A 60 Minutes Resignation Highlights the Corporate Media’s Surrender to Trump
The latest press scandal shows how plutocracy props up authoritarianism.
A “60 Minutes” Resignation Highlights the Corporate Media’s Surrender to Trump
The latest press scandal shows how plutocracy props up authoritarianism.
Still frame from Donald Trump’s interview with 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl on October, 25, 2020.
(CBS via Getty Images)Since 2016, Bill Owens has led 60 Minutes—he was only the third executive producer in the CBS News show’s history. When he addressed his staff on Tuesday in a memo announcing his resignation, he began, “The fact is that Sixty Minutes has been my life.” This is not an exaggeration. Owens has been at CBS News for 37 years, most of those at 60 Minutes. As is typical for a journalist of his stature, he’s at times shunted his personal life aside in the service of his career.
In the memo, Owens recalls, “My son was 6 months old, my wife was pregnant with my daughter and my mother was in a coma when I spent 5 weeks on the battlefield in Iraq with Scott. My 60 Minutes priorities have always been clear. Maybe not smart, but clear.”
By foregrounding the private costs of the job at the start of the letter, Owens was making explicit that his departure was no ordinary career move: It was a ritual self-sacrifice designed to get the attention of his superiors and shame them into righting a great wrong. Owens was killing his career to make a point.
Owens believed that 60 Minutes was abandoning basic journalistic principles by caving in to Donald Trump. 60 Minutes has been in the president’s gunsight for months. Trump claims that an interview 60 Minutes aired last October was deceptively edited, and he launched a $10 billion lawsuit for damages done by the program. Normally, such a ridiculous claim would be dismissed as a nuisance suit. But CBS, which is owned by Paramount, has been keen to appease the president.
As The New York Times reports:
Paramount’s controlling shareholder, Shari Redstone, is eager to secure the Trump administration’s approval for a multibillion-dollar sale of her company to Skydance, a company run by the son of the tech billionaire Larry Ellison. She has expressed a desire to settle Mr. Trump’s case….
Legal experts have dismissed that suit as baseless and far-fetched. Many journalists at CBS News—the former home of Walter Cronkite and Mike Wallace—believe that a settlement would amount to a capitulation to Mr. Trump over what they consider standard-issue gripes about editorial judgment.
Trump has considerable power to punish CBS. As CNN notes, “Trump has repeatedly called for the network to lose its license and urged the Federal Communications Commission to punish the broadcaster. Ultimately, 60 Minutes handed over the full transcript and video of the contested interview to the FCC, and Trump and Paramount this month agreed on a mediator in the lawsuit.”
CNN went on to claim that Owens’s “resignation provides Trump with another major victory against the broadcaster.” The question is: Is this truly a triumph for Trump or a pyrrhic victory? After all, Owens clearly hopes that his sacrifice will have a real impact and rally journalists to defend the integrity of their profession. While Owens’s sacrifice is morally exemplary, it’s unclear whether it will work.
Owens crafted his resignation to embarrass his bosses and inspire journalists at 60 Minutes and elsewhere. One CBS employee, speaking under conditions of anonymity, told CNN, “He sacrificed himself hoping it might make our corporate overlords wake up and realize they risk destroying what makes 60 Minutes great.”
In this case, the threat to journalistic independence comes from more than just Trump. As The New York Times reports, “Redstone complained to CBS executives in January about a 60 Minutes segment on the war between Israel and Hamas, and a day later, the company appointed a veteran CBS producer, Susan Zirinsky, to a new role overseeing the news division’s journalistic standards.” This is another case where the desire to shield Israel from criticism overlaps with submission to Trump’s authoritarianism, and as such it parallels the crackdown on campus dissent where university administrators and the Trump administration have been working hand in hand.
With both the universities and the media, the existing economic inequality makes Trump’s autocratic aspirations easier to fulfill. Universities are beholden to large donors who share many of Trump’s political beliefs, and the same is true of media corporations. Even when the leaders of these institutions disagree with Trump, their economic interests make them vulnerable to a hostile presidency. This explains why the billionaire owners of The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times spiked their newspapers’ endorsements of Kamala Harris.
On Monday, Semafor reported that the media company Nexstar dismissed a reporter, Olafimihan Oshin, from one of their publications, The Hill, in order to avoid a lawsuit from Trump. Oshin had written an article aggregating other news sources with a factual error. The piece stated that Truth Social, Trump’s media company, lost $73 million when it had lost $30 million. Normally, this type of mistake leads to a correction, not a lawsuit. A source told Semafor that Nexstar was “eager to avoid Trump’s wrath” and “agreed to fire the reporter in exchange for being dropped from the case—which a spokesperson for Nexstar, Gary Weitman, denied.”
These stories add up to a pattern: Corporate media is bending the knee to Trump. Sadly, Owens might have sacrificed his career in vain. We might hope he ignites a resistance in the newsroom, but it’s just as likely the submissiveness of the corporate owners of media outlets will only intensify. If so, Americans would be well advised to turn off 60 Minutes and other mainstream outlets. Instead, as I’ve suggested before, anyone hoping for honest looks at Trump should turn to alternative media sources such as Democracy Now!, The Lever, Jacobin, and (it goes without saying) The Nation.
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