How the US right wing is taking over news media and choking press freedom
Takeover of broadcast companies by Donald Trump’s allies is harbinger of media capitulation to authoritarian leanings
The
US right has appeared to increase its influence on mainstream media in
America in recent weeks, especially in television news which has been a
major target of the Donald Trump administration.
CBS
News – once home to legends of US journalism such as Walter Cronkite
and Edward R Murrow – installed a Trump ally as its ombudsman, weeks
after the family of Larry Ellison, one of the world’s richest men, and a friend of the US president, sealed control over Paramount, the owner of CBS.
Now Paramount is reportedly
looking to buy Warner Bros Discovery, the media behemoth behind CNN,
which would potentially bring the influential news network under the
roof of an increasingly Trump-friendly conglomerate.
At the same time a long-running family feud among Rupert Murdoch and his children was settled with a deal that will assure Fox News – and other powerful media outlets run by the family – will retain their conservative bent.
The
moves deepened concerns among many US media critics and observers of
authoritarianism that press freedoms in the US were undergoing
capitulation to the Trump administration’s rightwing authoritarian
leanings.
At CBS
News, parent company Paramount placed Kenneth Weinstein, the former
head of the conservative Hudson Institute thinktank, to oversee public
complaints. But without a background in journalism and being politically
close to Trump, Weinstein is viewed as a potential conduit of
administration influence.
“It could be that
Weinstein’s appointment represents an effort to turn down the
temperature,” says Kathleen Culver, director of the UW-Madison School of
Journalism and Mass Communication, against the pressure of Trump’s
frequent complaints of liberal bias in the media.
“Or
it could be part of a larger effort to redesign CBS News to pursue
neutral coverage or take a more partisan tack, either in pursuit of a
corporate owner’s partisan goals or in pursuit of a larger audience and a
proper profit motive.”
But the timing of
Weinstein’s appointment came days after Kristi Noem, the homeland
security secretary, complained of biased editing of her CBS Face the
Nation interview on Sunday, and two months after CBS-Paramount agreed to
pay the president $16m to settle a complaint that CBS News unfairly
finessed to a 60 Minutes pre-election interview with Kamala Harris.
Nearly all experts saw the Trump suit as having little merit, but it
appeared to ease the clearing of the sale.
CBS
also said it would no longer permit editing of its interviews prior to
broadcast – a rare move in US news shows where edited interviews are
commonplace.
Separately David Ellison, the new CEO and chairman of Paramount, and son of Oracle
founder Larry Ellison, is said to be pursuing the Free Press, an
“anti-woke” start-up founded by controversial ex-New York Times
journalist Bari Weiss.
In a potential deal
rumored to be worth millions of dollars, Weiss will – in theory – be
given a role re-shaping CBS News editorial content in the direction of
the Free Press and change, as media newsletter Puck noted last week, “the editorial posture and reputation of one of the most storied, and certainly self-important, institutions in American Journalism”.
On
Friday, after the assassination of rightwing influencer Charlie Kirk a
day earlier, Paramount took down an August episode of South Park
lampooning Kirk’s debate speaking style in the character of Cartman
after complaints. When it was published, Kirk himself had laughed off
the characterization, calling the segment “hilarious” and said he
considered it a “badge of honor”.
From a
purely economic perspective, taking a news business to the right could
make some economic sense. Shares in Murdoch-controlled Fox Corporation, owner of rightwing Fox News Channel, are up more than 40% since Trump was re-elected.
Fox
News won 63% of total day cable news viewers and 65% of primetime
consumers in August, while CNN and MSNBC lost half of their audience
across both metrics compared with a year earlier
Last
week, the long-running dispute between four children of the 94-year-old
media mogul was settled. Murdoch’s eldest son and appointed successor,
Lachlan, along with his two younger sisters, Chloe and Grace, was
assured control of the family business – and its political leaning
firmly to the right – until at least 2050. The three disputing siblings –
James, Elizabeth and Prudence – walked away with $1.1bn each.
Though
Trump is pursuing a lawsuit against the Murdoch-owned Wall Street
Journal for its reporting of Jeffrey Epstein birthday book entry, the
immense power of Fox in American politics is now assured to continue for
the foreseeable future.
“Trump’s relationship with Murdoch is of course all over the place,” said Bob Thompson, a Syracuse University media professor.
But,
Thompson says, the settlement of the 60 Minutes lawsuit was “clearly a
capitulation to the federal government because they wanted to get the
merger through. I can’t think of any prior historical context where CBS
have ever rolled over on that.”
The same may
also be true for when CBS cancelled the late night talk show hosted by
Trump antagonist Stephen Colbert, though CBS said it was purely for
financial reasons. “I don’t think they were lying,” Thompson said,
“because part of that financial decision was they wanted the [merger]
deal to go through.”
Nor is it just television where the right’s grip is stiffening.
At
the Washington Post, Adam O’Neal, a former correspondent from the
Economist and Wall Street Journal editorial writer, was recently tapped
by owner Jeff Bezos to champion “personal liberties and free markets” in
its opinion pages – another sign that a once centrist or left-leaning
publication is drifting right.
But not every
US media business is heading that way – when Mark Guiducci, Vanity
Fair’s new editor, reportedly recently floated the the idea of putting
Melania Trump on the cover, it prompted backlash from some staffers
whose outrage quickly leaked out into the press.