in the news media, I asked Gomez why the average American should care about the CBS News bias monitor. “It should concern everyone who values a free and independent press. No government, regardless of party, should get to decide what is true, who gets heard, and which voices are silenced,” she said.
To their credit, several conservative advocacy groups banded together earlier this year to publicly oppose the FCC’s investigation of CBS News, arguing an “adverse ruling against CBS would constitute regulatory overreach and advance precedent that can be weaponized by future FCCs.” And the conservative Wall Street Journal editorial board pleaded in vain with Paramount’s bosses to not “[pay] off the president” and instead “win the legal case, vindicate its CBS journalists and the First Amendment.”
Though Paramount ended up sheepishly bending its knee to Trump, it’s mildly heartening that some influential voices on the right still understand the concept that any powers endowed to the government will ultimately be wielded by one’s political enemies — so long as we still have a democracy.
Although Trump and his administration are doing everything they can to run roughshod over institutions and impose ideological litmus tests on government employees, universities and private companies — they won’t be in power forever, however much that may disappoint them. And once they’ve left the White House, it’s unlikely that MAGA would be warm to the idea of a “bias monitor” that informs Democratic administrations about what they perceive as unfair media coverage.
I argued many times during Trump’s first administration, and later during the Biden administration, that the left should not demand government-approved “truth arbiters” in their fight, as many did when searching for ways to push back on Russian disinformation campaigns, online bigotry and Covid conspiracy theory lies. Better late than never, but hopefully now they can see why that was always a terrible idea.
However, the few remaining “limited government” conservatives and libertarians who haven’t completely surrendered their principles in service of Trump’s revenge regime ought to demonstrate that they’re not just MAGA-compliant hacks bitter about the mainstream media, and speak out against the idea of government-sanctioned informants in any newsroom.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
