Ticking Time Bomb

As I wrote a couple months ago, 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. Which brings us to the latest explosion. NYT (Gift Article): Paramount to Pay Trump $16 Million to Settle ‘60 Minutes’ Lawsuit. The negotiated settlement hardly amounts to rounding error for Paramount, considering it essentially pays for approval of a massive sale of the company to Skydance. In the grand scheme of things, this seems like a relatively small explosion. The amount of money is modest. The deal requires no public apology. On its own, it would just be sad, pathetic, and depressing (the 2025 trifecta). But this deal doesn’t exist on its own. ABC News settled a similar frivolous suit. WaPo changed its editorial policies. META paid for suspending Trump’s accounts. Amazon is paying $40 million to license a Melania documentary. Each individual deal isn’t a bunker buster. But after a while, all the small explosions are blowing away democracy’s increasingly fragile firewall.