Pissed at CBS

May 13, 2026 (Vol. 20 No. 19) - OK, I admit it. I am thoroughly pissed at CBS. First, they caved into and settled a Trump lawsuit that he had no chance of winning. Then they screwed around with a 60 Minutes segment on the Trump administration's controversial deportation of undocumented - and occasionally documented - immigrants. Then, Bari Weiss turned the CBS Evening News into a "MAGA approved" broadcast. Of course, all of this comes on the heels of last fall's shocking announcement that it was cancelling The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, late-night TV's top-rated broadcast. Tomorrow night will be his final broadcast. I noted my displeasure at the time of Colbert's cancellation. Unfortunately, we've also seen other efforts at silencing late-night voices over at ABC. However, to their credit, Disney has recently shown some backbone in the face of threats from the Big Orange Turd. Still, I doubt that will stop him from the Commode Commander's late-night rants on antisocial media.

Back when I was a radio-television major at the University of Maryland - back when the earth was still cooling - I learned that broadcasting had a special place in American law. Operating under the premise that the airwaves belong to the public, the government could license broadcast radio and television stations, requiring that they operate in the public interest. However, with the introduction of new media, mainly the Internet, during the 1980s, the Reagan administration eliminated what was known as The Fairness Doctrine, which led to the explosion of conservative talk radio. It was also a period which saw the growth of a new class of media ownership, corporate types more interested in profits than the public interest. That arrangement worked for a while until Donald Trump chose to weaponize the government's regulatory authority to force less critical (if not more favorable) broadcast content.

For me, this trend harkens back to a Freedom Forum conference I attended in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1997. I wrote about it in February 2025. In that session, Russian journalists said they were nervous about their country's movement away from government-controlled media to that owned by oligarchs. To American ears, that sounded like backwards thinking. It was better to trust regulated corporations than to leave the media in the hands of unregulated (and potentially out-of-control) government. Twenty-nine years later in a Trumpian world where the government is run by oligarchs, it is virtually impossible to differentiate between the two positions. Media conglomerates run by the ultra-rich pay lip service to the concept of "public interest" in much the same manner that Fox News is "fair and balanced."

I cannot state this forcefully enough: Healthy and strong democracies depend upon an informed and enlightened citizenry. I would argue that in the current media environment, there is no such thing. As a result, the global standing of the United States has suffered from this absence. How else could a vulgar, fraudulent, misogynistic, seditious rapist pedophile become President of the United States? Yes, I am pissed at CBS. But I am more pissed at Donald Trump and his legion of sycophants and miscreants who first elected him and still give unwavering support to him despite his systematic destruction of America's greatness. (Yet another broken promise from the man who would be the MAGA King.) Assuming we still have fair elections this fall - and that is much more an open question than ever before - those may be our last chance to save us from ourselves. If we fail, then may God have mercy on our souls. That's it for now. Fear the Turtle.