Swamp Rabbit looked puzzled. “Sherpas are the guys who guide them crazy mountain climbers to the top of Everest,” he said. “What’s that got to do with CBS?”
It took me a minute to explain. On Sunday night I’d waited for a televised football game to end so I could watch “60 Minutes,” which used to be famous for investigative stories that upset powerful wrongdoers. This week’s lead story was supposed to be about the Trump administration’s deportation of Venezuelan migrants to a prison in El Salvador where they were subsequently abused and tortured.
But not so fast — at the last minute the network’s editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, aired a feature about sherpas instead of the tortured-migrants story, ostensibly because the Trump gang had refused to respond to questions from “60 Minutes” about the latter.
“That’s a really lame reason not to run a news story,” Swamp Rabbit said. “And who the #*&% is Bari Weiss?”
I told him Weiss is the opportunistic hack chosen by Trump ally David Ellison for the editor-in-chief’s job after Ellison and his father, billionaire Larry Ellison, gained control over Paramount Skydance, the parent company of CBS. In effect this makes her the sherpa for the CBS News team, guiding them to stories her boss wants to cover, and away from stories that would be unflattering to Donald Trump.
Weiss said she is delaying broadcast of the migrants story, not killing it, so that CBS can get “the principals on the record and on camera.” But this is a lie; they’ve already been given a chance to go on record. What she’s actually doing is kowtowing to the Ellison family and Trump, and in effect helping rob “60 Minutes” of the credibility it earned over more than a half-century of mostly first-rate investigative reporting.
Meanwhile, the Ellisons have sought Trump’s help in acquiring Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns CNN, another network Trump is determined to gag. And Trump already controls the FCC through his puppet Brendan Carr, who tried earlier this year to fulfill Trump’s wish to have ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel canned.
“This is straight out of the Joseph Goebbels playbook,” I said. “You can’t have a true dictatorship without first having control of the mass media. Trump and his lapdogs are trying to establish the American equivalent of the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.”
“There you go again,” Swamp Rabbit said. “Every time the Trump gang does something despicable you start yelling ‘the Nazis are coming, the Nazis are coming.'”
“Crypto-fascists is more accurate,” I said. “And they’re already here, but not enough Americans have noticed. They’re too busy watching football games.”
Footnote: You’ve got to wonder about people like Bari Weiss. She’s been a right-winger for a long time, but she once fancied herself a free speech advocate and even ran a publication called The Free Press. Was that a pose or did she expect all along to end up taking orders from a billionaire fascist? Was ideology the deciding factor or was it just about the money?
Coda: The good news is that totally suppressing news stories isn’t so easy these days. The tortured migrants story that Weiss shelved is already available on the internet:
Odd Man Out 