On today’s BradCast: As you know, much of what we hold dear in these United States is under assault right now, thanks to the man we were collectively dumb enough to elect as President last year. But, for countless reasons, no single institution may be more important to help protect than our nation’s free press, which is under far greater fire than I think most Americans realize. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]
Sadly, that attack has now been joined by too many of the major corporate outlets that control far too many of our previously independent mainstream news sources, all the way down to the local level. And the worst of them, as we’ve recently learned, are all too willing to hoax their own customers into unknowingly joining the battle.
We’ve got a number of U.S. media-under-attack stories for you today, from international U.S. media to national media to local media.
First, a bit of encouraging news on the international level. On Tuesday, a federal judge ordered [PDF] the restoration of the 83-year old, Congressionally-mandated and funded Voice of America. The international news outlet, originally created by the U.S. to counter Nazi propaganda in Europe, had been broadcasting continuously since 1942, until Donald Trump ordered its parent agency, the United States Agency for Global Media (USAGM) shut down last month. Some 1,300 VOA staffers and contractors were sidelined, as the airwaves of VOA and its USAGM-overseen sister networks such as Radio Free Asia and the Middle East Broadcasting fell silent. A number of VOA journalists sued, and on Tuesday, the court ordered USAGM to return employees and contractors to their pre-March 14 status. That’s good news, though VOA is not fully back yet, and the Administration is expected, of course, to appeal the ruling.
Nationally, corporate pressure super-charged by Trump is also threatening another American broadcast institution. 60 Minutes‘ longtime executive producer, Bill Owens, quit on Tuesday amid pressure from CBS’ corporate owners Paramount, as the company is seeking approval from the Administration for a corporate merger with an outfit called Skydance. That approval, however, is threatened by Trump, who filed a laughable, $20 billion suit against the top-rated, long-running newsmagazine after he didn’t like an interview they aired with Kamala Harris before last year’s election. Since then, Trump has similarly bristled at tough reports from the notoriously independent new program, charging that they will “pay a big price” for daring to report accurately on his Administration. We don’t yet know the full story of what happened at 60 Minutes. But as Paramount is hoping to settle Trump’s ridiculous suit, Owens told staffers that the program’s independence is threatened, so it was time for him to leave. That, even as he told the show’s employees that it is “too important to the country” for them to quit in protest.
From attacks against the U.S. international free press to the national level, we finally arrive on today program at still more threats newly underway against highly-trusted local news outlets, thanks in no small part to collusion between giant corporate broadcasters and the Trump Administration’s corrupted FCC.
Last month, Trump’s newly-seated Federal Communications Commission Chair, Brendan Carr, announced a new initiative to gut FCC radio and television rules that he described in a notice seeking public comment as his “Delete, Delete, Delete” plan [PDF].
As The Desk detailed earlier this month, the nation’s largest owner of local television stations, Nexstar Media Group — which controls more than 200 TV stations in more than 160 markets across the country — ordered the local newsrooms at all of the stations it operates (including affiliates of NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox, CW, etc.), to create a “news” story from deceptive, misleading talking points that suggest that the FCC was seeking comment from the public on regulations that “threaten the growth of your local TV news stations”. Each, nearly identical report, voiced by local anchors, aired on dozens of stations, instructing viewers to visit a weblink that resolves to a Nexstar-run page instructing them how to let the FCC know that viewers are “worried about the long-term health of my local television stations” and want to “eliminate the regulations that are threatening the growth of my local TV station.”
As a number of employees at some of those stations told The Desk on background, however, they were uncomfortable running the reports as “news”, but were given no choice by their corporate parents at Nexstar.
Given the national power company, which already rakes in some $5 billion per year, it’s hardly a surprise that we haven’t heard much about this story in the corporate media. We do our best to make up for that today.
Our guest is the longtime award-winning broadcast journalism veteran turned media activist SUE WILSON, who described some of this earlier today in an article at The BRAD BLOG headlined “Trump’s FCC on Precipice of Ending All Limits on Corporate Control of Local TV News Stations”. In it, she explains how Nexstar already controls two — and sometimes three (with FCC permission) — TV stations in virtually every major media market in the country. But now, with the FCC’s Carr looking to “delete, delete, delete” as many regulations as possible, the company is hoping to do away with remaining restrictions on how many stations any single company may control both nationally and at the local market level.
Wilson details how Nexstar and fellow broadcast goliath Sinclair, a far-right outlet who ordered a similar “must-run” package for its nearly 200 stations in support of Trump back in 2018, have long been gaming the system meant to limit corporate control of local stations. Today she details how they are colluding with the new FCC Chair to simply gut regulatory ownership limits while ignoring, or somehow working around, those that have been implemented statutorily by Congress.
“What we are seeing more and more across the United States is that you can turn on your TV set, and you can watch a local news reporter do a report,” she tells me today. “You turn to the next station and it’s the same reporter doing the exact same report.” And that, of course, is with the limits currently in place — the ones that Nexstar are misleading their own viewers into helping them make it worse. Worse for viewers, anyway, if not more profitable for Nexstar, Sinclair and the others.
Wilson also details today — as she did in her article earlier — how you can, and should, respond yourself to the FCC’s call for comments. But you will need to do it quickly. Final comments are supposed to be filed — either by Twitter/X or via the FCC’s Comment site — by Monday, April 28.
“We are fighting a juggernaut in the Capitol. They want to deregulate the media. They want to take over the media, is what they are really after. We have to stop them,” argues Wilson, urging listeners to remind the FCC in comments that the “publicly-owned airwaves belong to us.”
(Snail mail support to “Brad Friedman, 7095 Hollywood Blvd., #594 Los Angeles, CA 90028” always welcome too!)
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Of course Trump’s lawsuits are frivolous, but 60 Minutes, while still terrific, isn’t as good as it used to be. It was better when they investigated crooks led by Mike Wallace and Andy Rooney closed the show. They had Mitch McConnell and Marjorie Taylor-Greene on.
Even though we are not important, sometimes we just have to Pisum off (On The Origin Of A Genetic Constant – 13).
How can 60 Minutes be independent when it’s on CBS?
Brian @3:
Well, if CBS allows them — as has been reported — to do whatever they like during the hour each week, they can arguably claim to be independent. If CBS News, or the network, or the network’s parent company, etc., oversees what they did and has the ability to change it in some fashion, they would not be independent. But, reportedly, even CBS News left 60 Minutes alone all of these years.