The Not-So-Free Press

We are just one or two corporate mergers away from having all media in the United States under the control of Trump-aligned billionaires

It’s typical of the Orwellian tenor of our times that a Substack newsletter called the “Free Press” is now playing an instrumental role in Trump’s consolidation of state power over the lingering remnants of America’s independent media.

Bari Weiss—formerly of the New York Times op-ed page, and since founder of The Free Press on Substack—was tapped yesterday to serve as editor in chief of CBS News. Weiss has made a career of proclaiming her supposed “heterodox” beliefs and contrarian willingness to tweak the pieties of both sides of the political spectrum (though the promised criticism of the right often fails to materialize). But what her appointment to the CBS job actually shows is a willingness to cater to Trump’s autocratic demand for editorial control over U.S. news rooms.

After all, CBS is owned by Paramount—whose long-sought merger with Skydance was approved by Trump’s FCC only after they reached a suspiciously-timed settlement with Trump in his lawsuit against the company. They also made various moves to compromise their editorial independence and bring their journalism into alignment with Trump’s partisan interests. Recently, they agreed to appoint a conservative censor (ahem, “ombudsman”) to monitor their news content. Similar moves led, earlier this year, to the resignation of senior members of the 60 Minutes and CBS News team—in protest over political interference in their broadcasts.

Shortly after their merger was approved, Paramount also made a point of sacking liberal satirist and long-time Trump critic Stephen Colbert. They, of course, claim that this was all strictly a business decision.

Paramount Skydance, by the way, is run by David Ellison. That’s billionaire Larry Ellison’s son. Larry Ellison, meanwhile—long-time head of Oracle—is a Trump ally, who has leveraged his ties to the White House to secure lucrative contracts in a Trump-brokered deal to build AI data centers. He has also been tapped as one a handful of investors poised to take over the U.S. version of TikTok, once it splits off from its Chinese parent company (another Trump-brokered business arrangement that has used state power and coercion to funnel billions to the president’s cronies.)

The sudden elevation of Weiss—who first came to most people’s attention for her screeds against “wokeness” at the New York Times, and who has seemingly concentrated all of her supposed “heterodox” and “contrarian” firepower at The Free Press against liberals, trans people, and leftists, rather than the White House—to the role as chief editor at CBS— obviously plays into the larger Trumpification of the storied broadcaster. David Ellison also bought The Free Press as part of his deal to bring Weiss on board.

The so-called Free Press then, appears to be helping to put the final nail in the coffin of the genuinely free press in America.

If this seems overstated—let us step back for a moment to survey the overall media landscape in the country.

America’s news providers—such as they are—can be roughly divided into legacy newspapers, broadcast and cable TV, and social media. Let’s take the last first.

Of the major social media platforms, X is obviously controlled by a red-pilled, white nationalist, fanatically MAGA-aligned right-wing billionaire, Elon Musk—who took over the platform formerly known as Twitter in order to loosen all content restrictions and fill it with Neo-Nazi memes.

When major advertisers threatened to pull their content from the newly-Nazified version of Twitter, due to alarm over the proliferation of far-right antisemitic and racist content, Musk appealed to Trump’s antitrust enforcers to punish a liberal media watchdog that had dared to report (accurately) on the deluge of Neo-Nazi content on the platform.

So, the Trump administration has used state coercion to intimidate advertisers into continuing to financially support content lifted from the pages of Der Stürmer.

So much for the platform formerly known as Twitter.

Meanwhile, its biggest competitors—Facebook, Instagram, etc.—are owned by Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg—who has evolved in recent years from a one-time liberal funder of pro–immigration reform causes to a Trump-curious “manosphere” bro who made a point of contributing money to Trump’s inaugural fund.

As for TikTok—which has had its share of other problems with editorial independence, shall we say—it is now (as we saw above)—about to be taken over by a Trump-aligned billionaire, who’s also part of the same family that now controls Paramount, and thus, CBS news. It’s not hard to imagine that Larry Ellison might exert pressure to re-shape the TikTok algorithm to favor pro-Trump content; just as Musk did with ex-Twitter.

So that’s social media. How about legacy media?

America’s major mass-circulation newspapers today are the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. Of these, the last is owned by right-wing media baron Rupert Murdoch (who—to his credit—is I guess still independent enough that he has managed to get himself sued for defamation by Trump—despite doing probably more than any person living to create the right-wing fever swamp that brought Trump to power in the first place).

The Post, as we know, is owned by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos—who has interfered with the paper’s editorial line in order to bring it into closer alignment with the Trump administration. (The paper also fired one of their columnists a few weeks ago—for daring to accurately quote some of the racist things that Charlie Kirk said before his death.)

Only the Times, then—of the three major newspapers—remains an independent, publicly-traded company that is not wholly owned by a Trump-friendly billionaire. It is therefore fitting that—in a perfect inversion of the truth—people like Weiss have chosen to smear that paper as being the least independent of all—a mouthpiece, as they see it—in their mirror-image version of the universe—of “woke” elite propaganda. (Trump and his friends are gifted at nothing so much as the psychological art of “projection.”)

So much for newspapers—how about TV news?

Of the major broadcasters, CBS has already sold out to Trump, as we’ve seen. The Disney-owned ABC similarly sought to curry favor with Trump’s administration—under direct pressure from his FCC regulators—by temporarily suspending Jimmy Kimmel from the airwaves.

So that basically just leaves NBC holding down the fort for independent broadcast journalism. How long would they hold out on their own—particularly if Trump’s FCC threatens to revoke their broadcast license for not toeing the party line?

On the cable side, CNN still seems independent in its editorial perspective. But Paramount’s David Ellison is also reportedly making a play to buy CNN’s parent company, Warn Bros. Discovery. That would bring CNN and HBO too under the thumb of the pro-Trump House of Ellison.

Obviously, this degree of extreme consolidation in the media poses a severe threat to democracy and the independence of thought in America.

What is generally supposed to forestall this kind of consolidation, in our system of government, is our nation’s antitrust laws.

But many a Trump-friendly billionaire has discovered that you can actually enlist the antitrust regulators on your side—perverting and derailing their purpose from preventing the unilateral accumulation of corporate power, to actually furthering it—by catering to the partisan interests of the administration currently in power.

Hence we see that Trump’s FTC has been willing to use its regulatory power to support Musk and prevent boycott actions targeting the racism on his platform; and Trump’s FCC has been willing to use the threat of government coercion to bring broadcast journalists into line with Trump’s partisan agenda.

If you think that David Ellison couldn’t possibly end up running CBS and CNN and Warner Bros. Studios and HBO—that surely that much power lodged in one corporation would violate our country’s anti-monopolization laws—I say: you’re probably right as a legal matter. But who would stop it, if Trump’s FCC is entirely under the president’s thumb, and he actually likes what Ellison is doing, because it enables him to accumulate more power over America’s formerly-independent media?

I think there’s a very good chance we will see a Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger in the near future—and Trump’s antitrust regulators will have no problem approving it.

Our legislators in generations past perceived this danger too: what if some future president tried to corrupt the purpose of antitrust enforcement in order to secure his partisan advantage?

Congress therefore tried to head off this danger by installing independent heads of agency at these regulators—led by multi-member boards with guaranteed partisan balance and for-cause removal restrictions—in order to ensure they could not be perverted into mere corrupt tools to advance the executive’s personal interests.

One might think this safeguard against partisan corruption was airtight. But one would be forgetting about the Supreme Court—which now regards these congressional guardrails as unconstitutional (despite decades-old precedent to the contrary).

Since taking office, Trump has obviously tried to fire and remove Democratic appointees at the regulatory agencies—in blatant defiance of federal statutes protecting them from partisan interference.

And the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has so far let him get away with it. And they will almost certainly continue to let him get away with it, because they are adherents of the “unitary executive theory,” according to which the president can pervert executive agencies to serve his narrow political interests as much as he wants.

And so, in a matter of months, a handful of billionaire allies of the president have managed to achieve almost complete power over the lingering remnants of America’s independent media.

We seem to be retrogressing to a former time in American history, when a group of “elephant plutocrats” (to use Vachel Lindsay’s term at the time) used a sleazy and sensationalized “yellow press” to foment wars and gin up U.S. imperialist ambitions, in order to open new markets for their corporate interests. The age of the robber barons and their hired propagandists appears to have returned.

It is ironic—to say the least—that Bari Weiss—who is forever trumpeting her ideological independence; who claimed for herself the mantle of the last “free press” in America; who proclaimed that she alone of all journalists could never be intimidated or bought—should be the one to ring the death knell of genuinely independent journalism.

But I suppose it’s no more ironic than the propaganda of authoritarian regimes always is—regimes that give their state-sponsored media titles like Pravda ['“Truth”]. (Ahem, “Truth Social”, anyone?)

Bari Weiss is merely following in the footsteps of the great corrupt press barons of our country’s gilded past. Edgar Lee Masters featured one of them, in his great collection of social criticism in verse, The Spoon River Anthology. What he wrote of his “Editor Whedon” could well be said of today’s Editor Weiss:

To be able to see every side of every question;

To be on every side, to be everything, to be nothing long;

To pervert truth, to ride it for a purpose,

To use great feelings and passions of the human family

For base designs, for cunning ends,

To wear a mask like the Greek actors—

Your eight-page paper—behind which you huddle,

Bawling through the megaphone of big type:

“This is I, the giant.” […]

To win at any cost, save your own life.

In short, concludes Masters: “To be an editor.”