President Donald Trump has zeroed in on Paramount, the weakest of American media titans, to administer a lesson in sontaku, the Japanese art of “obeying in advance” or “following unspoken orders.”
Paramount’s CBS claimed the decision to cancel Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show was “purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night. It is not related in any way to the show’s performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount.”
The Wrap summarized the latest capitulation from Paramount and speculates about the company’s motivation and its weak position:
CBS’ announcement on Thursday evening that “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” will conclude next year, after its 11th season on the network, comes three days after the host accused the network’s parent, Paramount Global, of paying a “big fat bribe” to President Donald Trump by settling his lawsuit over a “60 Minutes” segment broadcast during the presidential campaign.
Colbert leveled that charge because Paramount is seeking to finalize an $8 billion merger with Skydance Media, creating the impression that it bowed to pressure from Trump in order to smooth the way for that transaction. But the FCC still has not approved the deal, and the cancellation of Colbert — a leading, nightly critic of Trump — comes as the deadline ticks toward the expiration of the merger.
…
Although the economics of late night television have shifted, as evidenced by other cuts relating to rival shows and the cancellation of CBS’ “After Midnight,” the decision to drop Colbert is, at worst, further capitulation to Trump to silence one of his loudest and most famous critics and a damning blow to free speech.At best, it’s a “lights out” moment for network television. Taking CBS at its word, if the highest-rated show in late night is such a money loser that it has decided to scrap a franchise launched when David Letterman joined the network in 1993, then what does that mean for the rest of broadcast TV?
Paramount is headed by 70-year-old heiress Shari Redstone, who is battling thyroid cancer, restive shareholders, and her own indecision over selling the company to David Ellison’s Skydance.
Redstone is likely exhausted after spending the past decade battling for control of the company:
Ms. Redstone, 69, presides over a vast media empire that includes Paramount Pictures, MTV, Nickelodeon and CBS. But her rise to the top was not simple.
For years, Ms. Redstone toiled away at National Amusements, the theater chain that doubles as a holding company for Paramount. A lawyer by training, she demonstrated an early aptitude for the media business but was overshadowed by her aging father, who refused to relinquish control even as his mental capacity waned.
As the family business began to falter, Ms. Redstone began to assert herself more. She thwarted an attempt by Philippe Dauman, one of her father’s lieutenants, to sell a stake in Paramount Pictures in 2016. One of her allies, Bob Bakish, became his permanent replacement as chief executive.
Two years later, she won another battle. Leslie Moonves, whose programming prowess earned him the nickname “the man with the golden gut,” led a revolt against Ms. Redstone, urging a Delaware court to strip her family of its company control. Ms. Redstone prevailed after Mr. Moonves was accused of sexual harassment and forced out of the company. (Mr. Moonves has denied allegations of nonconsensual sex.)
Unfortunately, by the time she had claimed full control of her late father’s empire, Paramount was only a shadow of what it had once been:
Paramount’s portfolio of cable networks has been battered by the same cord-cutting and advertiser weakness that have afflicted its industry peers and is facing analyst-estimated subscriber losses of nearly 25 percent over the next two years. Wall Street is unconvinced that Paramount’s money-losing streaming business will ever be able to compete with the likes of Netflix. Paramount+ has a 6 percent share of the revenue market, while Netflix has 47 percent and Disney’s streaming services have a combined 23 percent.
Paramount’s movie studio has done its best to revive aging franchises like “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” and keep “Mission: Impossible” running, but it ranks last among Hollywood’s five legacy film companies in domestic market share and posted an operating loss of $143 million for the first nine months of this year.
Despite those headwinds, Paramount has made some progress. The streaming service has 63 million subscribers globally, and the company’s Pluto TV free streaming service generates more than $1 billion in annual revenue, up from $70 million when it was acquired in 2019.
There are also financial pressures at National Amusements. Historically, the bulk of the holding company’s profits have come from dividends on the Paramount stock it owns, roughly 10 percent of that company. But financial pressures forced Paramount to sharply reduce its dividend, cutting into profits at National Amusements.
Now, National Amusements is incapable of generating cash, according to a May estimate from S&P Global Market Intelligence, and owes about $25 million in annual interest cash payments.
Why is Ms. Redstone willing to sell her controlling stake in the company? It may come down to the pressures facing both National Amusements and Paramount. As Rich Greenfield, an analyst at LightShed Partners, put it in a recent client note, “Paramount has a bleak future ahead.”
Enter David Ellison, CEO of Skydance and son of Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison.
Trump has said Ellison “will do a great job” at the helm of Paramount but the merger has yet to secure approval from Trump’s FCC.
And the same Variety article that headlined Trump’s praise of Ellison, also documented some tension between the two:
Meanwhile, David Ellison met with Trump at two recent UFC events (on April 12 and June 7), which the Skydance CEO failed to disclose in violation of FCC ex parte rules, according to an FCC filing by tech company LiveVideo.AI (which claims it made “a superior bid” over Skydance to acquire National Amusements Inc. and Paramount and is opposing the Skydance-Paramount deal). At the June 7 UFC fight, Trump and Ellison engaged in “a heated exchange which required White House and UFC officials to intervene” before the encounter concluded “with a firm handshake,” according to the filing, citing video recorded at the event.
Yes, you read that right, Ellison has been sitting cageside at The Ultimate Fighting Championship to get face time with the president.
As I’ve covered previously, The UFC is owned by Hollywood power broker (and major Democratic party insider) Ari Emanuel, who has used the fight promotion to get very close to Trump while maintaining his status as a Democratic insider.
In fact, Trump’s recent announcement that the White House will host a UFC event next year may be his way of “encouraging” streaming companies (including Paramount, but also Warner Bros. Discovery, Amazon, Disney, and Netflix) to bid heavy for the UFC’s media rights which are currently up for acquisition.
Ellison’s cageside appearance upset already dejected CBS staffers who connected the dots between Elison’s conversation with Trump on a Saturday night and Trump’s renewed attacks on 60 Minutes the next day:
‘It’s dejecting for reporters and producers to see one day before the president attacks “60 Minutes” – again – for doing accurate and fair journalism,’ the source in CBS’s Manhattan newsroom said.
‘Anyone who believed Ellison might be a breath of fresh air after [Shari] Redstone and have the backbone to run a principled news organization is feeling pretty naïve today’, they continued, referring to the billionaire daughter of the late Sumner Redstone.
At least one other source told Status how Ellison went on to socialize with several members of the president’s inner sanctum that night, after being spotted at a ringside table with Trump’s team.
Topics touched upon during these talks, however, remain unknown – but Trump took to Truth Social the very next day to renew his war of words with CBS while saying his lawsuit was just.
Most pundits who have addressed Paramount/CBS and their concessions to Trump have focused on the implications for corporate media and its coverage of the President, which are indeed deeply troubling, but I am also very curious to know if Trump’s decision to renew his attacks on CBS were undertaken as something of a favor to Ellison. Was Trump attacking CBS to increase the pressure on Redstone to sell to Ellison?
But let’s get back to the consequences for the press. The Washington Post reported on the impact inside CBS:
The breaking point came on a Saturday night in the middle of May. CBS President George Cheeks called news division chief Wendy McMahon with a suggestion: “It’s probably time.”
Two days later, McMahon announced her departure.
The forced resignation marked a turning point: The network of Edward R. Murrow, which stood against McCarthyism and once defined American broadcast journalism, was capitulating to White House pressure as its corporate owner sought approval for a lucrative merger.The cascading effects of President Donald Trump’s decade-long war on the media had helped topple McMahon, as her corporate bosses struggled to navigate how to respond to a lawsuit from a president who had fundamentally reshaped the relationship between the press and power in America.
Variety had more on the impact at 60 Minutes:
Bill Owens, just the third executive producer in the show’s nearly six decades on air, abruptly quit, saying he no longer had the freedom to run the newsmagazine in the best interests of its journalism and its viewers. On Sunday, correspondent Scott Pelley took the rare step of detailing this off-camera drama for viewers, telling them that Paramount had begun to take what staffers perceived as an undue amount of influence on “60 Minutes” editorial processes.
And Puck reported on the team Ellison has in mind to run CBS News under his ownership:
David Rhodes, the onetime CBS News head and current executive at Sky in the U.K., is in talks to take over CBS News if/when the Skydance acquisition of Paramount closes, per three sources familiar with the negotiations. As with all of these things, talks could still fall apart. But if David Ellison and his Skydance team sign Rhodes and close a pending deal to acquire The Free Press, the center-right media brand founded by Bari Weiss, the plan would call for Rhodes to manage and operate CBS News day-to-day alongside Weiss as an ideological guide of sorts.
Yes, that Bari Weiss, the woman Yasha Levine calls “The Toady Queen of Substack”:
Bari is a real operator and a genius suck up to power. She came from an affluent suburb, her parents own the upscale Weisshouse furniture store. Bari first came to public attention while a student in Columbia, where she led a campaign to cancel teachers critical of Israel and tried to get Joseph Massad, a Palestinian professor, fired. She then went on to quickly rise through the ranks of zionist activist journalism — first starting out at Jewish outlets like Tablet, then writing op-eds and reviewing books for the Wall Street Journal, where she worked directly under Bret Stephens, the arch-neoconservative now known simply as “bedbug,” and then getting beamed up to the New York Times op-ed department. Her Times job was what you’d call a Trump first term DEI hire. She was picked up to generate controversy and serve up conservative opinion to the libs. While at the Times, she constantly got glowing profiles from her liberal colleagues — and even got dressed for a photoshoot by Vanity Fair. People who know Bari say that she has real charisma — and she’s used that gift to ingratiate herself to power. And she seems to have a special way with billionaires. “She doesn’t just speak to the 1 percent. She speaks to the one-hundredth of 1 percent. And they’ll listen,” Frank Luntz, the Republican pollster, explained the Bari Method to the New York Times’ Matt Flegenheimer.
I should also mention Trump’s close relationship to David Ellison’s father Larry (especially since The New York Times reported last year that Larry would be the real power behind the merged Skydance/Paramount).
Oracle, the source of Larry Ellison’s vast fortune, is widely believed to be Trump’s first choice to take over TikTok, should he succeed in forcing its Chinese owners to surrender control, per The Intercept:
Larry Ellison has been at Donald Trump’s side since he took office last month. The man Trump referred to as “one of the most serious players in the world” was front row at the inauguration, and then watched as the president signed an executive order on artificial intelligence — a major business interest for tech giant Oracle.
And Ellison, Oracle’s billionaire co-founder, was sitting next to Rupert Murdoch in early February when Trump created a fund to facilitate the purchase of TikTok. His presence was no accident.
Last month, after the Supreme Court upheld a law banning TikTok, Oracle emerged as a leader in the race to take control of the Chinese-owned short-form video platform.
While the campaign against TikTok was led by China hawks in Washington, it was the ire of pro-Israel activists that perhaps best explains why Oracle is such a natural choice to take over the social media app.
The campaign to ban the app kicked into high gear after Hamas’s October 7 attack against Israel. The timing spurred talk that the push for a ban wasn’t just about American national security, but Israel’s too. Politicians even tied their campaigns against TikTok to alleged Hamas propaganda being hosted on the platform.
Oracle, which had already taken control of some of TikTok’s day-to-day operations, had taken a firm pro-Israel stance and, according to an Intercept investigation, clamped down on pro-Palestine activism inside the company.
While the TikTok play currently appears to be stalled, Paramount’s settlement with Trump is under Senatorial scrutiny:
Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts), Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) sent a letter Monday morning to (Skydance) chief executive, David Ellison, asking him to address Trump’s claims of a side deal.
“Is there currently any arrangement under which you or Skydance will provide compensation, advertising, or promotional activities that in any way assist President Trump, his family, his presidential library, or other Administration officials?” the senators wrote. “If so, what is the nature of this arrangement? What will you or Skydance provide, and what have you discussed receiving in return from the Trump Administration?”
I doubt Ellison will be intimidated by the feckless trio of Warren, Sanders, and Wyden any more than by Sen. Adam “RussiaGate” Schiff’s tough talk on the topic.
Ironically, Shari Redstone considers Trump a friend and has taken many steps to please him:
Redstone has done her best to curry favor with Republicans. “She’s right of center, but not by any means extreme,” according to one person who knows her. “She’s generally interested in news being as accurate as possible. People are a mix of things. She’s very supportive of race relations and things that would be called DEI. She’s not dogmatic, and she’s not a party regular for anyone at all.”
In January, Paramount hired Trump fundraiser and lobbyist Brian Ballard to help see the company through the rocky merger-approval process. Ballard Partners is also working for big tobacco companies in a fight against unlicensed vape products. Perhaps hoping a Republican government would be more likely to sign off on her plan, Redstone, through the company PAC, gave slightly more to Republican candidates than to Democrats in the most recent full-year cycle, according to opensecrets.org. And Redstone might have hoped for some goodwill from Trump, who once called to offer words of support amid her fight to get rid of former company management before he was ever a presidential candidate.
“He would call and tell her to keep up the good fight,” according to the person who knows her. “I think she feels personally appreciative of that.” (Another possible connection: Mark Burnett, producer of The Apprentice, sold Survivor to CBS.) Redstone and Trump have even lunched together. “Part of what is surprising is that he is giving CBS such a hard time when Shari is on one side and [Larry] Ellison is on the other,” that source said. The Oracle cofounder appeared in February at the Oval Office and is an ally of Trump.
Speaking at the New York Times DealBook Summit in 2016, just after Trump won the presidency, Redstone told interviewer Andrew Ross Sorkin, “I’m actually really optimistic for someone to come in and unify the country. I think he listened to a lot of voices around this country that people weren’t listening to about some of the challenges that we have, and I’m hopeful that he’ll surround himself with really good people and start to solve some of the problems we have.” In 2019, Redstone discussed launching a right-wing news channel to take on Fox News, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
At the center of Redstone’s dilemma is a news division that is at odds with both her mission to make peace with Trump and her life’s work fighting antisemitism. Redstone’s passion for Israeli causes has caused friction with news operatives for years. “She has no interest in understanding life in the Palestinian world,” one person told me, claiming Redstone did not understand journalism. A source close to Redstone denied this, saying she cared about innocent people on all sides of war. (Redstone declined to comment for this story.)
Redstone has weighed in on news coverage numerous times in recent months, including sticking up for anchor Tony Dokoupil after he challenged Ta-Nehisi Coates on air. Coates had been on CBS Mornings to discuss his book The Message, which is about censorship and includes a section on Israel and Palestine (Vanity Fair excerpted a portion of the book). But the interview got heated and Dokoupil was accused of not meeting editorial standards. (Dokoupil didn’t respond to a request for comment sent via a CBS PR representative.)
Unfortunately for Redstone, Trump is strictly transactional and his response to weakness is to exploit it for every advantage.
UPDATE: I slept on this column from Puck’s Matthew Belloni which has more details about the economics of Colbert’s show:
Late Show has been losing more than $40 million a year for CBS (though that doesn’t include some ancillary revenue). While the show still garners an average of 2.47 million viewers a night, leads its 11:35 rivals in total audience, and just this week scored its ninth consecutive Emmy nomination for outstanding talk/variety series, its ad revenue has plummeted precipitously since the 2021-22 season.
Linear ratings are down everywhere, of course, and as the Times reported, the network late-night shows took in $439 million combined in ad revenue in 2018. By last year, though, that figure had dropped by 50 percent. Measure that against the more than $100 million per season it costs to produce Late Show. By contrast, the CBS primetime and daytime dayparts are still profitable, and that programming is supported by robust license fees for streaming and other off-network viewing. Late Show, with its topical humor and celebrity interviews pegged to specific projects, has struggled on Paramount+. And of the three network late-night shows, Late Show has by far the smallest digital footprint on YouTube and other platforms.
So from a business perspective, the cancellation makes sense, and Cheeks and his underlings said in a carefully worded press release that “it is not related in any way to the show’s performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount.”
But…
If Trump has an enemies list, Colbert is on it.
The president himself has said there are additional conditions attached to the settlement of the 60 Minutes litigation (though Paramount has denied that), and we know Ellison and Trump have spoken privately about the transaction at two separate UFC matches. So it’s beyond fair to ask whether Colbert is simply another slab of sacrificial lamb tossed to Trump and Carr to get this $8 billion deal approved.
Nobody can know for sure. All I can tell you is what I’m hearing. Several sources at both CBS and Skydance insist the decision was based on economics, not politics. After all, if this was about appeasing Trump, they argue, Cheeks would have pulled Colbert off the air ASAP rather than giving him 10 more months in the chair. “Trust me, there’s no conspiracy,” a very good source close to Colbert told me tonight. Still, two other people with deep ties to CBS and Late Show suspect otherwise. After all, when a network decides that a show is too expensive, executives typically go to the key talent and ask them to take pay cuts, fire people, or otherwise slash costs.
That didn’t happen here—though with Colbert said to be making between $15 million and $20 million per year, a pay cut wouldn’t have solved the problem on its own. And given the company’s willingness to fold to Trump, there’s no reason for you or me to think they would stand up to any political pressure, or resist any specific demand (which, of course, is the reason to not settle frivolous litigation…). If Chris McCarthy, Cheeks’s counterpart on the cable TV side, cancels The Daily Show in the next couple weeks, I think we’ll have a good idea what’s going on. But for now, I cautiously (and skeptically) believe that this was mostly an economic decision.
He has taken on Matt & Trey of South Park fame.
He will lose. At best he’ll get a Streisand effect (which they “made a thing” VERY early on). At worst he’ll lose a shedload of supporters.
Matt and Trey are probably praying that he puts them in the crosshairs becaue it’ll validate them. Just like the Gazillion times they pointed out the absurdity of the US before (WalMart, Amazon, etc). Whilst Matt & Trey definitely made a mis-step by negotiating weird deals with two streaming services, they are virtually untouchable.
I see where they’ve been fighting with Ellison but last I heard they had sworn off attacking Trump.
The “don’t wanna touch Trump” thing is a media misinterpretation. They are on record as saying they made a major mis-step in making Mr Garrison the “trump surrogate” – one of their strongest characters had to be omitted from most stories for 4 years. (They admitted they thought HRC would win in 2016 and boxed themselves in.)
They won’t make Mr Garrison be “trump” again. They’ll find some simple get-out-of-jail-free card. But once they play that……Trump will DEFiNITELY be back on the menu. At the moment they’re being careful because of the lawsuits between the two streaming services who each think think they “own” South Park………whereas if you look at the minutiae, Matt & Trey own it all and can retire and say FU at any point. All the financial press have pointed out the HUGELY weird amount of control Matt & Trey have and why they won’t roll over to Paramount or others (plus they’re very libertarian).
So how has Trump taken on South Park? By picking on Paramount over CBS News?
Last I checked Trey and Matt’s contempt for the MSM is comparable to Trump’s.
> Last I checked Trey and Matt’s contempt for the MSM is comparable to Trump’s
And that is bad because? A large proportion of this site’s stuff reports on MSM rubbish.
Please don’t straw man me. I do not equate Matt & trey with Trump. Pretty sure that is a site violation.
LOL. What are you talking about?
I never said it was bad to be contemptuous of the MSM.
I could have easily said “my contempt for the MSM is comparable to Trump’s/Matt & Trey’s” and it would have been equally true.
You also never answered my question: how did Trump “take on” Matt and Trey? I doubt very much they give a shit if the person running the entity that signs their checks is Shari Redstone or Larry Ellison.
Colbert has had that show for 11 years? How about we suggest the only reason he managed to hang around so long was because of his devotion to the Dems who were, after all, in power until a few months ago. The government influence over broadcasters can work when it comes to hiring as well as firing.
Of course the lawsuit over the way 60 Minutes edited an interview was outrageous but it’s not as though 60 Minutes is what it once was either. Some of us stopped watching years ago on the grounds it had already turned to the right.
Meanwhile the Trump administration is conducting foreign policy to benefit the Trump organization (example: pressuring Vietnam to approve a new Trump Hanoi resort) which is surely more outrageous than the fate of fading broadcast networks with broadcast share of audience eyeballs now down to 20 percent). Plus some here have talked about the way CNBC constantly shills for the Wall St oligarchs which merely moves the corruption to a few other players not to mention the heavy broadast reliance on Pharma to make up or their one time reliance on cigarettes.
Some of us became cynical at an early age.
You’re right to be cynical about Colbert and CBS News/60 Minutes, but it’s pretty novel for a sitting US President to be batting a major media company around like this and the real impact will be seen when companies like Disney start “obeying in advance.”
Disney has previously shown a set of ideals, and corporate aligned themes, that their reporters and anchors really need to toe that company line or face the consequences. It is not widely known or even acknowledged but it really deserves a wider focus and attention. I’m aware Disney was cited (most likely) as a quick but important example.
Sage Steele, Sam Ponder among a few of their better known, formerly ESPN employees. Do what the mouse says (!). I’m not consistently on the Instagram but Sage is a good following but her content is not for everyone. Added, these media corporations find themselves painted into a corner as many alternatives exist that just weren’t there 15 to 25 years back.
I don’t believe that Disney has any kind of corporate ideals beyond the bottom line. My impression of the fates of Steele, Ponder, et al. is that there was a corporate whipsaw where in the late 2010s and 2020, corporate HQ thought corporate DEI was where their bread was buttered and when the reactionary backlash hit, they raced to get out of its way and people like Steele and Ponder were collateral damage.
Actually no. Sage Steele was employed at ESPN as recently as 2023 I wish to say, and Sam Ponder was abruptly fired last fall. Sam Ponder was a popular host on the weekly NFL Sunday coverage. Each has shared publicly their opinions and in doing so get called to the principal’s office.
Rather than spell out further the talking points I’ll stop. These media companies care about dollars and eyeballs, what other US ideals we as citizens might hold close and near…I’m afraid the ship sailed awhile back.
I don’t think the media corps recognized the backlash until Trump got re-elected in 2024.
It might be worth talking about the just passed Repub assault on public broadcasting. NPR may deserve it but IMO PBS does not, even if I no longer enjoy many of their programs. And even the radio side has music shows and other content outside of the news division. The money being cut will affect local stations more than the programs themselves which often have corporate sponsors.
that’s definitely related. Ironically, the damage to PBS and NPR will disproportionately impact rural Americans. There are huge swaths of Alaska where NPR is the only radio going for example.
You got that right. So much so, In my case I realized that having a college degree does not mean your smart, it means you jumped through the hoops and have a decent memory to recite facts (okay, a bit overstated).
Thank God for whatever gave the ability to see bullshit so pervasive in institutions and people at a young age. I feel better now, thanks
Did Paddy Chayefsky write this script?
Another good piece, Nat.
Thanks, Henry. I’m pretty sure we’re all mad as hell and not going to take it anymore and have been for a long time, hence most of the US elections in the 21st century being change elections.
“Change Elections”.
lol.
how many of those have we had, now?
I’m with Wulf Zendik:” Dropping Out is a Revolutionary Act”.
i read this…and while interesting to me, in a sort of lifestyle of the rich and famous manner(it’s well written…you can write, sir…dont get me wrong)..i find that i dont care about any of these people any more.(given, ive cared little about them since “lifestyles” was still in syndication).
the horse not only got out of the barn a long time ago, but the barn is an ashen ruin, the horse soon got tangled in a poorly made fence, and expired, and is now a scattering of dry bones in the tall grass on a hillside.
we havent been a “Republic” in at least my lifetime(55)…and our unacknowledged Empire has been in Wile E. Coyote treading air mode for at least 40 years.
All of this is merely rich folks looting each other as the titanic sinks.
(the ongoing looting of Us’n’s is just BAU…its habit, by now…do they even know theyre still doing it, i wonder?)
what i’m interested in is fleshing out the myriad yet somehow of-a-piece Crises of Legitimacy plaguing the entire upper crust, and the institutions they inherited and ran straight into earth.
Yea, I was thinking about the futility of American “change elections” as I typed that.
Thanks for the kind words about my writing.
Hard to argue with your grim conclusions.
It looks like Trump and associates keep these deal and negotiation points in order better than Russia’s deal points.
They have a more accurate understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of US media companies than they do of Russia’s. Rubio’s claims about Russian casualties in Ukraine the other day were straight up fever dreams out of the stupidest swamp.
It’s worse than that. They don’t care enough to learn.
They can’t be embarrassed or humiliated over something that they do not ultimately care about.
aye.
“against stupidity, the gods themselves strive in vain”-Schiller.
i thought i could no longer be amazed at the antics and perfidy of the ruling elite(of which trump is a sort of distaff part)…but damn!
4-chan comes to DC.
I can see Baron Trump as augustulus, bending the knee to some mexican Odoacer.
and contrary to the msm and blue check ballon juice screeds…these clowns are just revealing the already rotten edifice.
and i can discern no design to it…and thus no malice.
malice, after all, requires more development than just an Id.
these people are all Id…and just automatically acting out their infantile power games, now that they have the chance…and the adults are out of the room…wondering what the hell happened to their perfect 30 year decade of the 90’s.
amoral toddlers, rolling balls of shit across the floor….because they can…and because it gets a reaction from those “adults”.
i have expected the dissolution of american empire for most of my life….things that cant continue, dont.
but jeez.
i didnt expect this level of funhouse insanity to ensue.
i’ll end up hanging a pic of trump at the bar…so long as i can find a suitably mocking one , ere the power goes out for good.
because he has, definitely, accelerated the decline and fall.
that he did so while…apparently…thinking sincerely that he was doing something entirely different, is just an hyperironic lagniappe.
what a time to be alive, and to be so connected to happenings all over the planet,lol.
Hi NWT, thanks for another excellent article.
Re: “Oracle, which had already taken control of some of TikTok’s day-to-day operations, had taken a firm pro-Israel stance and, according to an Intercept investigation, clamped down on pro-Palestine activism inside the company”.
Expanding on that, mega-oligarch Ellison (L) has been a Trump guy for a long while now. And of course an avid Zionist/genocide-enabler. I don’t know much about what he wants, but what I hear I don’t like.
Here’s Oracle CEO Safra Catz (an Israeli) in 2024:
Catz said that “when you connect with Oracle you understand that we are committed to the U.S. and Israel. We are not flexible regarding our mission, and our commitment to Israel is second to none. This is a free world and I love my employees, and if they don’t agree with our mission to support the State of Israel then maybe we aren’t the right company for them. Larry (Ellison, co-founder of Oracle) and I are publicly committed to Israel and devote personal time to the country and no one should be surprised by that.”
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Listening to the Bill Simmons podcast earlier, and the discussion included that Colbert was losing money. Doesn’t negate the political stuff, but makes it an easier choice.
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Bari Weis TV does not sound like a ratings-winner :)
There’s more examples on what purports to be an “Oracle guys for Palestine” substack:
https://oracleforpalestine.substack.com/p/oracle-for-palestine
Glad you picked up on that. Keep in mind that Shari Redstone is a big zionist too.
Thanks for the kind words.
Re: Colbert losing money, yes, that is the case. Fallon and Kimmel are losing money, too. I might update the post as a Puck piece just came out that lays that all out.