If Paramount and Shari Redstone have an issue with my framing of this farcical deal they agreed to with Trump that includes a $16 million payoff directly to him, they can take it up with Senator Ron Wyden, who wrote “Paramount just paid Trump a bribe for merger approval. When Democrats retake power, I’ll be first in line calling for federal charges. In the meantime, state prosecutors should make the corporate execs who sold out our democracy answer in court, today.”
Every legal expert who isn’t wholly owned by Trump has come out and said this lawsuit Trump threatened CBS with over their 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris is essentially, a joke that would never be taken seriously in a country with the rule of law. Luckily for Trump, we don’t live in a country with the rule of law for our elites, and his shameless attempt to install a shambolically corrupt dictatorship has paved the way for the Shari Redstones of the world to live their truth: spending every day pushing the boundaries for cowardice and corruption.
Paramount and Skydance Media have an $8.4 billion merger pending that the Trump administration must approve, and Trump has been using this frivolous lawsuit as leverage over them. Shari Redstone personally is slated to make up to $2.4 billion on this deal, and that is the price she is willing to sell CBS’s soul for.
There is no reason to trust CBS News anymore. It’s not a news network. There admittedly wasn’t much reason to trust them in the first place, as they have long been the most Fox News curious of the big three mainstream networks, and they were caught plagiarizing two different independent journalists in the same week earlier this year. But 60 Minutes has long been the only good TV news show, and now that is gone. Longtime producer Bill Owens left over objections to Redstone’s preference that they stop doing journalism, along with former CBS News CEO Wendy McMahon who resigned because “it’s become clear that the company and I do not agree on the path forward.” Whatever comes next for 60 Minutes and CBS News will be inextricable from Redstone proving that capitalism is incompatible with journalism.
There is absolutely no question whatsoever that CBS News is just another propaganda network under Trump’s heel now. Shari Redstone and Paramount have very publicly negotiated a deal openly stating that this is their vision for their flagship network. They are gleefully declaring themselves to be more than happy to destroy American journalistic institutions if it means they can get paid. This whole era is defined by shockingly greedy elites looting Rome while it burned.
What a sad, pathetic group of people. American elites in this moment have proven themselves on the whole to be not just morally or intellectually bankrupt, but fundamentally broken on a very human level that almost makes them feel like a different species from the rest of us with net worths under a billion dollars. The simple endeavors that separate man from the wild and make us so unique have no purchase among a group of people who only see the majesty and mystery of the world as something to be exploited for profit. Shari Redstone is the face of a craven and cowardly group of elites shunning their basic humanity so they can die with a little bit more money than their peers. If America survives this era of collapse and emerges into something closer to our stated ideals, people like Redstone and companies like Paramount will be held up as avatars of the kind of country we can never devolve into again if we want it to survive.
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