This Week In Media Complicity
Wonkette would never do this to you.
Can’t have a functioning democracy without a free media, and doesn’t a certain Dictator know it! He and his administration of goons have been working to get platforms and media companies to fall in line with the four-year-long-hate-week agenda, and some have been folding faster than a polyester suit on fire. Who’s been licking That Man’s shoe lifts the very hardest lately? Let’s explore!
First up, Heart-of-Markness Zuckerberg, who we just learned agreed to pay $25 million to settle a 2021 lawsuit over That Man getting his Facebook accounts suspended for inciting a coup attempt. Apparently going on Joe Rogan with his new MAGA man-talk makeover, donating $1 million for Carrie Underwood and Snoop Dogg’s career-immolation party in December, and singing along with the January 6 choir was still not enough to make America’s First Dictator let back him “in the tent”/quit threatening to throw him in prison and/or make trouble for Meta.
Annie Linskey and Rebecca Ballhaus have the scoop of tea: The very same day the felon was appearing by Zoom to receive his sentence of nothing from Judge Juan Merchan, he was also hammering out the terms of Zuck’s surrender/his nuts to a two-by-four.
It was all apparently so traumatic the Zuck had to shop-therapy himself a new $895,500 watch for his multimillion-dollar collection.
Meta and manly man Mark can, of course, make whatever terms of service they want to on their platform, including the rule against “language that incites or facilitates violence and credible threats to public or personal safety.” Trump had no legal leg to stand on, there, but that doesn’t matter for the world’s most powerful bully.
Elizabeth Warren Tweeted: “It looks like a bribe and a signal to every company that corruption is the name of the game. After Meta pays to play, what does Mark Zuckerberg expect as a return on this investment?”
Oh, I dunno, not going to prison for made-up reasons? Not having Facebook TikTok’d by the FCC’s new big brother Brendan Carr, who sees it as his holy Christian duty to overturn Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act so the FCC can get into the platform-monitoring business and the selective-tech-company-punishing business?
Oh, and Carr started an investigation into PBS and NPR this week for a justification to defund them.
And then there’s CBS! Remember how the world’s most powerful snowflake sued them for eleventy gazillion dollars for the made-up tort of “election interference fraud,” because Trump thought “60 Minutes” deceptively and unfairly edited an interview to make Harris look smart? Now CBS’s parent company, Paramount, is reportedly in talks to settle that nonsense. Whyever would they do such a thing? Could it be because Paramount’s controlling shareholder, Shari Redstone, is in talks to sell the company to Skydance Media (majority shareholder Larry Ellison, and run by his son David)? Sure would be scary for Shari and Larry if the FCC decided that Skydance being 5-10 percent owned by a Chinese company was some kind of TikTok-level national security concern, or something.
Not to be confused with the $15 million bribesettlement that ABC/Disney paid to Trump’s nonexistent Presidential library because anchor George Stephanopoulos said that Trump was found liable for rape, instead of just some wholesome non-consensual fingerbanging.
And look, it’s the MAGA-fied LA Times, twisting an op-ed beyond recognition even though the writer has the receipts. Psychoanalytic clinician Eric Reinhart wrote a piece for them opining that RFK Jr.’s wrecking ball to public health is not going to fix the health care system, with the snappy title “RFK Jr’s Wrecking Ball Won’t Fix Public Health.” And then some editor or higher-up took a wrecking ball to his piece instead, changing the headline and photo and deleting his criticism of Brainworm Bobby to make it look like Reinhart was a big fan. New headline: “Trump’s healthcare disruption could pay off — if he pushes real reform,” and the paper deleted his conclusion:
Although RFK Jr. and Luigi Mangione are both responses to the same underlying problem of US healthcare corruption, there is a major difference between them: one operated outside the law to kill one person in defense of millions, whereas the other—via his egomaniacal disregard for scientific evidence—seeks to use law itself to inflict preventable death on those millions.
Here is the original Op-Ed, and here is the edited version that went to print.
Reinhart on Twitter:
My first and definitely last time working with the Los Angeles Times. Editing out the most urgent point of an OpEd in the minutes before sending to press while then also assigning a title and image that suggest an argument entirely opposite to the author’s clear intent is pretty shitty.
Yes, yes it is, and possibly lawsuit-worthy too. And then there’s the censorship and data purge going on inside the government, including a VERY WORRYING blackout on communications from the CDC, and pages of data purged, a whole other story.
At least CNN’s Kaitlan Collins has been in the media room and the TV giving Trump the what-for. If you can stand seeing his fug face, enjoy watching her making that dictator flustered by calling out his “DEI causes plane crashes” nonsense, then laying out some facts:
Will Trump start threatening to sue Warner Bros. Discovery (CNN’s parent company) next, or make Collins ask questions from a broom closet? Probably.
But let’s hope she and other reporters still pushing back can hang in there, we need them.
[WSJ gift link “Meta to Pay $25 Million to Settle 2021 Trump Lawsuit” / WSJ gift link “Zuckerberg Debuts ‘Real Mark’ in Push to Woo Trump”/ GQ/ New York Times archive link/ LA Times archive link]
I get that the Republican Party is a party of cowards, Christo-fascist sycophants, techbros, clueless enablers, miserly millionaires and billionaires, racists, sexists, xenophobes, dullards, imbeciles, homophobes, anti-semites, Islamophobes, reactionary fuckwits and douchebags … where was I? Oh yeah, I get all that. And elected Republicans currently holding the reins of power in all 3 branches of government right now for more reasons than this last bullshit election are all of those things with a blank check to do whatever the fuck they want. Except that they don’t have it. What they do have is a contract signed in blood to obey the fucking moron in the White House at all costs lest he do what? Bully them? Cost them their seats? (Sic a violent mob on them and their families is an ever present threat too, yeah.) But this is all their fault. They could have stopped this dumb piece of shit at any time. Instead they handed over their balls in a velvet drawstring sachet along with the keys to their vaults. And for what? To give up power? I know they’re afraid of their violent, drooling base. But they made this fucking bed. And now we’re all laying in it. They have willingly given up power and influence to cater to the whims of a hateful toddler with unchecked power. We’re all trapped in that one Twilight Zone episode and the cornfield sounds like the best option right now. At what fucking point are they going to realize that, actually, none of this is really worth it if the country is left in ashes. Unrecognizable. What is actually “conservative” about dismantling the government, the media, the state? I don’t know how we make it through four years of this shit. I really don’t. I am so fucking angry. We had Biden, he was great, his administration was smart, kind, forward-thinking, as productive as it could be despite the obstruction of the fucking Republicans and a couple of asshole Democrats and now we are going backwards. None so blind as those who will not see.
And my Democrats need to Step. The. Fuck. Up. No more cooperating with the fall of the Republic. Jesus Christ. What a train wreck. Assmouth von Brain Stem said exactly what he was going to do. And he’s doing it. And it’s all bad. He’s not some subtle master tactician. He’s a demonic child with a magnifying glass, and all of us are ants. He just likes breaking shit because his parents could not bring themselves to tell him they loved him even once. (In retrospect, understandable.) It increasingly feels like there are no adults in the room whatsoever. I don’t know if there’s any line at all or if we passed it several exits back. Shit’s terrifying, guys.
It's so grim. But indeed, because the owners of these media outlets are really, really after those juicy Republican tax cuts (and the money-generating clicks President Klan Robe gives them), this was an inevitability.
The way for clout and coverage going forward will not just be sanewashing what Klan Robe does, but also to diminish and demean his opponents...the Democrats. Watch exactly how the coverage is shaped going forward.