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      Six great reads: rebels in Nazi Germany, how creativity works and Europe’s biggest pornography conference

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      1. The astonishing story of the aristocrat who hid her Jewish lover in a sofa bed – and other German rebels who defied the NazisView image in fullscreenFrom a diplomat who embraced the exiled Albert Einstein to a schoolteacher who helped “non-Aryan” students flee, these remarkable individuals refused to bend the knee to Hitler – only to be dramatically betrayed. What, asked Jonathan Freedland, in this extract from his new book, The Traitors Circle, made them risk it all?Read more2. The unconscious process that leads to creativity: how ‘incubation’ worksView image in fullscreen“One of the most marvellous properties of the brain,” wrote Dutch psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis in this fascinating piece from Well Actually, is its ability to continue working unconsciously when the conscious mind has moved on to something else.Read more3. Disgruntled NYT journalist to ‘anti-woke’ power grab: how far can Bari Weiss go?View image in fullscreenAfter leaving the New York Times, Weiss turned her Substack into an unshakable pro-Israel voice. Now as Paramount eyes acquisition of her company, David Klion profiled a writer who is poised to become Trump’s ally among media elites.Read more4. Israel is forcing us to leave Gaza City. We know they may never let us returnView image in fullscreenIn this deeply personal piece, Gaza reporter Malak A Tantesh wrote about her family’s decision to leave northern Gaza, the area they call home, for the tents of the south where they had also endured last year’s winter. The family has stayed in 10 locations since they were first forced out of their prewar home in Beit Lahia.Read more5. Boom times and total burnout: three days at Europe’s biggest pornography conferenceView image in fullscreenIn this powerful feature, Amelia Gentleman, alongside photographer Judith Jockel, reported from the biggest pornography conference in Europe, where she spoke to entrepreneurs who were excited about AI and soaring profits, and creators who were battling burnout and chronic illness due to the industry’s gig-economy structure.Read more6. ‘I wasn’t terrified of dying, but I didn’t want to leave my kids’: Davina McCall on addiction, reality TV and the brain tumour that nearly killed herView image in fullscreenWhen the TV presenter was offered a free health screening, she thought it was pointless: she was “the healthiest woman you’ve ever met”. But then came the shocking diagnosis. Now fully recovered, she told Simon Hattenstone, she’s re‑evaluating everything.Read more More

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      Trump news at a glance: president urges death penalty in Charlie Kirk killing, as widow says: ‘we’ll never surrender’

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      Donald Trump on Friday advocated for the death penalty in the killing of his close associate Charlie Kirk, as the widow of the rightwing activist spoke publicly for the first time since the shooting.The president told Fox & Friends in an interview – during which he also announced that a suspect was in custody – that he hopes the shooter “gets the death penalty”. He added: “Charlie Kirk was the finest person. He didn’t deserve this”.On Friday night, Kirk’s widow, Erika, gave a combative speech from the office where her late husband hosted his podcast, telling “the evildoers responsible for my husband’s assassination” that “You have no idea the fire that you have ignited within this wife. The cries of this widow will echo around the world like a battle cry.”In an interview on Fox & Friends on Friday morning, the US president was asked what he intended to do to heal the wounds of Kirk’s shooting in Utah. “How do we fix this country? How do we come back together?” he was asked by the show’s co-host Ainsley Earhardt, who commented that there were radicals operating on the left and right of US politics.Less than 48 hours after Kirk was shot in broad daylight on the campus of Utah Valley University, Trump replied: “I tell you something that is going to get me in trouble, but I couldn’t care less.”He went on: “The radicals on the right are radical because they don’t want to see crime … The radicals on the left are the problem – and they are vicious and horrible and politically savvy. They want men in women’s sports, they want transgender for everyone, they want open borders. The worst thing that happened to this country.”Trump declines to call for unity after Charlie Kirk killing in stunning moveDonald Trump has declined to call for the US to come together as a way of fixing the country’s divisions in the wake of the assassination of his close associate, the rightwing activist Charlie Kirk, preferring to cast “vicious and horrible” radicals on the left of US politics as the sole problem.Read the full storyTrump says he will send national guard to Democratic-run MemphisDonald Trump said on Friday that he will send national guard troops to Memphis as part of his administration’s expanding military-led response to urban crime in Democratic-run cities.“I think maybe I’ll be the first to say it right now: we’re going to Memphis,” the US president said during an appearance on Fox & Friends, describing the violence in Memphis as dire.Read the full storyJudge stops statement of man defending himself over Trump assassination attempt The trial defense of the man accused of trying to assassinate Donald Trump at one of his golf resorts in Florida in September 2024 got off to a shaky start on Thursday, after he was cut off by the judge minutes into his opening remarks.Ryan Routh, 59, who is representing himself despite having no legal education, is charged with five crimes including attempted assassination of a major presidential candidate. He has pleaded not guilty.Read the full storyCourt lets Trump block Medicaid funds to ‘defund’ Planned Parenthood The Trump administration can move forward with its plan to “defund” Planned Parenthood by blocking it from receiving reimbursements from Medicaid, the US government’s insurance program for low-income people, a federal appeals court has ruled.Read the full storyUS immigration officers shoot dead man trying to flee vehicle stop near ChicagoA man was fatally shot during a vehicle stop on the outskirts of Chicago by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officers after attempting to flee, according to officials, and another officer was injured during the altercation.The target of the stop was Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez, an undocumented immigrant with a history of reckless driving, according to the Department of Homeland Security.Ice said the suspect attempted to drive his vehicle into the arrest team, striking an officer and subsequently dragging him as he fled the scene.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      Missouri Republicans approved a new congressional map on Friday that adds an additional GOP-friendly seat in Congress, a boost to Donald Trump as he tries to redraw districts across the US to stave off losses in next year’s midterms.

      The US government is drawing nearer to a potential shutdown after Donald Trump told Republicans on Friday “don’t even bother dealing with” the Democrats, whose congressional leaders are refusing to support spending bills that do not include their healthcare priorities.

      The US Environmental Protection Agency proposed on Friday a rule to end a mandatory program requiring 8,000 facilities to report their greenhouse gas emissions. The agency said mandatory collection of emissions data was unnecessary because it is “not directly related to a potential regulation and has no material impact on improving human health and the environment”.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 11 September 2025. More

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      Trump declines to call for unity after Charlie Kirk killing in stunning move

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      Donald Trump has declined to call for the US to come together as a way of fixing the country’s divisions in the wake of the assassination of his close associate, the rightwing activist Charlie Kirk, preferring to cast “vicious and horrible” radicals on the left of US politics as the sole problem.In an interview on Fox & Friends on Friday morning, the US president was asked what he intended to do to heal the wounds of Kirk’s shooting in Utah. “How do we fix this country? How do we come back together?” he was asked by the show’s co-host Ainsley Earhardt, who commented that there were radicals operating on the left and right of US politics.Less than 48 hours after Kirk was shot in broad daylight on the campus of Utah Valley University, Trump replied: “I tell you something that is going to get me in trouble, but I couldn’t care less.”He went on: “The radicals on the right are radical because they don’t want to see crime … The radicals on the left are the problem – and they are vicious and horrible and politically savvy. They want men in women’s sports, they want transgender for everyone, they want open borders. The worst thing that happened to this country.”Trump’s refusal to seek a common bipartisan way forward at a time of profound national anger, fear and mourning was a stunning move for a sitting US president, even by his standards.The US has a long history of presidents using their rhetorical powers to try to overcome political fissures. The pinnacle perhaps was Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address towards the end of the civil war, in which he sought to “bind up the nation’s wounds” and made a point of striving for unity “with malice toward none, with charity for all”.In more recent times, Joe Biden used his inaugural address in 2021, just days after the insurrection by Trump supporters at the US Capitol on January 6, to call for unity, without which, he said, “there is no peace, only bitterness and fury”.Trump’s appearance on Fox News made clear he has no intention of following that rhetorical tradition. Instead, the tenor of his response to the Kirk shooting has been hyper-partisan and grounded in retribution.In Friday’s comments, he threatened the philanthropist George Soros with a Rico investigation of the sort normally reserved for organised crime. He accused Soros of funding “professional agitators” who were engaging in “more than protest, this is real agitation, this is riots on the streets”.In an Oval Office address delivered hours after Kirk was pronounced dead, Trump made menacing remarks indicating he would seek revenge against “organizations that fund and support” political violence. He laid blame for the current plight entirely on what he called the “radical left”.The president has already used his second term in the White House to turn the heat up on those he regards as his political enemies. He has authorised an investigation into the main fundraising channel for the Democratic party, ActBlue, and threatened to rescind the tax-exempt status of progressive groups such as Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew) and environmental groups. More

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      Missouri Republicans approve redistricting that gives GOP additional seat in Congress

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      Missouri Republicans approved a new congressional map on Friday that adds an additional GOP-friendly seat in Congress, a boost to Donald Trump as he tries to redraw districts across the US to stave off losses in next year’s midterms.Republicans currently hold six of Missouri’s eight congressional seats. The new map would eliminate a district currently represented by Democrat Emanuel Cleaver in Kansas City. Cleaver, who was Kansas City’s first Black mayor, has been in Congress for two decades. The new map splits up voters in the district and places them instead into more GOP-friendly ones.The plan now goes to Missouri’s governor, Mike Kehoe, a Republican, who is expected to sign it into law.Opponents of the measure pledged they would use a legal maneuver to force a statewide vote on the maps next year. Activists must gather more than 100,000 signatures in the next 90 days to put it up for a referendum.“This fight is not over. Missouri voters – not politicians – will have the final say,” Elsa Rainey, a spokesperson for the group People Not Politicians Missouri, said in a statement.Missouri is the first state to pass a new congressional plan after Texas adopted a map that gives Republicans between three and five new seats. California voters are set to vote on a ballot referendum later this year that would add five congressional districts in that state.“Missourians will not have fair and effective representation under this new, truly shameful gerrymander. It is not only legally indefensible, it is also morally wrong,” Eric Holder, the former US attorney general and chair of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, said in a statement.Each seat is important because Republicans only hold a three-seat majority in the US House and the president’s party typically loses seats in a midterm election. Typically, redistricting is done only once, after the decennial census at the start of the decade, but Trump has pushed an anti-democratic effort to redraw district lines mid-decade, allowing politicians to pick their voters instead of having them face competitive elections.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOhio, where Republicans also control the redistricting process, is also set to redraw its maps in the coming months. Indiana Republicans are also considering redrawing their state’s map as well. More

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      The US is on the brink of another era of political violence – and Donald Trump ‘couldn’t care less’ | Jonathan Freedland

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      The killing of Charlie Kirk has left the US and those who care about it on edge. The arrest of a suspect, Tyler Robinson, has hardly settled the nerves, not when the revelation of any supposed political allegiances could touch off a fresh round of recriminations. The fear is that the country is about to descend into a new era of political violence, becoming a place where differences are settled not with words and argument but by guns and blood. After all, it has plumbed those depths before.The US was born in violence, fought a civil war less than a century after its founding and in living memory seemed to be on the brink of another one – with a spate of assassinations in the 1960s that took the lives of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Medgar Evers and John and Bobby Kennedy. That should provide some consolation, the knowledge that the country has been through this before and survived.And yet the comfort is scant, because these are different times. For one thing, guns are even more available now than they were then: there are more than 850m firearms in private hands in the world, and nearly half of those are owned by Americans. For every 100 Americans, there are 120 guns.For another, today’s information supply is dominated by social media, amplifying the most extreme voices and rewarding the angriest sentiments. Where once the CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite could break the news of a presidential assassination and provide sombre balm, now grief is inflamed into fury, with footage of Kirk’s horrific shooting entering global circulation mere moments after his death.But the crucial difference is at the top. An act of political violence used to be met by a standard, reassuringly predictable response: the president would condemn it, grieve for the dead and their families, plead that there be no rush to judgment, and call for calm and for unity, insisting that Americans not give the killers what they want, which was division, but rather come together as fellow citizens of a republic they all loved. I heard versions of that speech, delivered at different moments by Bill Clinton, George W Bush and Barack Obama. On Wednesday night, Donald Trump chose an alternative path – one that proved that, as he later admitted to Fox News when asked about bringing the country together, he “couldn’t care less”.Instead, and at a time when no one was in custody and nothing at all was known of Kirk’s killer, Trump said the blame for his death lay with “the radical left”. It was its “rhetoric” that was “directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today”. The problem was not political violence in general, but “radical left political violence”.Put aside the inaccuracy of such a statement. Put aside the documented fact that not some, but all extremist-related killings in the US in 2024 were connected to rightwing extremism, just as they were in 2023 and in 2022. Put aside that, although Trump listed incidents in which figures associated with the right had been attacked, he pointedly did not mention and wilfully chose to ignore the murder of the Democratic Minnesota lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband in June; or the arson attack on the home of the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, in April; or an earlier plot to kidnap the Democratic governor of Michigan.Put it all aside, even though it exposes the transparent falsity of Trump’s declaration that US political violence comes from one side only. Consider instead the likely effect of his words. At best, they add fuel to an already incendiary situation. At worst, they encourage retaliation and revenge.Witness Trump’s allies and cheerleaders. “We’re gonna avenge Charlie’s death,” promised Fox News host Jesse Watters. Elon Musk declared that “The Left is the party of murder”. A legion of other rightwing influencers have already taken this talk to its logical conclusion, announcing, as one put it, that “THIS IS WAR”. Could the message being sent to a furious and well-armed support base be any clearer?And notice something else Trump said on Wednesday. He pledged to find those “organisations that fund and support” what he classifies as political violence. Given that one of his closest aides said before Kirk’s murder that the Democratic party should be viewed as a “domestic extremist organisation”, it’s not hard to imagine who he will be coming for. Surely any group that opposes him.How should they – Democrats, liberals, the left – be responding to this moment of peril? So far they have observed the old norms, with almost every Democratic figure of any standing, whether former president or serving politician, offering the decent, human response: horror at such a brutal act, sympathy for Kirk’s wife and now-fatherless young children, fear for where this leaves the country. Watch MSNBC, or listen to the Pod Save crowd, and you’ll see that that’s how most of the leading lights in the anti-Trump universe have, rightly, responded. Any deviation from that norm has been punished.It is one of the asymmetries of the US culture wars that this etiquette, rigorously enforced from left to right, is not observed in the other direction. So when an intruder broke into the home of the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, and nearly clubbed her husband, Paul, then 82, to death, the leading Republican in the country did not offer condemnation or words of consolation. No, Trump responded by making repeated jokes at Paul Pelosi’s expense.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDifferent rules apply. After an act of violence, Democrats must be gracious, empathetic and call for calm on all sides, while Republicans can mock the victims, blame only one side and demand more violence. And there’s a further asymmetry: a single post from a random, anonymous user online will be treated as a statement from “the left”, while the outpourings of the right’s most powerful voices, in politics or the media, and including the president himself, somehow get a free pass.As part of this etiquette, it’s become poor taste to point out Kirk’s actual views. It’s as if the belief that no one should be killed for their opinions requires you to withhold any judgment of those opinions. But Kirk did not hold back. He was happy to tell people that he would be nervous getting on a plane flown by a Black pilot, and to talk of “prowling Blacks”; to tell Taylor Swift to “Reject feminism. Submit to your husband … You’re not in charge”; to deny the truth of the 2020 election; to recommend that children should watch public executions; and to suggest “Jewish dollars” were to blame for the spread of “cultural Marxism”.Many liberal luminaries have swerved past this back catalogue, preferring to express their admiration for Kirk’s willingness to debate and his genuine gift for engaging the young. That has left the field clear for the right to redefine Kirk not as the extremist he was – and was proud to be – but as a paragon of civic participation, one who merits a posthumous presidential medal of freedom and a lowering of the flag. While the liberal left is observing the conventional pieties, the right is swiftly sanitising Kirk’s views and canonising him, hailing him as a martyr for the cause of what they insist is “simple common sense”. As a result, it will have moved the Overton window yet further in its direction.These are dynamics Kirk knew well and that he was adroit at using to his advantage. He understood that a culture war inherently favours those willing to disregard the rules. It is a lesson that liberals and the left are, rightly, reluctant to learn – but that reluctance comes at an increasingly high price.

      Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

      Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

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      ‘She doesn’t have the power to stop him’: DC mayor walks a tightrope with Trump

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      During a press conference at the end of August, Washington DC’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, made sure to say “thank you” – in her own way – for Donald Trump’s influx of federal law enforcement in the nation’s capital.“We greatly appreciate the surge of officers that enhance what MPD has been able to do in this city,” Bowser said. She admitted that, after a recent meeting with the president, his knowledge of DC had “significantly increased” since his first term in the White House.Bowser pointed to recent data that shows a significant drop in violent crime, particularly carjackings, since more federal law enforcement began working with DC police. But she also offered some pushback.“What we know is not working is a break in trust between police and community,” Bowser said. “We know having masked Ice agents in the community has not worked, and national guards from other states has not been an efficient use of those resources.” She also underscored that if there were more local police officers, it would cancel out any need for any supplemental federal law enforcement.The president has spent years denigrating DC. After leaving office in 2021, and mounting his re-election campaign, he called the district “horribly run” and a “nightmare of murder and crime”. In August, he justified his “crime emergency” – after a former Doge staffer was attacked in DC – by describing the “bloodshed, bedlam and squalor” of the nation’s capital. He has also falsely claimed that violent crime in the district is the “worst it’s ever been”, despite it reaching a 30-year low in 2024, according to data compiled by the justice department.Trump promised repeatedly to “take over” DC on the campaign trail. Then, on 7 August, he started to send hundreds of federal agents to the capital to work with local law enforcement. Just days later, he declared a “public safety emergency”, allowing him to federalize the MPD for 30 days . He supplemented all of this by deploying the DC national guard. Now, about 2,300 national guard troops are patrolling the district – including several hundred sent from Republican-run states.Bowser did not denounce the move. Instead, she called it “unsettling” and said that it resembled an “authoritarian push” on a Zoom call with local organizers.Expressing deference to the president, while displaying a quiet pushback against his policies, is emblematic of the tightrope Bowser, who is the second-longest-serving mayor in DC’s history and is eyeing a fourth term, has been walking since Trump returned to office this year.It’s a far cry from her past willingness to undermine the president publicly. In 2020, during the height of the George Floyd racial justice protests that swept the country, the mayor called Trump a “scared man” on social media, as he tried to quell the demonstrations in the capital.She also called his use of federal law enforcement officials and national guard at the time an “invasion of our city” before announcing that a section of 16th Street, which is in front of the White House, would be renamed “Black Lives Matter Plaza” – with the road’s new name painted in tall yellow letters on the ground.When Trump returned to office, the pressure from the president and congressional Republicans to rename and pave over the plaza, or risk losing federal funding, forced Bowser’s hand in March. “We have bigger fish to fry,” she said of her decision to comply with the administration’s demands. “Now our focus is on making sure our residents and our economy survives.”Arguably, it signaled a new dawn in her ongoing power struggle with the president.Her apparent cooperation, including a recently signed executive order that ensures cooperation between MPD and federal officers indefinitely, has earned her praise from the administration. Trump congratulated Bowser’s compliance in a post from Truth Social. “Wow! Mayor Muriel Bowser of D.C. has become very popular because she worked with me and my great people in bringing CRIME down to virtually NOTHING in D.C,” the president wrote.On Monday, he also suggested that the mayor was more aligned with the administration’s goals than he had previously thought. “That’s not her ideology, but now I think that maybe is her ideology,” he said, while giving remarks at the Museum of the Bible in DC. “She’s taking a lot of heat from the radical left.”But Bowser’s apparent willingness to work with Trump has elicited frustration from members of the DC council. In a post on Twitter/X, the at-large council member Robert White pushed back against the mayor’s choice to credit federal officers in the capital.“This is trampling on democracy in real time, on our watch,” he said. “Sometimes we want to wait and see what’s happening, but that time has passed.” White later issued a statement that called for the rescission of the mayor’s order, calling it a “permission slip” that Trump was using to justify sending forces into other Democratic-led cities.“I wish there was greater resistance in this moment,” said Zachary Parker, a DC council member who represents Ward 5, which spans the Northeast quadrant of the district.“The mayor has been conciliatory to the president from the day she went to Mar-a-Lago to greet him to now – and look where we are,” he said.For longtime DC political analysts like Tom Sherwood, Bowser is stuck between a rock and a hard place.While he notes that her public appearances, like the late August press conference, could have more “vinegar”, Sherwood also says that language is only part of the dance – Bowser is ultimately forced to bend to the whims of a mercurial president who has a majority in both chambers of Congress.“The mayor has to consider pushing back where she can and not provoking even more attacks from this president, whose mind is like a weather vane when it comes to his attention to the district,” he said. “Both legally and politically, she doesn’t have the power to stop him.”Although DC does have limited self-governance, Congress is ultimately in charge of the district. Meanwhile, the president is allowed to keep both federal agents and national guard troops in the capital for as long as he deems necessary.“Every political person I’ve spoken to who doesn’t like what the mayor is doing can’t answer one question,” Sherwood said. “If you were mayor, with the limited power you had, what would you have done differently?”Many progressives in DC argue that Bowser is playing too nice, and isn’t reflecting the fact that almost 80% of DC residents oppose the takeover, according to a recent Washington Post-Schar School poll.While there isn’t any recent polling to show how the impact of the federal takeover has affected the mayor’s approval among DC locals, in May, 53% of residents were happy with Bowser’s job leading the district – a marked improvement from 46% the year prior. But the mayor has failed to reach the crest of approval ratings she received in the first five years of her tenure, which began in 2015.Recently, more than a hundred groups, local organizations and unions signed an open letter to Bowser, saying that her actions since 11 August had appeased Trump. “History is calling upon you to lead our people, not to cower in the face of an authoritarian who does not have our best interests in mind,” the letter reads.Ultimately, the mayor has to play the long game when handling the administration, according to a DC government source familiar with the mayor’s thinking. “We’re only eight months into this. There’s a lot of time left on the clock. DC’s only tool in the toolbox is soft power,” the source said. “Her only job is to protect the residents of Washington DC. She’s going to use whatever strategy is going to yield the best result for that specific mission.”Trump’s police takeover expired on 10 September, and the US House is not expected to vote on an extension – a sign that there might be a payoff to Bowser’s strategy.But, for Michael Fanone, the former DC police officer who has chronicled his work helping to defend the Capitol during the January 6 attack, it’s not as simple as hoping that Trump’s focus on the district will wane.“I don’t think we can say whether or not we know definitively that he’s off her back. I think that you see he’s moved on to another shiny object,” he said, referring to the surge of federal immigration agents in Chicago, and the president’s repeated threats to deploy national guard troops to the city. “Quite frankly, this isn’t just a local fight.”While the governors of blue states, like California’s Gavin Newsom, Illinois’s JB Pritzker and Maryland’s Wes Moore, have all taken vocal stands against the president, Sherwood recognizes that Bowser can’t risk the same ferocity. “I think she has made the calculation that most DC citizens will support her effort trying to battle Trump without the weapons other governments have,” he said. More

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      The real bias monitor at CBS is Donald Trump | Seth Stern

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      News outlets, including CBS, are free to run their editorial operations as they see fit. If they independently decide to hire a bias ombudsman, that’s their prerogative. If they think the best person to monitor bias at this moment is a career partisan like Kenneth Weinstein, that’s cause to question their judgment, but not necessarily a first amendment concern.That all changes, however, when the monitoring is at the behest of the federal government. And that’s what’s going on at CBS. The creation of the ombudsman role was one of many capitulations CBS’s owners made to the Trump administration to persuade the Federal Communications Commission to approve the Paramount-Skydance merger.Other concessions included a commitment to end DEI and, of course, the $16m dollar bribe to Trump, laundered as a settlement payment to resolve his frivolous lawsuit over 60 Minutes’ editing of an interview with then vice-president Kamala Harris. Two days after the check hit, the FCC approved the merger. And though Paramount denies it, Trump claims there was also a side agreement to sweeten the deal with $20m in pro-Trump PSAs.Given the original sin of that rotten transaction, there is no room for benefit of the doubt when it comes to Weinstein’s hiring.The day the hire was announced, the FCC chair, Brendan Carr – known for his lapel pin with a golden bust of Trump – told the Wall Street Journal that his supposedly independent agency was “fully aligned with the agenda that President Trump is running”. When it comes to the press, that agenda is clear: censorship and retribution.Weinstein’s past Trump bootlicking raises questions about whether he’s too biased to monitor bias. Soon after the administration extracted its latest surrender from CBS – a commitment to no longer exercise its constitutional right to edit interviews, in response to criticism from the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem – it was reported that Weinstein had deleted his X account.So the man tasked with policing transparency at CBS is already obscuring his own words? Not a great start as a journalistic ethicist.David Ellison, CEO of the new Paramount Skydance Corporation and son of Larry Ellison, who recently became the world’s richest person, insists Weinstein won’t report to the government. The ombudsman role is about transparency, not oversight, he claims. It will ensure that CBS showcases “varied ideological perspectives”, presumably including that of his dad’s buddy in the White House, who also wants to broker a deal for the Ellison family to control TikTok.One might argue that a serious bias monitor would focus on whether journalists’ biases (and yes, journalists have biases like everyone else) interfere with their pursuit of truth rather than implementing a nonsensical “all perspectives are created equal” policy. But again, absent government interference, Ellison’s entitled to write the job description as he sees fit.The government, however, apparently does intend to oversee – and, if it sees fit, interfere with – CBS’s bias policing. Carr reportedly said his agency was in a “trust but verify posture”, when it comes to the anti-bias commitments it unconstitutionally extracted. He noted: “When you make a filing at the FCC, we have rules and regulations that deal with false representations to the agency,” adding that his agency was “going to stay in touch with [Paramount] and track this issue”.In other words, the FCC is positioned to use Paramount’s seemingly coerced commitments during the merger process – including the bias ombudsman – to punish CBS if it steps out of line, or better yet, make it think twice about doing so in the first place. An independent bias cop would be all over the Columbia Journalism Review’s reporting on Thursday on alarming corporate meddling, by old and new ownership alike, in an effort to slant the network’s coverage in Israel’s favor. What an opportunity to hit the ground running! But don’t hold your breath.Legally, the government cannot use regulatory penalties as an end run around the constitution to control the news. As a prior version of Carr said in 2021: “A newsroom’s decision about what stories to cover and how to frame them should be beyond the reach of any government official.”But that assumes a government that respects the limits of its authority. The United States doesn’t have one of those. If this administration needs a pretext to punish CBS, it’ll find one – whether it’s alleged misrepresentations to regulators or some other bizarre theory government lawyers have yet to dream up.And don’t expect the FCC to push back. My employer, Freedom of the Press Foundation, filed an attorney disciplinary complaint against Carr in July, which included a laundry list of his overreaches and extra jurisdictional actions, from threatening corporate owners of cable news networks that don’t air Trump’s press conferences to efforts to meddle in online content.The FCC regulates neither cable news nor online speech, and Carr knows that. He also knows he can’t force even those he does regulate to broadcast whatever he wants. But those on the receiving end of Carr’s correspondence understand that he’s not speaking to them as an independent regulator but as one of Trump’s henchmen. It isn’t about whether they violated whatever regulation he cites (if he even bothers), it’s about whether they’re kissing the ring emphatically enough for his boss’s liking.The Trump administration has abused its powers to shake down Paramount and secure a foothold inside CBS’s newsroom. That doesn’t mean CBS will never criticize Trump again – that would be too obvious. But its owners know they might get slapped if it goes too far. That’s enough to tame a watchdog – especially a corporate one that prioritizes endeavors more lucrative than defending the first amendment.The new CBS might not quite be state media, but it’s certainly going to be state-supervised media. Congratulations to Weinstein on the title, but the real bias ombudsman is Donald Trump.

      Seth Stern is the director of advocacy at Freedom of the Press Foundation and a first amendment lawyer More