Weekly Mind Dump: Trump's Subjugation of News Media Leads Us to Dictatorship

The CBS takeover by MAGA-friendly forces advances autocratic rule; when all media are echoing the same propaganda, you'll know the takeover is complete.

Week of 12/21-27, 2025:

One of my tasks as a young military intelligence analyst and later as a diplomat was to wade through reams of transcripts of broadcast and written propaganda put out by dictatorships, translated into English, to try to glean truth from lies. It was the work of nerds. Soviet agricultural minister inspects hyper-productive state farms! — while food store shelves are empty. North Korea boasts it has increased electricity output five-fold! — when imagery shows a nation living in darkness. Cuba boasts record economic gains! — while its people flee by the tens of thousands. Cambodia and Vietnam sign a friendship treaty! — when Vietnamese occupation troops are being killed by the thousands by guerrillas, blah, blah. Dictatorial regimes spew forth an unending flow of breathless praise of their leaders. Wading through this stuff is enough to drive one to drink. Imagine what life is like for the citizens of these countries having to listen to or read this mind-numbing bilge day-in and day-out.

Well, get ready America. It’s already here and moving fast.

We all know that CBS’s new billionaire MAGA owners and their overseers the previous week pulled a hard-hitting “60 Minutes” report on the Trump administration’s mass deportations without due process of migrants, most with no criminal backgrounds, to a U.S.-funded torture prison in El Salvador.

And there are the multi-million dollar settlements Trump has extorted from ABC, Facebook and CBS and the latter’s cowing to his demands to monitor news content. Trump is also pursuing lawsuits and threats against The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and NPR/PBS.

CBS’s new MAGA masters are moving fast to turn the once venerable network into Trump-TV. CBS hosted the “Trump-Kennedy Center Awards,” emceed by Trump himself and displaying all the spontaneity and authenticity of a Brezhnev-era Soviet talent show. Viewership hit a record low.

This Sunday, I tuned into CBS’s “Face the Nation,” a bedrock of political journalism on air for 71 years, currently hosted by Margaret Brennan. These excerpts caught my anxious attention:

CBS WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT JENNIFER JACOBS: Fraud investigations. I think you’re going to see this administration really dig in deeper to try to find evidence that proves fraud in various government programs. People cheating the system, trying to fleece taxpayers.

Am I missing something here? This is the most corrupt presidency in U.S. history by far with Trump estimated to have grifted $3 billion in under a year and counting.

CBS LEGAL CORRESPONDENT JAN CRAWFORD: You know, there is a narrative that the Supreme Court is corrupt. I mean we saw that emerge in the wake of the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe versus Wade. And now we see it, that they’re in the tank for Trump. Not only is that narrative overreported, it is patently false, and it is dangerous for the institution and the public’s faith and confidence in the rule of law. This is a conservative Supreme Court. It has been a conservative Supreme Court for 20 years. People can disagree and do disagree with their opinions, but it’s profoundly wrong to call it — or say corruption where there, in fact, is none.

What’s underreported is any understanding of what this court’s been doing for the past 20 years. Its views of its role, vis-a-vis the other branches. How it sees the law. How it’s trying, in its focus, to restore some kind of accountability and our constitutional structure.

Again, this is a court that is functional. It is consistent. They are nine justices. They don’t necessarily see the Constitution the same way by any means or how to interpret federal law. There’s a struggle over the proper way to interpret the Constitution. But that is as it should be. And I think as we approach our 250th anniversary of this country, it’s important to think about the court and their rule of law as the justices are doing, especially if we hope to keep democracy intact.

I had flashbacks of poring over communist Albanian propaganda broadcasting. But, no, this is CBS! This woman droned on for almost two whole minutes. That this MAGA-dominated court is in the tank for Trump and corrupt is “patently false”? It has overruled 90 percent of lower court rulings against Trump and given him blanket legal immunity. Not corrupt? Clarence Thomas and his accepting favors and monetary freebees from a billionaire over many years is not corrupt? Not in the tank for Trump? Samuel Alito proudly flew MAGA flags from his principal and vacation homes.

Brennan couldn’t stifle her surprise and seemed almost to lose her trademark cool:

MARGARET BRENNAN: That’s a big statement, Jan, if we hope to keep democracy intact. My goodness.

JAN CRAWFORD: If we lost — if the public loses confidence in the rule of law, I don’t know what that means for democracy.

MARGARET BRENNAN: Yes. Yes.

CBS has been consumed by the MAGA shark. Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite are hurling celestial lightning bolts of outrage from newsroom heaven. This also hits me personally. I was a student intern at CBS-News headquarters in New York. I researched for reporting done by Cronkite and other correspondents and also on occasion for “60 Minutes.” I was one of those anonymous figures in the background during Uncle Walter’s evening broadcasts. And it was the thrill of a lifetime to meet Morley Safer and observe Cronkite, Mike Wallace and others prepare for their next reporting. I learned a lot, including the unshakeable adherence to the highest standards of ethics and integrity in journalism, now sadly leaving us in this unprecedented era of corruption and amorality.

Now, I fear, CBS-News will be competing with Pyongyang’s KCTV for audience share. I have to wonder how long Brennan, Bob Costa and other veteran journalists will stick it out at CBS/Fox News 2.0.

Trying to overcome my grief, I switched over to warm and fuzzy PBS — just as Sharyl Attkisson on the Sinclair-syndicated program “Full Measure” was approvingly reporting on the Trump administration’s decision to give slain January 6 insurrectionist Ashli Babbitt a burial at Arlington Cemetery with full military honors. Babbitt is the Horst Wessel of the MAGA movement, a martyr for fascism, whose traitorous remains will disgrace Arlington’s hallowed grounds. Attkisson had left CBS a few years ago due its “liberal bias,” has done reporting linking vaccines to autism and falsely claimed the Obama administration had hacked her computers. The new Foxified CBS would undoubtedly welcome her back with open arms. Or, alternatively, Pyongyang’s KCTV. They’re now interchangeable.

The burgeoning right-wing media-verse acts as a powerful MAGA force multiplier. Fox News has finished No. 1 in cable news viewership for 24 years in a row, dwarfing those for MS NOW and CNN combined. It commanded 63 percent of the cable news audience share among total day viewers and 64 percent during primetime. Today there are over 1500 right-wing radio stations in the U.S., along with another 700 religious stations that broadcast MAGA memes and endorse Republican candidates for office. Pro-Trump Sinclair Group TV stations reach 40 percent of U.S. households; Sinclair also owns the largest number of radio stations at nearly 200, and is continually expanding its media empire.

“Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play,” said that master of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels. Trump and his minions have taken this to heart. And as he picks off one independent news organization after another, suborning them to his will, the keyboard gets louder and louder, smothering the dwindling competition, and fascism’s power further consolidates.

When you wake up one morning, tune into the news and hear nothing but hosannas to Great Leader Trump and only anesthetizing reports on “the greatest economy in American history,” this or that “hoax” by the “radical left lunatics,” “Putin wants peace,” etc. etc., you’ll know the MAGA revolution is complete, Project 2025 is fully in place and that you and your family had better mind what you say or else suffer the consequences.