Paramount and Shari Redstone Ensure That CBS Is No Longer a News Outlet, It’s Trump’s Mouthpiece

On the heels of legendary 60 Minutes producer Bill Owens resigning over claims that the show’s independence was compromised comes another high profile exit for the former news agency. CBS News’ top executive Wendy McMahon resigned yesterday, writing in a statement that “it’s become clear that the company and I do not agree on the path forward.”

That path forward is crystal clear, as CBS’s parent company Paramount has decided that journalism is not a focus for CBS News anymore, and they would prefer to just do whatever Trump tells them to do. They interfered in a recent 60 Minutes report on Trump firing IRS workers, and the inherent tension between capitalists and journalism has never been more evident. Journalism exists to challenge power, and capitalists cozy up to it in their never-ending rent-seeking endeavors they falsely claim to be competition. Instead of fighting back against Trump’s lawsuit that First Amendment attorneys told CNN was “frivolous and dangerous,” Chairwoman Shari Redstone and her band of bootlickers on Paramount’s board are capitulating to the most pathetic fascist in human history in the hopes that they can get their $8 billion merger with Skydance Media approved.

If CBS actually caves to this extent, that would be the end of 60 Minutes.

Which, of course, is the point. Not just for Trump, but for Shari Redstone.

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— Bill Grueskin (@bgrueskin.bsky.social) May 20, 2025 at 6:00 AM

This is the kind of shameless kleptocracy and unabashed corruption that would make some Kremlin insiders blush, and Elizabeth Warren, Ron Wyden and Bernie Sanders sent Paramount a letter saying they may be breaking federal bribery laws if they settle with Trump. After getting caught plagiarizing independent journalists (twice), Shari Redstone and the Paramount board are unambiguous in their desire to sacrifice whatever shreds of journalistic integrity CBS News has left for dear leader. CBS News has always been Fox News curious, but its flagship 60 Minutes program that is the gold standard for TV journalism papered over the litany of other embarrassments by its TV show hosts cosplaying as journalists.

But now Shari Redstone and Paramount have ensured that journalism is the last word that anyone will ever associate with CBS News. If you work there and are still trying to fight the good fight, you should be commended for working to establish basic journalistic principles in an environment hostile to them, but understand that the capitalists at the top of your organization have proven that you will never do the kind of journalism that gets capital-J journalists into this industry. CBS News is openly advertising itself as a PR agency for Trump, and if the regime wants to plant any friendly propaganda outside the unhinged right-wing universe, Shari Redstone has made it clear that she will lick Trump’s boot and give him a home for whatever demands he wants so long as he signals her merger may be approved (that said, Redstone may want to ask the litany of capitulating law firms like Paul Weiss how trusting Trump’s word in quid pro quos has gone for them).

The ongoing cowardice of America’s capitalist class is one of the most astonishing developments of this second Trump administration. A bunch of doofuses on Wall Street and in corporate America completely convinced themselves of a Trump that does not and never has existed, and now they are backing down from winnable fights while JPMorgan and other large banks are getting their credit downgraded along with the rest of America. Everyone who jumps in with Trump loses whatever credibility they have left, and Paramount is enthusiastically choosing to be the avatar for this eternal dynamic that Rudy Giuliani understood before Shari Redstone did.

What 60 Minutes does going forward will be one of the most telling indications of how much Redstone and the Paramount board are embracing former CBS CEO Les Moonves’ famous line that “[Trump] may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” There has never been a more succinct summation of America’s morally bankrupt capitalist class’s worldview than that line. Who cares about this country anyway? There are short-term profits to make for capitalists determined to destroy the world and avoid any responsibility for it while lecturing us as to how they’re the supposed adults in the room.

Moonves and Redstone and Paramount and all the other cowards who are so cloistered in their elite safe space that they cannot see the world past next quarter’s earnings are soldering their personal legacies to Donald Trump. Should we ever escape this hellish reality, CBS News and the like should never be allowed to rejoin the ranks of real journalists so long as Shari Redstone and Paramount are in charge. They have made their priorities clear, and what they believe CBS News should do going forward is to be the antithesis of journalism.