July 8, 2025
Paramount’s settlement with Trump is a symptom of deep structural decay in our company’s media system.
Paramount’s $16 million settlement with Donald Trump is an amazing display of bribery, greed and cowardice. This is also a symptom of deep structural decay in today’s media where this system outweighs democracy.
Review: Last October, Trump sued Paramount, the parent company of CBS News. Trump claims CBS plans to edit an interview in an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris in a “proportion of Democratic Party” in 60 minutes before the presidential election. From the outset, almost all legal experts determined that the case was completely worthless. After all, media organizations are protected by the First Amendment and are legally and morally allowed routine editing of interviews they air.
Still, Shari Redstone, the controlling shareholder of the media conglomerate, is seeking regulatory approval to sell billions of dollars in sales to Hollywood studio Skydance. Redstone seems eager to resolve the case with Trump and plot a merger, and democracy is damned. As Senator Bernie Sanders aptly noted: “The Redstone family weakened today’s press freedom in exchange for a $2.4 billion payday.”
Since the lawsuit was first filed, many journalists and Democratic policymakers have opposed the serious move, a ridiculous allegation of Trump and the principle that Redstone did not compete.
Trump’s rash bullying should not be granted legality for a moment. But we are here.
Trump’s legal scammers continue to closely abide by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s authoritarian script to undermine the free media: manipulating media laws, threatening news companies’ profits, and exploiting oligopoly media ownership structures. In short, weapons arm any tool weapon to defeat media agency submissions to make everything look and sound like Fox News.
Current Problem
This controversy also illuminates the dangerous stifle of media groups’ role in news. Each tentacle of their huge stake creates more conflicts of interest and privileges business interests for our democratic needs. From Craven of ABC and now CBS to fascist discourses about X and Fox News, we witnessed corporate power on media campaigns, thus depriving society of major inspections of authoritarianism. We should all be shocked.
But we should not be surprised. Facing strong government armed forces, profit-seeking media organizations can foresee their journalistic principles rather than endanger their commercial interests. While individual journalists may speak out here and there, major news outlets in the United States fold and fail us. By doing so, they help undermine public accountability and society’s First Amendment protection.
what to do? Senator Elizabeth Warren called for a bribery investigation and promised legislation to “stop corruption through donations from the presidential library.” Sen. Ron Wyden vowed that Democrats regain power and he would “demand federal charges first.” More directly, Wyden encouraged state prosecutors to “make us sell our Democratic corporate executives in court.”
Nevertheless, we need more ambitious reforms. Corporate media organizations are a key part of the pathology that troubles our society today. The latest attack on the media and its foreseeable surrender is about why the oligarch profit-driven media system is bad for democracy. These news failures are often described as misconduct by immoral people. But they are the result of structural features that cannot be simply understood as the “bad apple” fable.
In other words, Paramount pointed out the surrender of Trump Systematic Need a question Systematic Make fixed. Meaningful public interest protection will be a step in the right direction, but we should strive to build a new media system based entirely on different logics, rather than putting regulatory band-aids on the wounds of whistles. While blackmailing against Trump is unforgivable, the reward structure (including legal obligations) is not yet appropriate, and media owners are encouraged to ignore democracy’s obligations to society. Profit requirements – Shareholders, investors, advertisers and themselves, drive media owners to see news and information as commodities rather than basic public services, rather than as consumers rather than dedicated citizens.
We must expose and confront these logics to understand the toxic synergy between the hyperasset theory under the authoritarian system, the centralized media system and fascist tendencies. Viewing unrestricted commercialism as a core source of the problem takes our strategic framework from trying to humiliate media owners to better behavior rather than asking our news media to have democracy for all of us, rather than the profits of the privileged minority.
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As I said before, the revitalized public media system must remain in our long-term political horizon. Such a system must be “public” in scope more than just a name: it must be actually owned and controlled by the community provided by the media. Such decentralization, federal guarantees that the infrastructure managed locally can better withstand the increasingly obvious types of government capture in our commercial media. While this looks different from our current public media system, it may use that infrastructure as its initial artifact.
In the near future, we must do everything possible to oppose further media ace. This includes supporting nonprofits and independent media in any way possible, especially given the ongoing collapse of local journalism. But in the long run, we must look to structural media reforms, far beyond defending the status quo, condemning corporate media owners and preventing the fascist drift of current media oligarchs. We need to decommercialize from roots to branches and fundamentally democratize our media.
If Trump has any silver lining of the ongoing corruption in our media landscape, it is that he is revealing the impact of commercial media’s commitment to journalism and how capable they are to maintain the remains of American democracy. When Trump wasted the rest of the media’s integrity, we should start planning to rebuild journalism from scratch, daring to imagine how we can create a truly democratic media system from the wreckage.
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