July 8, 2025
Paramount settlement with Trump is a symptom of deep structural rot in our corporate media system.
Paramount’s 16 million dollars of the settlement With Donald Trump is an extraordinary demonstration of bribery, greed and cowardice. It is also a symptom of a deep structural rot in our media today – a system in which the profit at every turn tries democracy.
For review: Last October, Trump sued Paramount, a parent company CBS News. Trump claimed that CBS 60 minutes deceptively edited Interview with Vice President Kamala Harris on “Tip scales for the benefit of the Democratic Party ”, which leads to the presidential election. From the very beginning, almost all legal experts determined that the case was completely without merit. In the end, the media is protected by the first correction, and legally and ethically allowed to do the usual interview checks that they broadcast.
However, Redstone’s balls, a media outlets that controls the shareholder, seeks to ensure a regulatory approval for multi -billion dollar sales of Paramount Hollywood strike. Redstone seemed to want to resolve the case with Trump and organize a merger, democracy would be damned. As Senator Bernie Sanders is apt Place: “The Redstone family today reduced the freedom of the press in exchange for $ 2.4 billion.”
Ever since the lawsuit has been filed, numerous journalists And democratic politicians opposed this outrageous step – by breaking Trump’s funny accusations, and the lack of Redston’s principle was that they did not dispute them.
Trump’s frivolous hooliganism should not be given the legitimacy of the minute. And yet here we are.
Trump’s legal character continues its close preservation of the Hungarian Prime Minister Authoritarian Book of Victor Orban To undermine the free press: manipulate the media law, threaten the news and uses ownership structures to oligopolistic media. In short, arming any tool at its disposal to defeat the media institutes so that everything looks and sounds like Fox News.
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This dispute also illuminates the dangerous idea that the media media possess journalism. Each tentacle creates even more conflicts of interest and potential for privileged business interests over our democratic needs. From out Craven Capitulation ABC And now the CBS, to the Nazi discourse on X and Fox News, we are seeing corporate power over our media, depriving society a major check against authoritarianism. We all have to be disturbed.
And yet we should not be surprised. In the conditions of state weapons, the organizations seeking profits, predictably donate their journalistic principles, and did not jeopardize their commercial interests. And although some journalists can perform here and there, the main media in America repeatedly compiled and bring us. By doing this, they help to weaken the public accountability, as well as the protection of the first amendment of society.
What do you need to do? Senator Elizabeth Warren calls for A study of bribery And he promises to introduce a legislation that “contains corruption through donations from the Presidential Library.” Senator Ron Widen cry What he will be “first in the line, calling for federal charges” as soon as the Democrats overcome power. More at once, the video calls on state prosecutors “to make corporate executors who sold it for our response to democracy in court.”
Despite these worthy initiatives, we need even more ambitious reforms. Corporate Media Institutes are a key part of the pathologies that suffer today by our society. This latest attack on the press and its predictable surrender is the exhibition, why the oligarchic media system governed by the income is bad for democracy. These types of press failures are usually narrated as rules of unscrupulous people. But they are the result of structural features that cannot be understood as an allegory of “bad apples”.
In other words, the Paramount surrender to Trump indicates system a problem that needs system fix. The importance of protection of public interests will be a step in the right direction, but instead of imposing normative dressings on purulent wounds, we must work on the creation of a new media system based on another logic. While Trump’s extortion is inexcusable, stimulating structures – including legal obligations – on the spot, urge the owners of the media to ignore democratic responsibilities to society. The profits of the imperative – shareholders, investors, advertisers and themselves – the owners of the media to consider news and information as goods, not the necessary public services and audiences as consumers, not as citizens.
We must present and resist this logic in order to understand the toxic synergism between the hypercopitalist, concentrated media system and the fascist trends in the autate mode. Seeing the permanent commercialism as the main root of the problem that moves our strategic frame from the attempt at the best behavior to oblige our media must serve democracy for all of us, not the income of several privileged.
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As I was arguing earlierThe lively state media system must remain fixed on our long-term political horizon. Such a system should be “public” more than just in the name: it actually owes and control the communities serving the media. Such a decentralized, federal guaranteed, but local, infrastructure can better resist the type of government capture, which is increasingly pronounced in our commercial media. Although it will look different from our current state media system, it can potentially Use this infrastructure as its original building blocks.
For the immediate future, we must do our best to push away from the further rabbit of our media. This includes support for nonprofit and independent media In any case possibleEspecially given Local journalism collapse continues. But for the long term we have to aim Reform of structural media This goes far beyond the defense, the status of the corporate media and the prevention of the fascist drift of the current media oligarchy. We need both the Commission and the radically democratized our media from the roots to the industry.
If there is any silver lining for Trump’s permanent corruption in our media landscape, this is what it exposes how to actually have a commercial media’s commitment to journalism, as well as as poorly equipped to preserve the remnants of American democracy. Because Trump refuses to have the integrity of our media, we must start planning to restore journalism from scratch, daring to imagine how we can create a truly democratic media system.
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