Bari Weiss’s Audience of One

A key goal of Donald Trump’s second term has been to use government power to place important media properties in the hands of loyalists who will bend coverage to the president’s will. Yesterday, the Trump-approved management at CBS duly held back a 60 Minutes report about the administration’s treatment of migrant detainees deported to El Salvador. Although many of Trump’s goals to reindustrialize the economy or prosecute his enemies have floundered, his plan to corrupt the media is starting to work. During his first term, Trump’s efforts to get the media to do his bidding consisted mostly of endless whining, punctuated by regular threats of nuisance lawsuits and the occasional actual suit. In his second term, he has seized upon a more effective tool. Most large media properties have owners, and those owners have business that relies on the federal government. Trump has made clear that the price of cooperative regulatory policies from his government is giving him friendlier coverage. Franklin Foer: CBS and CNN are being sacrificed to Trump The president has not even bothered to conceal the terms of his transaction with the billionaires Larry and David Ellison. Over the summer, the Trump administration approved a merger that gave the Ellisons control over Paramount, CBS’s parent company. After the merger was announced but before the administration approved of it, CBS agreed to settle one of Trump’s groundless lawsuits (against CBS News for the way 60 Minutes edited an interview with Kamala Harris, a standard journalistic practice). But Trump wanted more than money. He wanted influence over CBS’s coverage of his administration, and he believed its new owners would give it to him. “Larry Ellison is great, and his son, David, is great. They’re friends of mine” he told reporters in October. “They will make the right decisions. They’re going to revitalize CBS—hopefully, they’ll bring it back to its former glory.” That same month, David Ellison appointed Bari Weiss, editor of the neoconservative publication The Free Press , to run CBS News. Trump praised the move in his own 60 Minutes interview. “I see good things happening in the news. I really do. And I think one of the best things to happen is this show and new ownership,” he told Norah O’Donnell. “I think it’s the greatest thing that’s happened in a long time to a free and open and good press.” Weiss has held the job for only a few months, but Trump expects results quickly. Friday night, speaking at a rally in North Carolina, he complained that CBS has not yet changed its coverage of him to his liking. “I love the new owners of CBS,” he announced, before adding, “ 60 Minutes has treated me worse under the new ownership than—they just keep treating me, they just keep hitting me, it’s crazy.” Two days later, Weiss, who once decried “self-censorship” at The New York Times , yanked the 60 Minutes segment on deportations that had been slated to run. CNN reported that the story had...

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