Will Trump’s 'Truth' Triumph?

Things aren't looking good for press freedom

I’m going to make the call now, even though it is just six months into the 47th presidency of the United States of America. The first amendment, in so far as it concerns the media, has just about nullified by lawsuits, threats, and congressional cowardice.

Very soon, if truth is what you're seeking, you’ll want to cancel most of your subscriptions; turn off your tv (if you watch networks), sort out your podcasts/video content, get real picky about your social media, and, above all, be very suspicious of anything that might be AI generated.

The president’s on a tear, threatening professional sports teams, making noise about arresting former president Obama, along with assorted officials, and amping up a lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal.

This Epstein stuff might have blown over by now were it not for some thin skin and paranoia; he ought to know by now that there’s a big difference between somebody talking trash and getting a judge to agree, especially when it’s Trump.

It’s safe to say that the use of force (in all its manifestations) is going to accelerate; now he’s talking about punishing MAGA traitors. Trump may be ahead of himself here, there are still a few voices willing to counter his bullshit. But, as the (not true) boast about Coca Cola changing to sugar proves, much of the media are sufficiently intimidated to not call him out.

Lots of people are upset about Paramount/CBS’ cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s late night program. And yes, it sucks to be losing his articulate, witty, and biting commentary. The show’s financial burden (supposedly losing $40 million annually) on what used to be called the ‘tiffany network’, wasn’t the reason, and that’s as obvious as the nose on your face.

But in case you’re wondering about the specifics, Dean Obeidallal has specifics:

• …Paramount executives chose to do this just three days after Colbert mocked Paramount on his show for paying Trump $16 million to settle a bullshit lawsuit over how CBS’s “60 Minutes” edited an interview of Kamala Harris. Colbert first cited the pending merger and then joked about the $16 million payment, “I believe this kind of complicated financial settlement with a sitting government official has a technical name in legal circles: it’s 'big, fat bribe.'”

• That helps explain the timing of why Paramount announced a May 2026 end date on the very random date of Wednesday, July 16, 2025. It was to send a message to Trump we are doing exactly what you want so please approve the merger.

• It’s not that Trump doesn’t want to see Skydance own Paramount. Oracle founder Larry Ellison who per the NY Times “is putting up most of the $8 billion bid by his son, David” being used by Skydance to buy Paramount, was just at the White House hobnobbing with Trump in January. And the elder Ellison donated more than $31 million to GOP candidates during the 2022 congressional midterms.

Cancelling Colbert isn’t the only horrible part of this deal. There is reporting that the younger Ellison is ready to give Bari Weiss a prominent role in the megamedia corporation being birthed. This position would include “a role for Weiss in shaping CBS News' editorial direction.”

Those of you unfamiliar with Weiss, she was hired by the NY Times in 2017 as part of a broader effort by the publication to increase its “ideological range” in the wake of Donald Trump’s first election.

She resigned in a huff in 2020, sharing her I Quit letter online, citing “bullying by colleagues” and an “illiberal … hostile work environment”, along with criticisms of The Times’ leadership and fellow staff.

She is now the queen of anti-woke, standing like some kind of Joan of Arc against those who would deny her and her kind’s right to rule the culture, the government, and, most importantly, the truth.

This quit letter was a big deal in right wing circles, and Weiss quickly capitalized on her status, launching the online Free Press (rumored to be sold to Ellison soon) and raising $150 million with Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale to start an unaccredited anti-cancel-culture academic project called The University of Austin, teaching “forbidden courses.”

This “forbidden” point of view is characteristic of cranks, cultists, ideological pugilists, and that guy in the corner barstool who becomes an expert on any topic being discussed. It’s a big part of the “they” are persecuting us mentality displayed by the privileged, as a precursor toward the “otherizing” of groups.

The argument against “woke” in practice has turned out as the basis for the biggest “cancel culture” of all time. It’s given cover to techbros and conservative intellectuals for their racist and misogynist views.

This is why military bases are being renamed for Confederate traitors, and books inclusive of non-heterosexual views/characters are being yanked out of libraries nationwide. This is why Ivy league universities are facing demands from the Trump administration to revise their curricula and eliminate recognition of certain groups. And, of course, the basis for the War on Science is to root out the woke.

I can only hope that Weiss and company will be sending thoughts and prayers to the parents of unvaccinated children succumbing to infectious diseases and families displaced as a consequence of the atmospheric phenomenon whose name can no longer be spoken.

The same financial deal involving Paramount/CBS will drive the decision-making at Comedy Central, home of Jon Stewart and others critical of the administration. President Trump has also called for the elimination of the late night hosts on the other two major networks.

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The consequences of the “recissions” bill passed by the Congress will be felt for years to come, in particular the defunding after the fact of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the company providing financial support for NPR, PBS and more than 1000 not-for-profit radio stations nationwide.

Come October, more than 100 combined TV and radio stations, along with 78 public radio organizations and 37 TV organizations serving millions of Americans in rural pockets of the country will be at risk of going dark, says an analysis from Public Media Company.

Via NPR coverage:

• A Harris Poll last week found that 66% of Americans support federal funding for public radio, with the same share calling it a good value. Support included 58% of Republicans and 77% of Democrats. The online poll surveyed 2,089 U.S. adults with a 2.5 percentage point margin of error.

Republicans have been aiming at defunding public media from its inception, arguing that its news coverage was liberal and that the public should not have to pay for “woke” programming.

This animosity is why the budgeting cycle for public media was originally set over a two year period, as a means of protecting the entity. Talking back monies already appropriated defeats that safeguard, along with effectively neutering the Constitutionally mandated budgeting process.

Some public media in states with two Republican Senators was preserved and legislators facing possible electoral challenges were promised (wink, wink) that funding would be restored in upcoming budget negotiations.. And that budgeting would resume as an annual process, so any crank willing to play victim will kill off public media in the future.

The stations and programming likely to survive the funding cutoff aren’t out of the weeds.

In January, FCC chairman Brendan Carr announced an investigation, saying he was concerned that the PBS and NPR broadcasts “could be violating the law by airing commercials.” He cited a section of the Communications Act that prohibits a non-commercial station from airing commercials or other promotional announcements “on behalf of for-profit entities.”

The announcements/commercials were originally developed in conjunction with the FCC with the understanding that sales pitches for specific products would be excluded. Just as the rescissions were a flip flop in policy, so could corporate sponsorships, a major source of funding for programming, be taken back.

Carr has made it clear that he is within his bounds to scrutinize even news programming to see if it is in the public interest, so there’s a third avenue for endangering public broadcasting.

The point with lawsuits against commercial networks and public media is to narrow the range of programming to reflect the interests of the Trump administration.

Although enshittification has largely ruined the internet as a source of news, some critical thought and reporting does seep through on platforms like Bluesky, Substack, Medium, Ghost, podcasts, etc. Right now, a Tower of Babel of banished voices are finding their way to an increasingly large audience.

The shutdown mechanism for these non-conventional outlets is already before Congress, lurking as the enforcement mechanisms for the NO FAKES act. This is one of those arguments with a superficially undeniable rationale, namely keeping the bad guys from putting your wife, daughter, or other loved one into AI generated porn clips. It’s a classic “for the children” situation.

Taylor Lorenz and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are sounding the alarm:

• The NO FAKES act is "something that could change the internet forever, harming speech and innovation from here on out," The Electronic Frontier Foundation recently declared.

• Rather than giving people targeted tools to protect against harmful misrepresentations, the NO FAKES act just federalizes an image-licensing system, the EFF explains. The law would create an entire new infrastructure for widespread censorship with essentially zero safeguards against abuse. As the EFF notes: NO FAKES requires almost every internet gatekeeper to create a system that will:

1. Take down speech upon receipt of a notice.

2. Keep down any recurring instance—meaning, adopt inevitably overbroad replica filters on top of the already deeply flawed copyright filters.

3. Take down and filter tools that might have been used to make the image.

4. Unmask the user who uploaded the material based on nothing more than the say so of person who was allegedly “replicated.”

Our battle for the truth isn’t over, but many of traditional fourth estate protectors are little better than duendes, the mythical creatures of mesoAmerican cultures – helpful to the faithful and vengeful to unbelievers.

Last week on CNBC, House Speaker Mike Johnson was aired saying things about Trump that could be representative of the “truth” in the near future:

"His approval ratings are skyrocketing. CNN had a story a day or two ago -- he was at a 90 percent approval rating! There's never been a president that high."

Ultimately, as I keep saying, the crisis over truth is a symptom of the billionaire driven mentality aimed at destroying democracy and creating a techno ruling structure/

I’ll close with Rusty Foster’s insight from Today in Tabs (part of a longer piece that you should definitely read):

• When I told my new friend that the American news media has been systematically and intentionally destroyed by a handful of billionaires, he asked an extremely reasonable question, which was: “but why?” And what makes this feel like a conspiracy is that there is no single answer to “why?” Sometimes it’s arrogance, sometimes it’s ideology, sometimes it’s purely money. Often it’s a messy combination of all three.

• But if you really want to step back a bit, the reason why is that we have a socioeconomic system that concentrates nation-state level wealth and power in the hands of a few individuals, with virtually no checks on what they can choose to do with it. So if Larry Ellison wants to turn CBS News into Bari Weiss’s Free Press TV, or Jeff Bezos wants to make The Washington Post into an ideological subsidiary of the Cato Institute… what institutions of power will be left to disagree?

How to Delete All of Your Social Media Accounts by Boone Ashworth at WIRED

• Social services have evolved even further into becoming sticky traps for doomscrolling and AI-generated slop, and are hitherto unprecedented frontiers for rage bait. Bummed out about all the misinformation and being part of a profit machine that funds one increasingly unhinged billionaire or another? Well, there’s a way out.

• Unfortunately, social media companies don’t always make it very easy to rescind their grips on your attention. They bury deletion and deactivation options deep in their sidebars and menus and do everything in their power to keep you engaged and scrolling.

• It’s not always easy, but if you’re eager to exorcise the demons of social media from your life, here’s how to carry out those cleansing rituals.

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How Google Ruined Your Phone by Jaraj Devadiga at The Lever

• I remember getting my first Android phone and feeling a sense of empowerment. This Google-branded rectangle put the world at my fingertips. It did what I wanted and then got out of my way. It made life easier and more convenient.

• Now, despite boasting bigger batteries, faster processors, and higher resolution cameras, our phones make us feel powerless; as if we must fight our devices to get anything done. There’s a constant barrage of notifications, and by the time you have dealt with them, chances are you have forgotten what you wanted to do in the first place. Then there is Gemini, Google’s Artificial Intelligence bot, which won’t leave you alone. Press the home (middle) button for half a second too long, and it pops up, offering to “assist” you.

• What was once a useful tool has now become an instrument of torture, designed to extract as much money from consumers as possible. And to keep it that way, Google is quietly locking away its phones’ source code to make it as hard as possible for people to build better alternatives. While Google awaits the repercussions of being convicted of running an illegal search monopoly, the tech giant may have inflicted far greater harm on people through its control of Android than it has by monopolizing online search or advertising.

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The online activists trying to stop ICE from making arrests by Robert Klemko at The Washington Post

• “That’s not a protected speech,” Bondi said. “That is threatening the lives of our law enforcement officers throughout this country.”

• But site creators like Austin say they have no plans to back down. They say the popularity of the trackers is yet more evidence of a growing discontent over Trump’s handling of immigration enforcement.

• “My attitude is, come and bring it,” Austin said. “I’m not breaking the law. I don’t have my face covered like these officers when they’re going around abducting people. So if they want to try it, let’s run it back.”