Media Politicize

FCC Slides Major Deal Through

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Article in the New York Times by Benjamin Mullin, 7/24/25

Headline:  “F.C.C. Approves Skydance’s $8 Billion Merger With Paramount”

Subhead:  “The deal, which came under intense scrutiny by the Trump administration, was hailed by the F.C.C. chief, who welcomed “significant changes” at CBS, a unit of Paramount.”

“The Federal Communications Commission said Thursday that it would allow Paramount to merge with the Hollywood studio Skydance, clearing the way for one of the most highly scrutinized media deals in the last decade.

“Brendan Carr, the chairman of the F.C.C., said in a statement that the agency had approved the deal after receiving assurances from Skydance that the new company would be committed to unbiased journalism and would not establish programs related to diversity, equity and inclusion. . .”

Read the full article at:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/24/business/media/fcc-skydance-merger-paramount.html

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Article in The Washington Post by Jeremy Barr, 7/24/25

Headline: “FCC approves $8 billion Paramount-Skydance merger after lengthy review”

Subhead:  “The commission voted 2-1 in favor of the transaction amid accusations of political pressure on Paramount and Skydance, with Biden-appointed Commissioner Anna M. Gomez in opposition.”

“. . .Gomez, who has expressed concern that the administration was unduly pressuring Skydance and Paramount to make concessions to secure approval of the merger, blasted the outcome in a statement. ‘After months of cowardly capitulation to this administration, Paramount finally got what it wanted,’ she said. ‘Unfortunately, it is the American public who will ultimately pay the price for its actions.’ . . .”

Read the full article at:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/07/24/fcc-approves-8-billion-paramount-skydance-merger-after-lengthy-review/

Media Deal or Bribe?

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Article in Democracy Now by Jeff Cohen, 7/23/25

Headline: “Big Fat Bribe: Stephen Colbert’s Show Canceled After He Slams Trump & Paramount/Skydance Merger”

The top-ranked show on late-night television, CBS’s The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, has been canceled, just days after Colbert skewered Paramount, the parent company of CBS, for settling a lawsuit brought by President Donald Trump. The lawsuit accused another CBS show, 60 Minutes, of biased editing in an interview with Kamala Harris during the 2024 election. Its settlement comes as Paramount works to finalize a lucrative merger with Skydance Media that must be approved by the Federal Communications Commission. On his show, Colbert called the settlement ‘a big fat bribe.’

“So many media conglomerates had already given thinly disguised bribes to Trump to settle lawsuits they could not possibly lose in court,” explains Jeff Cohen, co-founder of the online action group RootsAction and the media watch group FAIR, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting. Cohen says he suspects Paramount agreed to cancel Colbert’s show — and will likely remove other programming critical of Trump — as part of a deal with the administration to win favorable conditions for its merger. . . It’s profit maximization. . .”

Read the full article at:

https://www.democracynow.org/2025/7/23/stephen_colbert

Rural Public-Media Freefall

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PUBLIC MEDIA ARE NOT STATE-CONTROLLED MEDIA

Article in The Daily Beast by Ben Sheehan, 7/23/25

Headline:  “What Trump’s PBS and NPR Funding Cuts Really Mean For America”

Subhead:  “Millions of Americans understand the value of public media—it makes us more informed and keeps us safe.”

“. . .American public media, as we know it today, has been a decades-long project. The government began funding it in 1967 through the nonprofit Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which then gave money to the Public Broadcasting Service (founded in 1969), National Public Radio (founded in 1970), and other nonprofits.  Until now.

“Last week, Congress voted to kill CPB’s funding for 2026 and 2027. Every Democratic representative and senator voted to maintain the funding as did Republicans Brian Fitzpatrick and Mike Turner in the House, and Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins in the Senate. Every other Republican voted to cut it. . .”

“Then what happens?

“For starters, local news coverage would decline further. (To be clear, it’s already in a state of freefall.) PBS and NPR affiliates, in many cases, are the best local news option. It’s not ‘woke’ programming that will die from these cuts, but oversight of your county, city, town, and neighborhood. Of your sheriff, district attorney, county executive, mayor, city council and school board—the people with the most impact on your day-to-day life. . .”

Read the full article at:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/what-trumps-pbs-and-npr-funding-cuts-really-mean-for-america/

Radio Lifeline Disappearing

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Article in The Washington Post by Staff, 7/22/25

Headline:  “Congress cut public media funding. Now what?

Subhead:  “What one rural community in Alaska could be losing now that Congress has defunded public media. And why this became a priority for President Donald Trump.”

“KYUK is the oldest Native American-owned radio station in the country. It broadcasts morning newscasts in both English and Yup’ik, the local Indigenous language, to 56 remote communities in Southwest Alaska. When there’s a weather emergency or even just a local basketball game, these communities turn to KYUK for information. But soon, that could all change.

“Late last week, Congress passed a rescissions bill that claws back the money set aside for public broadcasting for the next two years. For KYUK, this money represents close to 70 percent of its entire budget. Without it, the station could go dark. . . .”

Read the full article at:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/post-reports/congress-cut-public-media-funding-now-what/

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Article in The Guardian by Edward Helmore, 7/22/25

Headline:  “NPR’s editor-in-chief to step down days after Congress cuts $1.1bn in funding”

Subhead:  “Edith Chapin’s announcement comes after Congress approves Trump bill to cancel all federal funding for public broadcasters”

“The editor-in-chief of the US public radio network NPR has told colleagues that she is stepping down later this year.

“Edith Chapin’s announcement comes just days after federal lawmakers voted in support of Donald Trump’s plan to claw back $1.1bn from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the umbrella organization that funds both NPR and the non-commercial TV network PBS. . .”

Read the full article at:

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2025/jul/22/npr-editor-in-chief-to-step-down

Media Political Victim?

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Article in Rolling Stone by Alan Spinwall, 7/22/25

Headline:  “Politics, Not Performance, Killed ‘The Late Show With Stephen Colbert”

Subhead:  “The end of ‘The Late Show With Stephen Colbert’ signals a much bigger shift for late night. But it’s not just about money”

“At the start of Thursday night’s episode of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, the veteran talk show host announced that on Wednesday, his bosses at CBS informed him that Late Show would be coming to an end next May. As the studio audience booed at great length and volume, Colbert acknowledged, ‘Yeah, I share your feelings.’ Then he inspired additional sympathetic boos by adding, “It’s not just the end of our show, but it’s the end of The Late Show on CBS. I’m not being replaced. This is all just going away. . .”

“. . . A specific merger with Skydance Media was proposed last year, and it is still awaiting approval by the Federal Communications Commission — an agency whose chief reports to the man who lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., and who earlier this month received a $16 million settlement in a lawsuit he filed against CBS regarding the editing of a 60 Minutes episode. Colbert has been one of the most vocal critics of the current administration of anyone on television. . .

Read the full article at:

https://au.rollingstone.com/tv/tv-features/late-show-with-stephen-colbert-ending-analysis-80208/

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Article in The Guardian by Adrian Horton, 7/22/25

Headline: “Losing Stephen Colbert and The Late Show is a crushing blow, whatever the reason”

Subhead: “After watching the comedian’s smart and incisive assessment of America’s daily chaos for years, there’s something major to be mourned as he leaves the air”

“. . .or the better part of six years, I have watched every late-night monologue as part of my job at the Guardian (hello, late-night roundup), and though I often grumble about it, The Late Show has become a staple of my media diet and my principle source of news; as a millennial, I haven’t known a television landscape without it. There are many bleaker, deadlier things happening daily in this country, and the field of late-night comedy has been dying slowly for years, but the cancellation of The Late Show, three days after Colbert called out its parent company for settling a lawsuit with Donald Trump, felt especially and pointedly depressing – more a sign of cultural powerlessness and corporate fecklessness in the face of a bully president than the inevitable result of long-shifting tastes. . .”

Read the full article at:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jul/22/stephen-colbert-cancelled-trump-late-night

Jack-booting the Press

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Article in The Atlantic by Paul Farhi, 7/21/25

Headline: “Trump’s Campaign to Crush the Media”

Subhead: “The president has launched a frontal assault on the journalism business. So far, he’s winning.”

“President Donald Trump’s latest assault on the news media came in the form of another lawsuit last week. After The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump had allegedly written a birthday note, complete with ‘bawdy’ doodling, to the convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein in 2003, Trump boiled over with indignation. He denied writing the note and filed a libel suit the next day, demanding $10 billion in damages from the Journal, its parent company, and its principal owner, Rupert Murdoch, a sometime Trump ally.

“Although Trump faces considerable legal obstacles to win in court, betting against him would be unwise. In his first six months in office, he has been on a winning streak in his campaign to punish and diminish the press. His dispute with the Journal, after all, hijacked the news cycle from another Trump “victory”: eliminating federal support for public broadcasting. Early Friday morning, Congress voted to cancel $1.1 billion in subsidies for NPR, PBS, and their affiliated stations, marking the first time Congress has cut off public broadcasters since its funding began nearly 60 years ago. . .”

Read the full article at:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/07/donald-trump-campaign-media/683600/

The Ends Meet

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Article in Columbia Journalism Review by Jon Alsop, 7/21/25

Headline: “The Epstein Effect”

Subhead:  “Has the mainstream press gone QAnon?”

“In Thursday’s edition of this newsletter, Emily Bell wrote about the increasingly curious right-wing-media dynamics surrounding the biggest political story of the moment: the Trump administration’s frantic, yet seemingly doomed, attempts to move its base on from conspiracy theories related to Jeffrey Epstein, the pedophile who killed himself in jail in 2019, and the base’s refusal to be moved. ‘Trump is now confronting the outcome of a media ecosystem he invented, one based on panicky, consensus-squashing conspiracy theories,’ Bell observed. . .”

“. . .I’d argue that the MSM, on the whole, has never sounded as much like MAGA media as it has this past fortnight; as one unnamed reporter put it to New York’s Charlotte Klein last week, ‘Perhaps for the first time, the mainstream media and far-right media are sort of rowing in the same direction,’ at least when it comes to calling for Trump to release more records. . .”

Read the full article at:

https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/epstein-effect-mainstream-media-press-qanon-conspiracy.php

How to Control: Ban Access

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Article in the New York Times by Katie Robertson, 7/21/25

Headline: “White House Bans Wall Street Journal From Press Pool on Trump’s Scotland Trip”

Subhead: “The president sued the publication last week, accusing it of defamation for an article about his ties to the disgraced former financier Jeffrey Epstein.”

“The White House said on Monday that it had barred Wall Street Journal reporters from the traveling press pool for President Trump’s coming trip to Scotland, attacking the publication again for its reporting on ties between the president and the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

“On Thursday, The Journal published an article saying that Mr. Trump had sent Mr. Epstein a lewd birthday note in 2003. It included a drawing of a nude woman, The Journal reported, and ended with Mr. Trump writing, “Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret. . .”

Read the full article at:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/21/business/media/trump-scotland-wsj-press-pool.html

A Dirge for Public Media?

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Public media is not state-controlled media

Article in Poynter by Angela Fu, 7/18/25

Headline: “Congress signs off on Trump’s request to rescind $1 billion in funding for public broadcasting”

Subhead: “The Corporation for Public Broadcasting will lose its funding starting in October — a first in its history”

“For the first time in its 58-year history, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting — the organization responsible for distributing federal dollars to NPR, PBS and other public broadcasters — will lose its funding.

“The loss is a result of Congress’ striking deference to President Donald Trump. Under the Constitution, Congress holds the power to control government spending. But early Friday morning, at Trump’s request, the House joined the Senate in agreeing to take back $9 billion in funds it had already appropriated. That money included $1.07 billion for CPB and nearly $8 billion in foreign aid. . .”

Read the full article at:

https://www.poynter.org/business-work/2025/trump-defunds-npr-pbs-cpb-public-broadcasting/

Goodbye to Some Media

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Public media is NOT state-controlled media

Article in Columbia Journalism Review by Andrew Mercein, 7/18/25

Headline:  “Inside the Radio Stations Devastated by Public Funding Cuts”

Subhead:  “ ‘If we have to make cuts, there’s no easy choice,’ one station manager said.”

“At noon on Friday, just hours after Congress revoked more than 1.1 billion dollars in funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, more than a hundred and fifty member stations joined a closed-door Zoom call with NPR leadership. The federal funding they had spent months trying to save was gone. What remained was a shared sense of loss, exhaustion, and the daunting task of reevaluating their mission and programming.

“In an emotional hour-long call, station leaders grappled with fallback plans and infrastructure gaps. Some large stations offered to share resources with smaller ones. Others voiced gratitude for NPR’s efforts in Washington. But no one believed the damage could be undone quickly—if at all. ‘It was, in some ways, a postmortem,’ said one person who listened to the call. . .”

Read the full article at:

https://www.cjr.org/news/public-radio-stations-funding-cuts-rescission.php

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Article in Poynter by Tom Jones, 7/18/25

Headline:  “Opinion | Defunding NPR and PBS passed the Senate — and it’s a direct hit to rural America”

“As feared, President Donald Trump, with the help of Congress, is making good on his threat to cut federal funding for NPR, PBS and other public broadcasting.

‘It’s a dark day for journalism, the free press and, perhaps most importantly, everyday Americans who are going to feel the effects of what happened Thursday. . .”

Read the full article at:

https://www.poynter.org/commentary/2025/defunding-npr-and-pbs-passed-the-senate/