Trump now has a kill switch for stories he doesn’t like
- jjcarney100team
- 1 day ago
- 2 min read
As reported yesterday by Heather Cox Richardson, the Trump administration effectively killed a 60 Minutes story last Sunday on its renditions of migrants to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison. How? Officials simply refused repeated requests to comment.
This was the excuse Bari Weiss used to pull the story from the broadcast, just hours before it was scheduled to air. Weiss, outspoken critic of the far-left and TV news broadcasting neophyte, was hired by Trump-loyalist and new Paramount owner David Ellison for the top spot at CBS News in October,
Sharyn Alfonsi, the cancelled segment’s correspondent, condemned the decision in an email to colleagues, saying "If the administration's refusal to participate becomes a valid reason to spike a story, we have effectively handed them a ‘kill switch’ for any reporting they find inconvenient."
This is another unfortunate outcome of the takeover of media outlets by the ultra-rich, as described in a piece by Robert Reich last month. X, CBS, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, The Washington Post, MGM Studios, Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, New York Post, and soon Warner Bros Discovery including CNN, all now belong (or soon will belong) to the richest men in America.
Why are they buying up so much of the media? Reich’s (very likely correct) answer: they “may rationally fear that a majority of voters could try to confiscate their wealth.” By controlling the dwindling number of media outlets, the moguls can suppress stories that would incite ordinary Americans to do just that.
One piece of good news reported by Richardson - the segment had already been distributed in Canada prior the kill order, and bootleg copies are circulating in the U.S. She quotes Allison Gill of Mueller, She Wrote, “The bootleg has now gone viral, and may end up being the most-watched 60 Minutes segment ever.”
Illustration credit: The Contrarian
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