The Media Bias Wars Are Over

A half century of bitching about the newspaper really paid off for the American right. 

Thanks to cowardly, shortsighted, amoral corporate clowns desperate to complete a trillion dollar merger and a regime all too happy to accept the capitulation of powerful people who have submitted to our mad king in a quasi-sexual way, CBS News has been conquered by the American conservative movement. 

Right-wing actors who have for generations salivated over the prospect of turning major corporate media into part of the vast right-wing noise machine have taken over CBS as part of an agreement the regime struck with the moneymen (and women) behind the merger between Paramount and SkyDance. 

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The Trump regime announced today that it would dispatch a “truth arbiter” who will monitor all CBS coverage to ensure the network does not criticize the regime’s fascist agenda or broadcast stories that might conflict with the push to unravel democratic self governance in the United States. It’s a sickening turn in our drift toward all-out authoritarianism – I’m begging corporate leaders to read one fucking book – and it’s one born out of the right’s bad faith, like every other major accomplishment their movement has secured in its slow-motion coup.

In Fox News, we've had voluntary state media for thirty years in the US. In a defeated and occupied CBS, we now have involuntary state media. PBS could be next. That slope everyone keeps talking about is really fucking slippery.

The Media Can’t Handle This Bad Faith

The modern media was not designed to responsibly cover an ascendant fascist movement determined to use democracy against itself

Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter

In case you haven't kept up with the government takeover of CBS, Trump and his allies sued CBS because 60 Minutes dared to edit an interview they did with Kamala Harris a few weeks before the 2024 election. This editing of a sit-down interview with a presidential candidate constituted illegal election interference, the Trump universe cried in bad faith. In no way did they mean it. In no way did they actually think 60 Minutes had interfered with election results because they edited an interview. It's a ludicrous notion – laughable in the worst way – equating a news outlet engaged in basic editing with a shadowy entity determined to influence the results of an election. It doesn't matter that those on the right have never meant what they said. That's the power of bad faith. It served as perfect bad-faith pretext to do the whole Trump-as-mob-boss thing and extort the network and its parent company if the parent company wanted those sweet, sweet merger bucks. It worked like a charm. CBS is dead. The mad king is less mad.

FCC Commissioner Ana Gomez, one of the only people left in government willing to tell the truth, excoriated Paramount for selling out press freedom in order to do their precious merger. Gomez, like the good Bad Faith Times subscribers, saw the whole plot for what it was: The culmination of years and years of whining in bad faith about liberal media bias against the country's right-wing movement and its carefully constructed unreality.

“All of this is being carried out under the guise of combating so-called ‘media bias,’ a term which, in practice, appears to encompass anything or anyone who disagrees with this administration," Gomez said in a statement. "Never mind that those now feigning concern over media bias are the same individuals who have spent the past decade attacking the press and sowing public distrust in journalism. And even if such bias did exist to the extent they claim, the last entity the American people should entrust with defining or policing it is the federal government."

Paramount's pathetic capitulation to the country's fascist bullies, Gomez said, had given the regime a recipe to taking over other independent outlets that might tell Americans about their ever-shrinking rights and the time-bomb economy created by the mad king and his army of Baghdad Bobs.

The Bad Faith Of ‘Popular’ Right-Wing Media And Why It Matters

It was all so absurd and unbelievable from the start. Conservatives across the US have used social media over the past month to weave a conspiracy in which a fascist film known as Sound of Freedom was being censored and undermined by shadowy forces. We were to believe that wage

Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter

"This will be a new company, born in shame after trading away fundamental First Amendment principles in pursuit of pure profit," Gomez said. "It embraced this administration’s radical notion that discriminatory behavior should be tolerated and even embraced, while efforts to expand opportunity for everyone should be rejected. More alarmingly, the company agreed to never-before-seen forms of government control over newsroom decisions and editorial judgment—actions that violate both the First Amendment and the law."

The Soviet-style regime apparatchik telling CBS what it can and cannot broadcast is somehow not the worst part of this whole fucking thing. Paramount, in its prostrating before the king, said its news and entertainment programming would "embody a diversity of viewpoints across the political and ideological spectrum." The company issued this statement a day before killing its entire diversity programming, a concession to the fascist, blackpilled worldview it and of itself. A few weeks later, they allowed Trump to tell them who can and can't tell jokes on late-night TV.

We know what Paramount means when it talks about "diversity of viewpoints" because we know what every institution means when it uses coded language to capitulate to the American right wing. Viewpoint diversity means you have your standard, run-of-the-mill conservatives (maybe they wear eyeglasses to suggest they sometimes think about things), your right wingers (fake hair, faces mutilated), your outright fascists (the ugliest motherfuckers you can find), and your milquetoast liberals paid to serve as punching bags on air. This "diversity of viewpoints" will include exactly zero leftists; we know that. This has been the Fox formula since the second Clinton administration and it has appealed to some distorted sense of fairness that resides within conservatives and independents too embarrassed to identify as conservatives. This will now be the CBS formula in its attempt to stay in the mad king's good graces. Best of luck with that.

Whether corporate media dependent on advertising dollars is inherently incapable to serving as a check on capitalist excesses and its anti-democracy offshoots is a question I don't have time or capacity to explore in this blog post. I just hope Americans realize the conquering of CBS was the natural endpoint of generations of right wingers complaining moaning and bitching and whining and crying that major media outlets weren't being fair to them. That was never the case (the examples are plentiful; as an elder millennial my mind drifts to the media's devilish cheerleading for the Iraq War). The worst part: Those doing the whining and crying knew it wasn't the case. Their complaints, like everything else they do, were in bad faith.

Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.