The Hour is Getting Late

For decades, the tick tick ticking of the 60 Minutes stopwatch has become an emblem of trusted, dependable investigative journalism. For the first 133920 minutes of the new Trump administration, the tick tick ticking feels like it represents a ticking time bomb countdown to another democratic norm exploding as the Trump administration lights a fuse and organizations looking for transactional gains refuse to stomp it out. The latest is example is Paramount’s failure to vigorously defend 60 Minutes from Trumpian tirades and torts. NYT (Gift Article): ‘60 Minutes’ Chief Resigns in Emotional Meeting: “During the meeting, Mr. Owens alluded to his displeasure with additional layers of oversight that CBS executives had placed on the program. ‘In a million years, the corporation didn’t know what was coming up — they trusted ‘60 Minutes’ to report the stories and program the broadcast the way ‘60 Minutes’ saw fit,’ he said. Any change to that arrangement, he added, created ‘a really slippery slope.'” As I’ve said repeatedly, for their corporate overlords, network news divisions and shows barely represent a rounding error on the balance sheet. Here’s this story’s money shot. “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.” Whether Redstone’s decision to commit news independence Shari-kari will be enough to satisfy Trump is anyone’s guess. But this marks another bleak slide away from democratic norms, even as we’re learning that taking a stand can be effective. We’re not just going to be able to cross our fingers and hope to run out of the clock on Trump’s authoritarian leanings. So let us not talk falsely now. The hour is getting late.