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

by Evelyn Reynolds 12 September 2025, 10:00

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

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Last month, federal regulators approved the long-anticipated merger of Skydance Media and Paramount Global, positioning David Ellison – the founder of Skydance and the son of megabillionaire Larry Ellison – as one of the most powerful figures in US media. Paramount Skydance Corporation, as it is now officially known, is one of a small handful of American media conglomerates, with Paramount Pictures, cable networks such as Comedy Central and MTV, and CBS all under its umbrella. CBS, in turn, runs one of the major US news operations, with nightly news viewership in the millions and 60 Minutes still being the most watched news program on network television.The implications of the merger are far-reaching and were already being felt ahead of its final approval. In July, Paramount agreed to pay Donald Trump $16m to settle a lawsuit over a 60 Minutes segment the president disapproved of, and a few weeks later, CBS controversially cancelled The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, which many observers speculated was at least partly about jettisoning an outspoken critic of Trump in anticipation of the deal.But one of the most buzzed-about aspects is Paramount’s possible acquisition of the Free Press, the digital media company founded by Bari Weiss as a Substack newsletter in 2021, and Weiss’s potential new role steering CBS’s editorial slant. In July, the Financial Times reported that Weiss was seeking at least $200m for her website – more than double its valuation a year earlier and more than the site’s admittedly impressive 155,000 paid subscribers (roughly a 10th of total subscribers) would seem to justify. That same week, the media newsletter Puck published an anonymously sourced report that Weiss would possibly be advising David Rhodes, a former CBS and Fox News executive and the current chair of Sky News, in the event that Rhodes resumes running CBS. And just last week, Puck reported that the deal was all but finalized, with the Free Press to be acquired for somewhere in the $100m to $200m range (less than Weiss sought but nothing to sneeze at) and with Weiss tasked with “guiding the editorial direction of the [CBS news] division”.If all this comes to pass, it will cement Weiss as a key figure in shaping the national news environment, just five years after her much publicized resignation from the New York Times over what she characterized as a censorious and hostile workplace. This came in the wake of the resignation of the editorial page editor, James Bennet, after a staff uproar over the publication of Senator Tom Cotton’s opinion piece calling for military intervention against Black Lives Matter protesters.Weiss, 41, is no stranger to publicity; since 2019, she has been the subject of mostly fawning profiles in Vanity Fair, Semafor, Los Angeles Magazine, the Times of London, the New Statesman, the Financial Times, and her former employers, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. The product of an idyllic and fiercely Zionist upbringing in Pittsburgh’s Jewish community, she first gained notice for her campaign against pro-Palestinian faculty during her undergrad years at Columbia University. A stint at the Bret Stephens-run neoconservative Wall Street Journal editorial page followed, before she and Stephens both departed for the New York Times, where her tenure as an opinion editor and writer was stormy well before her resignation. She and her wife, fellow voluntary Times exile Nellie Bowles, decamped to Los Angeles, where she wasted little time launching new projects: she co-founded the “heterodox” University of Austin and launched a Substack, originally dubbed Common Sense and then rebranded as the Free Press, which quickly acquired venture capital backers, a sizable subscriber base, and an editorial staff numbering in the dozens and including many media industry veterans. Her triumphant return to New York City last year marked her as a power broker in her own right. More than any other figure in her age cohort, Weiss wrote the playbook on canceling anti-Zionists and “woke” progressives, even as she decried “cancel culture” and claimed to champion free speech – and with the Free Press, she has developed a whole newsroom around that mission. The Guardian put detailed claims in this piece to Bari Weiss and the Free Press and did not receive an official response.View image in fullscreenWhen New York Magazine convened 57 of “the most powerful people in media” to discuss the industry’s future last year, Weiss was on the list. A month later, after Trump’s victory, the Free Press co-hosted an inauguration party with Elon Musk’s X and Uber, attended by the former British prime minister Liz Truss, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, and Dr Mehmet Oz. For each of her haters, and there are many, Weiss counts Jeff Bezos, Jerry Seinfeld (whose daughter is on staff at the Free Press), and Sheryl Sandberg among her fans, and Marc Andreessen, David Sacks, and Howard Schultz among her financial backers. “She doesn’t just speak to the 1%,” the conservative pollster Frank Luntz told the New York Times last year. “She speaks to the one-hundredth of 1%. And they’ll listen.”In just a few years, Weiss has gone from a punchline in media circles to one of the most influential names in the industry, one with a genuine popular following beyond insiders and donors. Her stunning comeback is a tribute to her hustle, her oft-acknowledged personal charisma, and above all her unapologetic support for Israel and attacks on progressive social justice dogmas, often disparaged as “wokeness” – both of which align her with some of the most powerful people alive even as they alienate her from many of her generational peers in journalism.But while Weiss is widely understood as a provocateur, what is less well understood is how she has used the Free Press to empower rightwing factions within established elite institutions, and how her efforts have been turbocharged by Trump’s return to the White House. If Weiss does join CBS, it will only formalize the role she has already carved out as the Trump administration’s de facto ally in its effort to silence progressive and pro-Palestinian voices. Weiss will be an ideological commissar situated within the highest levels of the media business, wielding her considerable platform to help the White House enforce compliance in spaces that fostered resistance during Trump’s first term: the media, academia and civil society.To get a sense of the kind of opportunities Weiss might have to influence decisions and coverage at CBS, it is worth flashing back a year to the fall of 2024. On 30 September, Ta-Nehisi Coates appeared on CBS’s morning news show, where he was interviewed by anchor Tony Dokoupil over Coates’s new book, The Message, which includes a scathing firsthand account of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. Dokoupil questioned Coates aggressively (some would say condescendingly) over what he called a one-sided depiction of Israel, and the interview was litigated on social media for days, pitting supporters of Israel and Palestine against each other on predictable lines.A week later, the Free Press joined the fray with an exclusive from inside CBS News, where the Coates interview was at least as divisive as it was to the wider public. On the first anniversary of the 7 October Hamas attacks, someone high up at CBS leaked recordings of an editorial meeting to the Free Press, revealing that, as the site’s editors put it, “the network’s top brass all but apologized for the interview to staff, saying that it did not meet the company’s ‘editorial standards.’” Though the article acknowledged that CBS’s chief legal correspondent, Jan Crawford, defended Dokoupil’s tough questions, it portrayed the meeting overall as an example of the woke conformity endemic to institutions such as CBS.“The sad truth is that Coates is not speaking truth to power,” the Free Press editorialized, in a sweeping indictment both of CBS and of elite liberalism writ large. “He is echoing the new consensus of the powerful. One can find more sophisticated versions of The Message in the course catalogs of Ivy League universities, the editorial pages of leading newspapers, and in the reports of well-funded NGOs. It is journalists like Tony Dokoupil who are an endangered species in legacy news organizations, which are wilting to the pressures of this new elite consensus.”A month later, Trump won the presidential election. Since then, what the Free Press editors termed “this new elite consensus” has been under siege from the federal government, which has openly sought to purge anything it considers “wokeness” from universities, newspapers and NGOs, and in particular has sought to criminalize pro-Palestinian activism and criticism of Israel. Weiss, who has presented herself as a leading defender of free speech, has in effect leveraged her publication to help the government suppress it.The Free Press’s involvement in the administration’s war on Columbia University, Weiss’s alma mater (and, full disclosure, mine; I socialized with Weiss as an undergraduate, though we have not spoken in years) has been a case in point. Trump’s joint task force to combat antisemitism chose the Free Press to break the news on 7 March that the administration was withholding $400m in federal grants to Columbia over the university’s alleged failure to combat antisemitism in the wake of the 7 October attacks – essentially the opening volley in Trump’s assault on elite higher education. Two weeks later, on 21 March, Columbia conceded to Trump’s blackmail, agreeing to place its Middle East studies department – which Weiss has been crusading against since she was an undergraduate two decades ago – under academic receivership. Just four days after that, the Free Press published a leaked transcript of a private Zoom call in which the university’s then president, Katrina Armstrong, told about 75 faculty members that she did not intend to comply with all of Trump’s demands, despite her public surrender. Three days later, Armstrong resigned – and according to the New York Times, a key reason why was that Trump’s antisemitism task force expressed concern over the transcript leaked to the Free Press.Weiss’s publication, in short, was the preferred vehicle for conveying information from Columbia insiders who wanted to purge all criticism of Israel from the university to Trump administration officials who were using unprecedented financial pressure to help them do exactly that. Just as with CBS a year ago, Weiss and the Free Press were there to help reactionaries at elite institutions advance their internal turf wars – and unlike a year ago, those reactionaries can now count on the full weight of Trump’s authoritarian administration to back them up.The same playbook can also be seen in the Free Press’s efforts to discredit National Public Radio, which from 1971 until this summer served as America’s major publicly supported broadcaster. Last April, the Free Press published an error-laden article by a disgruntled NPR business editor, Uri Berliner, who accused his employer of pervasive liberal bias and of betraying America’s trust. Berliner was predictably hired by the Free Press two months later, and within a year, he was being invited by House Republicans to testify against his former employer. In July of this year, Trump’s allies on Capitol Hill voted to defund NPR, and the Free Press published Berliner’s victory lap. The pattern is clear: if you work at a liberal institution and you want the Trump-controlled federal government to step in and discipline it, Bari Weiss is there to help.These are the real stakes of Weiss potentially joining CBS. If Paramount’s acquisition of the Free Press goes through, Weiss will probably be in a position to recruit a network of snitches and rightwing thought police, both from within existing CBS staff and from her own publication, ensconced throughout one of the four largest US media conglomerates. CBS staffers are reportedly “apoplectic” at the news of her impending role, with some raising concerns about a “hall monitor” approach to coverage and others threatening to resign – resignations Ellison and Weiss might welcome, as it would give them an opportunity to start fresh. Weiss could be responsible for shaping coverage and enforcing her own orthodoxy, especially with regard to Israel and its critics – an issue around which Weiss has consistently provided cover for Benjamin Netanyahu’s genocidal government. This would represent a shift for CBS; Paramount’s outgoing chair, Shari Redstone, is an avowed supporter of Israel who has reportedly been outraged by 60 Minutes’s coverage since the 7 October attacks, and has openly expressed hope that the Trump administration could force CBS to clamp down on “anti-Israel bias”, which Weiss is ideally suited to facilitate.View image in fullscreenLast month, the Free Press sparked widespread outrage by publishing an article by staffers Olivia Reingold and Tanya Lukyanova, who reported that the starving Palestinian children whose images appeared in multiple mainstream outlets were all suffering from pre-existing conditions such as cystic fibrosis or rickets – a clear attempt to bolster a narrative the publication has been pushing for months that widely reported famine conditions in Gaza are a hoax. Reingold and Lukyanova’s article drew condemnation from many quarters, including from the president of Refugees International, who pointed out that it is precisely children with such conditions who are most vulnerable in a famine. But the Free Press brushed off its critics and claimed credit for pushing CNN and the Washington Post to caveat their coverage in light of their reporting. “Journalistic outlets love to boast about ‘impact,’ and this story has had more than its share,” wrote the editors. As if to prove their point, Netanyahu himself posted a video of Reingold defending her work, with the caption: “Facts matter.” (The Guardian stands by the stories it published that included the image and says the photo did not act to deceive.)One of the critics the Free Press singled out was Ben Rhodes, a former top adviser to Barack Obama, who, the Free Press noted, was once nicknamed “Hamas”, an epithet used by his Obama administration colleague Rahm Emanuel (who sat for a friendly interview with Weiss in July) for his willingness to criticize Israel. In an appearance on Pod Save the World – which is part of Crooked Media, the independent progressive podcasting network run by former Obama staffers – Rhodes called Reingold and Lukyanova’s reporting “sociopathic” and “grotesque”. “There’s something wrong with you, deeply, deeply fucked up,” he added. These would be harsh words coming from anyone, but Ben Rhodes is the brother of David Rhodes, who has been floated as CBS’s next executive and who reportedly would be working closely with Weiss. In Ben Rhodes’s 2018 memoir, The World As It Is, he acknowledged political differences with his brother while also saying they have always been close. That he would speak publicly with such undisguised contempt about Weiss’s media company in that context suggests serious alarm at the possible direction of CBS News.Alarm is a justifiable reaction. Weiss has often been underestimated, but the success of the Free Press to date vindicates her seemingly limitless ambition. That is in spite of internal turmoil: in May, the media newsletter Breaker reported that the Free Press had seen a number of notable departures amid its rapid expansion and that staff had been skeptical of Weiss’s “chaotic” management style.But in the context of Trump’s federally funded culture war, it is unclear any of that will matter. In order to avoid the president’s disfavor and present themselves as worthy of access, legacy media companies are desperate to tap into the audience and the relationships that Weiss has so effectively courted.Although the Free Press did not respond on the record to the Guardian’s questions, a source within the Free Press defended the range of views the organization publishes and emphasized that it was not a partisan shop.When Trump first ran for office, Weiss positioned herself as a “Never Trumper”, following the lead of her mentor Stephens and other prominent neoconservatives, and in 2017 she described the first Trump administration as “shambolic”. But this February, as Trump kicked off his second term, Weiss told Fox News’s Howard Kurtz that her stance on Trump had softened. “I’m the first to admit that I was a sufferer of what conservatives at the time would have called TDS, Trump Derangement Syndrome,” Weiss said, claiming she cried at her desk the first time Trump won. Now, she explained, she had come to appreciate Trump for two main reasons: first, she saw the left’s “overzealous, out-of-touch, hysterical reaction to him” as “extraordinarily authoritarian and totalitarian in its impulses”, and second, she approved of some of his actual policies, noting particularly his Israel-aligned moves in the Middle East.The Free Press claims to be independent and non-partisan, and ahead of the 2024 election it canvassed its own staff and determined that it was equally divided between supporters of Trump, Kamala Harris and neither. But during Trump’s second term, the site has been noticeably sympathetic to the administration. As the UnPopulist has carefully documented, Weiss has made a choice in the Trump restoration era – rather than position the Free Press as a heterodox champion of “classical liberalism”, as it was initially presented during the Biden years, she has aligned herself with the White House’s priorities. The hiring of Batya Ungar-Sargon, a formerly left-leaning journalist turned fervent Maga pundit, this April was a clear signal of Weiss’s repositioning. This choice has alienated many of her former champions – for instance, Glenn Greenwald, who achieved a public rapprochement with Weiss in the early days of the Free Press (both Weiss and Greenwald have thrived and handsomely profited on Substack), has since excoriated her for consistently attacking the free speech rights of Israel critics. But it has also set her up well to ascend to even greater influence.Weiss is not afraid to burn bridges, scandalize critics or be branded a hypocrite in pursuit of power. In that sense, she has something in common with the president who has done so much to enable her rise. But Trump could never operate in the kinds of spaces where Weiss has been able to flourish. With her education, experience and extensively cultivated networks, she is uniquely well-suited to champion the prerogatives of those in academia, media, publishing and similar sectors who feel threatened by progressive social movements. Liberal institutions produced Bari Weiss, and now at least one could be hers to remake.
David Klion is a columnist for the Nation, a contributing editor at Jewish Currents, and currently working on a book about the legacy of neoconservatism More
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Trump claims new CBS owner will gift him $20m worth of airtime after $16m settlement
by Evelyn Reynolds 22 July 2025, 20:03
Donald Trump has claimed that the future owner of the US TV network CBS will provide him with $20m worth of advertising and programming – days after the network canceled The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.The US president recently reached a $16m settlement with Paramount, the parent of CBS News, over what he claimed was misleading editing of a pre-election interview with the Democratic candidate for president, Kamala Harris.While CBS initially called the lawsuit “completely without merit”, a view shared by many legal experts, Paramount is in the midst of an $8bn sale to the Hollywood studio Skydance Media, which requires the approval of federal regulators.In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump claimed the settlement had been paid – and that he was expecting much more from the new owners of Paramount.“Paramount/CBS/60 Minutes have today paid $16 Million Dollars in settlement, and we also anticipate receiving $20 Million Dollars more from the new Owners, in Advertising, PSAs [public service announcements], or similar Programming, for a total of over $36 Million Dollars,” he wrote.CBS and Skydance did not immediately respond to requests for comment.Trump’s claim that he has been offered millions of dollars’ worth of programming is likely to exacerbate anger over the axing of The Late Show, which CBS announced on Thursday.Days earlier, Colbert, a high-profile critic of Trump, had branded Paramount’s settlement with Trump “a big fat bribe”. He is due to remain on air until May, and declared on Monday that “the gloves are off”.Skydance was founded in 2010 by David Ellison, son of the tech billionaire Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle, and an ally of Trump.The $16m settlement was already seen by critics as a further example of capitulation by media companies hoping to smooth the waters with the US president. ABC News, ultimately owned by Disney, also agreed to pay $15m to settle a defamation lawsuit over its coverage.After Trump’s latest claim regarding $20m worth of advertising and programming from Paramount, the Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren said in a statement on X, formerly Twitter: “This reeks of corruption.” More
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The end of Stephen Colbert’s Late Show is a concerning nail in the coffin for comedy | Jesse Hassenger
by Evelyn Reynolds 18 July 2025, 13:29
The idea that the political career of Donald Trump would be a goldmine for comedy died a long time ago, with the coffin accepting stray nails for the past five years. The latest and possibly last such nail is the cancellation of The Late Show, the CBS late-night talkshow hosted by Stephen Colbert since the fall of 2015, and originated by David Letterman when the network poached him from NBC in 1993. At this point, Trump hasn’t just made topical late-night comedy look outdated, hackneyed and an insufficient response to his reign of terror; he’s also made a chunk of it flat-out go away.There will be time to eulogize Colbert’s particular talkshow style later; the Late Show isn’t leaving the air for another 10 months, when his contract is up. Surely that leaves plenty more time to savage the president – and Colbert has been in this slot since right around the time Trump became a real contender in the presidential race, so why has this only now come to a head? Seemingly because the axing of the Late Show franchise follows the $16m settlement of a frivolous Trump lawsuit against CBS and their newsmagazine show 60 Minutes over the show’s editing of a 2024 interview with presidential candidate Kamala Harris. Colbert made great fun of his bosses’ payout as a cowardly “bribe” designed to appease the Trump administration, who are in the position to approve or deny the sale of Paramount, the corporate owners of CBS, to the company Skydance. In other words, the pre-merger nixing a comedian who regularly goofs on Trump on network TV seems like a convenient bit of timing – maybe even an unspoken bonus to go along with those millions of dollars.The network, of course, has characterized the decision as “purely financial” amid a period when most traditional late-night shows have struggled. As excuses go, it’s not entirely unconvincing. After all, Colbert isn’t being replaced with another host; The Late Show is simply going the same route as its short-lived companion series After Midnight (and The Late Late Show before it). CBS is surrendering the late-night block entirely. This represents a major retreat after the Letterman deal made the network a genuine player for the first time in ages. Presumably it’s back to reruns and old movies going forward.In that sense, this decision does transcend politics. CBS has ripped off a bandage that the big three networks have been applying to similar wounds for years. Late-night programming simply doesn’t mean as much as it used to, with smaller network lead-ins from primetime lineups and more audience choices for comedy, talk, music or even the dopey celeb games that Jimmy Fallon throws together. Saturday Night Live has retained some cultural cachet, thanks to a combination of lower commitment (20 episodes a year, on a night where many people don’t have work the next day, versus eight times as many, all airing on weeknights), legacy branding (it’s still known as a star showcase and political comedy go-to, no matter how wan those cold-open sketches get), and sketch comedy that travels well online. These days, it’s routinely one of the highest-rated network shows of the week when it airs a new episode, offering an encouraging sign that old time-slot rules about viewership no longer apply. It’s also extremely expensive to produce and difficult to replicate, which nonetheless looks more viable than the tired talkshow format.View image in fullscreenBroadly, this could be a good thing for comic minds including Colbert or Conan O’Brien. Some comedians seem unable to resist the siren call of late-night talkshows, chasing the Tonight Show dream even when that actual job remained out of reach. O’Brien is a singularly brilliant comedy writer and performer; as great as his late-night shows could be, in retrospect should he have spent three decades primarily in that waning medium? Colbert, meanwhile, did his strongest political satire playing a parody of a conservative commentator on The Daily Show and its later spinoff The Colbert Report. His warmth and sometimes-sharp humor made him a good “real” talkshow host – and by most standards, a successful one. In recent matchups, his Late Show has been the most-watched such program across the major networks. That he can face cancellation anyway should (alongside O’Brien losing his Tonight Show gig years ago) signal to newcomers that the rarified air of the national late-night talkshow host is also getting pretty thin, maybe unbreathable.Yet Trump has sucked up some of that oxygen, too. Even with the “challenges” cited by CBS, it’s difficult to believe that vanquishing a longtime issuer of Trump mockery wasn’t at least considered a side benefit of canceling The Late Show. Even if the decision was, as claimed, a financial one, it accompanies another financial decision: that Paramount could afford to pay Trump $16m rather than proceed with litigation that many seemed to think they could win. That’s precisely the kind of expense that could diminish how, say, your late-night talkshow attracts more eyeballs than The Tonight Show.Beyond Trump personally smudging up the balance sheets, he’s helped to hasten the demise of late-night comedy simply by being himself, seeming to provide the perfect target: a venal, dimwitted perma-celebrity with an army of devoted sycophants. But after two non-consecutive administrations have flooded the zone with grotesqueries, performing a lightly zinging monologue or sketches as a warmup act for good-natured interviews seems unlikely to entice either those craving anti-Trump catharsis, or those desperate to believe in his strongman powers.That Colbert took a somewhat less cutesy approach than his competitor Fallon seemed to be all that was necessary to mark him as a troublemaker. The thing is, Trump might have ultimately consumed him either way. By providing a ready-made caricature of himself, intentionally or not, the president has beaten the system again. It may not be worth mourning the hacky, presidential-themed jokes we might miss in a future with fewer talkshows than ever. But it does feel like the enforcement of one of Trump’s more minor cruelties: the ability to see himself as the only real star in the world. More
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How the rightwing sports bro conquered America
by Evelyn Reynolds 13 July 2025, 13:00
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View image in fullscreenThis February, Pat McAfee was broadcasting live on ESPN, the most watched sports network in the US, when he aired a salacious rumor about the sex life of a teenage college student. Once a workaday punter with the Indianapolis Colts, McAfee is now the most influential pundit in American sports with an eponymous ESPN show, who has more than 11m followers across YouTube, X, Instagram and TikTok.To howls of merriment from his panel, McAfee spelled out the rumor centered on a 19-year-old female student at Ole Miss, a public university in Mississippi, as it was “being reported by everybody on the internet”: that the student had sex with her boyfriend’s father. “Ole Miss dads are slinging meat right now!” roared “Boston” Connor Campbell, one of McAfee’s sidekicks.McAfee did not directly name Mary Kate Cornett, the college freshman at the center of the rumor, but she has since described how McAfee’s amplification of this “completely false” story encouraged others in the sports talk world to do likewise, resulting in her receiving a deluge of threats and harassment. Cornett has engaged lawyers to explore suing McAfee, ESPN and others involved in spreading the rumor for defamation. McAfee appeared moderately chastened by the episode: “I never, ever want to be a part of anything negative in anybody’s life, ever,” he said recently while addressing the outrage that his boosting of the rumor prompted. But he has not yet apologized, and in no way does his future as one of ESPN’s most bankable stars seem in jeopardy. Whatever blowback ensued has blown right on by.The whole episode served as a demonstration of power: the world of sports influencers such as McAfee, which is particularly influential among young men and can be understood as an extension of the Donald Trump-aligned “manosphere”, now stands as an important bastion of the culture of insensitivity and entitlement on which Trumpism thrives.View image in fullscreenA new generation of sports talk starsThe Pat McAfee Show, a two-to three-hour afternoon blast of high-volume sports chat, sweating and raw, uncomplicated American male heterosexuality, launched in 2019. It has quickly become a favored media stop for many of the top names in US sports and culture. Tom Cruise spent 30 minutes on the show recently (“I appreciate the shit outta you,” McAfee told Cruise); LeBron James stopped by for an hour.Throughout the show’s history, McAfee has courted controversy: he’s called WNBA star Caitlin Clark a “white bitch”, he’s made jokes about child abuse, he’s helped air rumors linking celebrities to Jeffrey Epstein. None of it seems to matter: McAfee, whose show moved to ESPN on a five-year, $85m deal in 2023, powers on unperturbed, growing in cultural might with each passing month.McAfee is now the avatar of a new generation of sports talk stars who have upended the rules about public speech, remade culture in their own brash image, and are completely bulletproof.View image in fullscreenAmong McAfee’s peers in this dripped-out new world of costless needling are Barstool Sports boss Dave Portnoy; former NFL players Will Compton and Taylor Lewan, who co-host the show Bussin’ With the Boys; and NFL receiver-turned-podcaster Antonio Brown. Sports are also a major, though not exclusive, topic of conversation for Joe Rogan, Theo Von and other leaders of the manosphere. The Wikipedia pages of many of these figures contain hefty “controversy” tabs. Portnoy has faced extensive and credible accusations of sexual misconduct; Brown refers to WNBA star Clark, an athlete on whom the anti-woke right seems psychotically fixated, as “Cousin Itt”, referencing the Addams Family’s hirsute, non-verbal relative, and is so crassly sexist online that even the famously feminist redoubt of Barstool Sports has described him as a “crackpot”.In an earlier era, reckless promotion of tasteless gossip about a teenager’s sex life might have been enough to sink a career like McAfee’s. Provocation, abrasiveness and a delight in offending have been essential to sports talk – on radio and cable TV – for decades. But in the years before social media, on-demand programming and betting turned sports into an all-hours, all-platforms juggernaut, there were still lines that sporting pundits could not cross: shock jock Don Imus, for instance, built his career on being outspoken but was fired by WFAN/MSNBC in 2007 after making racist and misogynist comments including describing the Rutgers women’s basketball team as “nappy-headed hos”.Today’s sports broadcast world runs according to a new set of rules, in which “respectable” TV and the demi-monde of sports podcasts, streaming, and shitposting increasingly intersect: all engagement is good engagement, and the best type of filter is no filter. Whatever faint norms of decorum constrained earlier generations of professional sports talkers have faded completely.There’s a reciprocal flow of testosterone and ideas between these shows, the world of sports, social media and real life. A handful of subjects and themes recur: veneration of the military, glorification of strength and traditional “male” values, celebration of gambling, the denigration of women and anything thought to represent “woke” culture. On any given day across the sporting bro-zone you might hear Bussin’ With the Boys and their guests rail against pronouns and cancel culture, the hosts of Barstool Sports’ Pardon My Take podcast argue Taylor Swift needs to “release a sex video” to make her presence at NFL games tolerable to the average male fan, or McAfee devote 30 minutes (as he did recently) to describing his day among “maybe the baddest motherfuckers on earth”: the drill instructors at the US Marine Corps training center on Parris Island in South Carolina. These interests and obsessions mirror the president’s cultural politics, turning the sports bros into critical emissaries for Trump’s peculiar brand of popularly elected vandalism.It’s worth questioning, of course, how influential these influencers really are. A recent poll from the Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics found that 35% of young men had an unfavorable view of Rogan, while a further 36% had never heard of him or did not know enough about him to have an opinion. The much-rehearsed idea that the minds of young male voters have been irretrievably colonized by the manosphere is surely overblown.But there seems little dispute that these influencers have been effective in platforming rightwing figures and ideas. The sports bros are an essential part of that legitimizing apparatus – all the more so because their endorsement of the right’s reflexes, priorities and modes of attack is couched in the ostensibly apolitical language of sports. The cultural supremacy of the sports bros is now so total that Barstool’s Dave Portnoy is now famous for his online pizza reviews that can make or break restaurants in America. When a casual day trader from Massachusetts who built his media empire on college gambling advice becomes the arbiter-in-chief of America’s favorite food, something fundamental has shifted in how we determine cultural authority.View image in fullscreenThe sports bro supremacyThe unsinkability of these sporting mouths, bobbing forever on the surface of our cultural consciousness, parallels the envenomation of online discourse and the transformation of Trump from presidential punchline into the most consequential political figure of the century. Trump, let’s not forget, first reached the White House after navigating a storm of outrage over the Access Hollywood tape, a victory that set a precedent for the practitioners of “locker room talk” who have found fame in his wake. With the tacit endorsement of the sports bros, on whose shows he became a regular guest during last year’s election, Trump not only seized the young male vote, he also engineered a complete reversal in his own reputation throughout the sporting world from his first to second terms.Interestingly, McAfee himself declined an invitation to have Trump on his show during last year’s election campaign, reasoning that he and his sidekicks are “not the ones” to be asking questions about politics – an uncharacteristic moment of modesty. But UFC-adjacent comedian Theo Von and Barstool Sports’ Bussin’ With the Boys both featured extended conversations with Trump during the campaign.These appearances showed Trump to be extremely well-versed in sports, which is perhaps no surprise when you consider the amount of time he spends tweeting about them, watching them and playing them – not to mention his own tangled history with the business side of sports (Trump owned a New Jersey-based team in the short-lived United States Football League during the 1980s). These podcasts also helped humanize Trump, presenting him as a relatable guy who works long hours and is sympathetic enough to engage a jumpy figure like Von in a conversation about drug addiction. The warm audience Trump received helped normalize his politics and support.Today the sporting world, with a few notable exceptions, genuflects before Trump in a way that seemed unthinkable during his first term. Beyond the unquivering Trumpian stronghold of Dana White’s UFC, the big professional leagues such as the NFL and NBA either kept their distance from the 45th president or were at outright war with him; now No 47 is the guest of honor at the Super Bowl and every second athlete is doing the Trump dance, the double fist pump and minor hip swivel that the president has turned into his signature choreographic move on the campaign stage.The president’s political endurance has perhaps, in turn, acted as a kind of bro bat signal, helping to validate the obnoxiousness and resistance to introspection on which the sports bros thrive: if he doesn’t have to censor himself, apologize or pay lip service to feelings, why should they?View image in fullscreenThe personality of American culture has long been split between purity and profanity. The death of consequences for figures like McAfee suggests the balance of power has definitively swung in favor of the trolls and tough guys, and now none of puritanical old America’s sanctities will hold them back. It says everything about the sports bros’ invincibility that among the top names floated by progressives to counter the blitzkrieg of Trump’s second term and lead them to 2028 is Stephen A Smith, the sports pundit who turned relentlessness into a career and is something of a spiritual godfather to the McAfees and Portnoys of the world. The only person who can defeat a sports bro is another sports bro.Might there be another strategy for the left to combat this tide flooding the sporting-cultural zone? Recent reports suggest Democrats are slinging money to all corners of the country in a desperate attempt to find the progressive answer to Rogan: the chatter is all about “speaking with American men” and investing to generate a “return on culture”, and Democrats such as Hakeem Jeffries and Josh Shapiro have in recent months zombied from sports podcast to sports podcast in a doomed and focus group-refined attempt to revive a cadaverous Democratic party with the tonic of their everyman cool.These appearances might be wooden and inauthentic, but it does suggest a key role for sports in the left’s attempt to pull itself off the canvas following the catastrophe of last November. Sports are hardly the exclusive preserve of the right. The Golden State Warriors’ four-time championship winning head coach, Steve Kerr, is probably the most vocal critic of Trumpism at work in American sports today, and Democrats have long associated themselves with sports: Barack Obama, of course, is an accomplished hooper, while Zohran Mamdani, the socialist candidate for New York City mayor who loves Arsenal and cricket and has spun his appearances at Knicks games during the recent NBA playoffs into campaign trail gold, is living proof that it’s possible to be passionate and knowledgeable about sports while eschewing the ugliness of bro culture.But left-leaning sports pundits? That’s a tougher ask. The pallor of recent attempts to seed a more robust progressive presence online highlights how severely Democrats have been left behind in the new world of sports talk. Broadcasts such as the Pat McAfee Show are powerful engines of political orientation not because they address politics directly – they almost never do – but because their politics emerge in the interstices of everything said on screen.There aren’t many popular voices in sports punditry that do for the left what McAfee and his cohort do, casually yet masterfully, for the right: embody an ethos, solidify an idiom and transmit a set of values that find a natural downstream outlet in electoral politics. Influential Twitch lefty Hasan Piker occasionally discusses sports but they are not his main focus; pundits such as Pablo Torre and Bomani Jones lean liberal but they do not have the same reach that the McAfees of the world do, and they don’t express their politics with anything like the same splash. Over the past decade sports broadcasters who discussed politics from a leftist perspective, such as former ESPN host Jemele Hill, were gradually forced out of the mainstream. NFL star Travis Kelce, who hosts a popular podcast with his older brother Jason, seems vaguely progressive in orientation but he also said playing in front of Trump at this year’s Super Bowl was “a great honor”, a tellingly wimpy political intervention. Like LeBron before him, he’s too big to get too real, too good to get dirty; the Kelce-James brand of progressivism is very much by the book, a progressivism of the civics class. Where the right is loud, the sporting left speaks with a militant squeak.View image in fullscreenA lack of voices on the leftOn-field athletic competition is about domination, strength, winners and losers, yes, but it’s also about finesse, beauty, cunning and wit; it’s a place where conservative fantasies of order and the cerebrations of the progressives can both find a home.But if any side should be controlling the field of sports talk, it is the left, since so many of the inequalities that plague society at large now infect sports as well, which are increasingly run on extractive lines for the benefit of predatory rentiers, autocrat-backed sovereign wealth funds and private-equity ghouls. Meanwhile the leveling mechanisms that still keep the American professional leagues interesting and unpredictable – collective wage bargaining, drafts, salary caps and luxury taxes – have their roots in this country’s unlikely tradition of sporting socialism. Far from being a natural stage for the tiresome politics of cultural revenge in which the right traffics, sports (as a thing to shoot the shit about) offer a rich canvas for the exploration of many issues about which the left cares deeply: race, gender, class, social mobility and the corrupting influence of money.The left should not be afraid of learning from the lords of the sporting bro-zone even as it spurns their machismo and lack of tact. A culture used to crew necks can’t go back to buttoned collars.For example, as part of his deal with ESPN, McAfee is allowed to swear live on TV: “The following progrum is a collection of stooges talking about happenings in the sports world,” announces a disclaimer that airs before each show, read aloud in a geriatric voice reminiscent of Grampa Simpson. “There may be some ‘cuss’ words because that’s how humans in the real world talk.” This is one area where the bros and the left should make common cause: swearing is good. Viewers love McAfee not despite the fact he’s loose, unpolished and has a dirty mouth; they love him because of these things. This is a man, let’s not forget, who first came to prominence at age 23, while playing for the Colts, after being arrested in downtown Indianapolis for taking a pre-dawn swim in a canal. Asked to explain why he was soaking wet, McAfee replied: “I am drunk.” The charge was dismissed but the hearts of a city were won, and a media career was born.Why can the left not take the best of McAfee and his ilk while jettisoning the worst? Surely it’s possible to talk sports in a way that’s biting, real, unfiltered, funny and even mean – to “connect with men where they are”, as we are repeatedly told the left must – without descending into toxicity, cruelty, belligerence and hate. If progressives want to reclaim the White House, they could do worse than to start rambling for hours on end about games and players that have nothing to do with politics at all. Sports-loving leftists of America, unite: you have nothing to lose but your parlays. More
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Why is the media paying millions to Trump? – podcast
by Evelyn Reynolds 11 July 2025, 04:00
Archive: CBS News, PBS, NBC News, WHAS11, CNN, Fox 5 New York
Read Edward Helmore’s piece on Trump’s war on the media
Listen to Science Weekly’s episode on the Texas floods
Listen to Season 10 of Comfort Eating with Grace Dent
Send your questions and feedback to politicsweeklyamerica@theguardian.com
Help support the Guardian. Go to theguardian.com/politicspodus More
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I chaired the FCC. The 60 Minutes settlement shows Trump has weaponized the agency | Tom Wheeler
by Evelyn Reynolds 5 July 2025, 11:00
It is time to unfurl the “Mission Accomplished” banner at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Paramount Global, the parent of CBS Television, has agreed to pay $16m to settle a lawsuit brought by Donald Trump over the editing of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris. Presumably, the FCC can now cease its slow-walking of the Paramount-Skydance Media merger.Just two days after the president took office, the agency’s new chair, Brendan Carr, inserted the FCC into the issues in the Trump lawsuit that alleged “news distortion”. As the New York Post headlined: “Trump’s FCC pick Brendan Carr says ‘60 Minutes’ editing scandal could affect Paramount-Skydance merger review.”That lawsuit was filed in the final week of the 2024 presidential campaign under the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, a statute historically used against false advertising. The case was filed in a single-judge federal district court that one legal publication characterized as “a favored jurisdiction for conservative legal causes and plaintiffs”. CBS characterized the case as “without merit”.The 60 Minutes broadcast aired in October; the day before, a different excerpt had appeared on Face the Nation. Soon after, the Center for American Rights – a group that describes itself as “a public interest law firm dedicated to protecting Americans’ most fundamental constitutional rights” – filed a complaint at the FCC alleging CBS had engaged in “significant and substantial news alteration”. The complaint was dismissed as seeking “to weaponize the licensing authority of the FCC in a way that is fundamentally at odds with the First Amendment”. Immediately upon becoming the FCC chair, Carr reversed that decision and ordered a formal proceeding on the matter (but let stand the dismissal of a complaint against a local Fox station over its 2020 election coverage).The election of Trump and the installation of a Trump-appointed FCC chair transformed the Paramount/CBS merger from a review of the public interest merits of the transfer of broadcast licenses into a broader question that included the 60 Minutes editing. Carr told an interviewer: “I’m pretty confident that the news distortion complaint over the 60 Minutes transcript is something that is likely to arise in the context of the FCC review of that transaction.”The formal paperwork for FCC approval of the license transfers was submitted 10 months ago, on 6 September 2024. Now that the lawsuit has been settled, it will be interesting to see how quickly the FCC acts.The CBS case is just one example of the tactical leverage the Trump FCC regularly exerts over those it regulates. Carr, who wrote the FCC chapter in the “Project 2025” Maga blueprint, has not been shy about using this authority to achieve such political goals.Even before formally assuming the FCC chair position, Carr began exercising chair-like authority to advance the Maga agenda. This began with a letter to the CEOs of Alphabet (Google and YouTube), Meta (Facebook and Instagram), Microsoft and Apple alleging: “you participated in a censorship cartel … [that is] an affront to Americans’ constitutional freedoms and must be completely dismantled.” Going beyond traditional FCC authority, he threatened: “As you know, Big Tech’s prized liability shield, Section 230, is codified in the Communications Act, which the FCC administers.” Carr suggested he might investigate whether those editorial decisions were made in good faith.Recently, Carr conditioned the approval of Verizon’s acquisition of Frontier Communications on Verizon agreeing to drop its corporate diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies. Continuing his anti-diversity efforts, he launched an investigation into Comcast Corporation because it promotes DEI as “a core value of our business”.In his pre-FCC chair days, Carr championed press freedom. In a 2021 statement, he wrote: “A newsroom’s decision about what stories to cover and how to frame them should be beyond the reach of any government official.” Once he became Trump’s FCC chair, however, he not only picked up on the 60 Minutes matter, but also launched an investigation into the public broadcasters NPR and PBS “regarding the airing of … programming across your broadcast member stations”.The FCC’s regulatory authority directly covers about one-sixth of the American economy while also affecting the other five-sixths that rely on the nation’s communications networks. What was once an independent, policy-based agency has been transformed into a performance-based agency, using any leverage it can discover or invent to further the Trump Maga message.
Tom Wheeler was the chair of the Federal Communications Commission from 2013 to 2017 More
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Former CBS anchor slams Paramount settlement with Trump: ‘It was a sellout’
by Evelyn Reynolds 3 July 2025, 20:50
A former CBS News anchor and 60 minutes correspondent, Dan Rather, has blasted the $16m settlement between Paramount, the parent company of CBS News, and Donald Trump, calling it a “sad day for journalism”.“It’s a sad day for 60 Minutes and CBS News,” Rather, a veteran journalist who was a CBS News anchor for over 20 years, told Variety in an interview published on Wednesday. “I hope people will read the details of this and understand what it was. It was distortion by the president and a kneeling down and saying, ‘yes, sir,’ by billionaire corporate owners.”Last November, Trump sued CBS News, claiming that the network’s interview with the Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, had been doctored to portray her in a favorable light – which he alleged amounted to “election interference”.Many legal experts had widely dismissed the lawsuit as “meritless” and unlikely to hold up under the first amendment, but on Wednesday Paramount announced that it had agreed to pay Trump $16m to settle the case over the interview that was broadcast on the CBS News program 60 Minutes.The settlement comes as Paramount is preparing for a $8bn merger with Skydance Media, which requires approval from the US Federal Communications Commission. Paramount has said that the lawsuit is separate from the company’s merger.A spokesperson for Trump’s legal team said in a statement to the Guardian that “With this record settlement, President Donald J. Trump delivers another win for the American people as he, once again, holds the Fake News media accountable for their wrongdoing and deceit.“CBS and Paramount Global realized the strength of this historic case and had no choice but to settle,” the spokesperson added.According to Wednesday’s announcement, the settlement funds will not be paid to Trump directly, but instead would be allocated to Trump’s future presidential library. The settlement did not include an apology.Rather told Variety on Wednesday that in his opinion “you settle a lawsuit when you’ve done something wrong” and “60 minutes did nothing wrong, it followed accepted journalistic practices”.“Lawyers almost unanimously said the case wouldn’t stand up in court,” he said.Ultimately though, Rather said he was disappointed but not surprised by the settlement.“Big billionaire businesspeople make decisions about money,” he said. “We could always hope that they will make an exception when it comes to freedom of the press, but it wasn’t to be.“Trump knew if he put the pressure on and threatened and just held that they would fold, because there’s too much money on the table,” Rather said. “Trump is now forcing a whole news organization to pay millions of dollars for doing something protected by the constitution – which is, of course, free and independent reporting. Now, you take today’s sellout. And that’s what it was: It was a sellout to extortion by the president. Who can now say where all this ends?”He continued: “It has to do with not just journalism, but more importantly, with the country as a whole. What kind of country we’re going to have, what kind of country we’re going to be. If major news organizations continue to kneel before power and stop trying to hold the powerful accountable, then we all lose.”In his more than 60 years in journalism, Rather told Variety he had never seen the profession face the kind of challenges as those it faces today.“Journalism has had its trials and tribulations before, and it takes courage to just soldier on,” Rather said. “Keep trying, keep fighting. It takes guts to do that. And I know the people at CBS News, and particularly those at 60 Minutes, they’ll do their dead level best under these circumstances. But the question is what [is] this development and the message it sends to us. And that’s what I’m trying to concentrate on.” More
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Win a game show, become a US citizen? We’ve entered the realm of the truly depraved | Dave Schilling
by Evelyn Reynolds 20 May 2025, 14:00
I guess Republicans really love game shows. Just a few days after Fox aired its “isn’t Trump wild” guessing game, What Did I Miss, it was revealed that the TV producer Rob Worsoff has pitched the United States Department of Homeland Security on a series premise he calls The American, which would give immigrants a chance to compete in a series of challenges for the prize of US citizenship. The actual process of winning citizenship is obviously too boring to film. Filling out an N-400 form? Snore. A written exam? I’d rather watch a dog eat grass. Skip all that and give us an obstacle course instead.People have stupid ideas all the time. My child thought it would be fun to squeeze lemon juice in his hot chocolate. He took one sip, almost barfed on the table, then begged me to order him another, lemon-less beverage. Stupid ideas are great, because most of them are harmless. “Oh, I ate a large bug off the ground. Whoops.” The only stupid ideas that are a problem are the ones where the actual government considers cosigning them. The DHS assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin was asked by Time magazine what the status of Worsoff’s pitch was and responded via email that it “has not received approval or rejection by staff”.Gotta really think this one through, I guess. Something like this must be thoroughly vetted by serious people. How cruel is this one, exactly? How desirable is the bloodthirsty demo for advertisers these days? Can we sell a presenting sponsorship? And is this for streaming or broadcast? Can we get Chris Hardwick to host? These are all vital questions to consider before making a decision in show business.Such an idea would be eye-rollingly low-class in normal times, but as the Trump administration attempts to ramp up deportations and to do away with the constitutional right of citizenship by birth (and federal courts bravely fight back), this dumb concept travels at warp speed to the dimension of the truly depraved. The US Citizenship and Immigration Services website takes great pains to describe the process of becoming an American as solemn and full of responsibility. Step 10 of the site’s “10 Steps to Naturalization” is “Understanding U.S. Citizenship”. It states: “Citizenship is the common thread that connects all Americans. Check out this list of some of the most important rights and responsibilities that all citizens – both Americans by birth and by choice – should exercise, honor, and respect.”Yes, but what if you had to guess the number of jelly beans in a jar first?To make his pitch even more appealing to the bigwigs in Washington, Worsoff suggested a few choice ideas for challenges that correspond to the most stereotypical aspects of life in America’s 50 states. A pizza-making contest for New York, a rocket-launching challenge for Florida, and a “gold rush challenge” for California. Nothing says “vital skills for living in 2025” like panning for gold in a pair of tattered Levi’s 501s. Perhaps Levi’s will sponsor the segment. Gosh, this thing pays for itself.But why stop there? Maybe a Breaking Bad-themed meth-making challenge for New Mexico. Polygamy challenge for Utah? How efficiently can you operate a turn-of-the-20th-century steel mill in Pennsylvania? Can you safely land a plane at Newark airport? For Washington state, you just have to answer trivia questions about Seattle inaccuracies in the sitcom Frasier. The possibilities for inanity are significant.In order to advance to the next round of this bottomless pit of human misery, contestants would be subjected to a vote, which Worsoff described as “like a presidential election”. Oh, how fun. Can you contest the results of that vote, too? Worsoff said in an CNN interview that his idea is “not like the Hunger Games”. Mostly because the costume budget isn’t as high.The Democratic opposition in Congress has, naturally, lined up to publicly condemn such a grotesque notion. The New York congressman Jerry Nadler said on X (formerly known as a useful platform for conversation) that “human lives are not game show props.”A nice sentiment, but I must be the bearer of bad news. Human lives have been game show props since the invention of the form. In 2005, Fox (why is it always Fox?) aired a reality show called Who’s Your Daddy, where a woman had to guess which of eight men was her real father. If she guessed correctly, she’d win both an awkward conversation and $100,000. Presumably the cash prize would go directly to her therapy bills. Bravo’s Real Housewives franchise, while not a game show (the real winners are the viewers, I suppose) is a reality universe where women frequently abuse alcohol to the detriment of their own lives and the lives of others around them. If human lives are not props in these shows, are they even entertaining to the masses?An idea like The American, then, is the natural extension of the genre, taking someone’s desperation, fear, and overwhelming desire and squeezing all the drama possible out of it. Worsoff told CNN that he had pitched this idea to previous Democratic administrations, but weirdly, we never heard about it back then. It’s only now that such a concept feels enough in line with the zeitgeist of immigration paranoia that Worsoff felt emboldened to speak freely about it.He said: “I’m putting a face to immigration. This is a great celebration of America.” Yes, it is a celebration of America. Specifically our worst impulses: the desire to make everything a game and revel in the bread-and-circuses spectacle of life and death, but to cloak it in nobility and charity. Worsoff continued: “I’m very fortunate and lucky and honored to be an American. And I want everybody to understand the process.”At no point did I think that a pizza-making contest was part of the process.
Dave Schilling is a Los Angeles-based writer and humorist More

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