Losing My Perspicacity April 29, 2025

Good morning and Happy Tuesday! Thanks for reading this morning.

If you’re a 60 Minutes devotee, you no doubt have heard all about Bill Owens (60 Minutes’ executive producer) resigning in protest over Paramount’s constant interference with the way the program decides and reports on stories. On his way out the door, Owens was brutally honest about the reasons for his resignation, telling his colleagues that he’d “lost his journalistic independence.”

I’m not sure America has a more critical news program than 60 Minutes. As a kid, I often rolled my eyes when the telltale ticking sound came on, knowing I was about to lose access to the TV for an hour while my parents watched. By the end of high school, I was watching along with them. Many, if not most, Americans probably have a similar story. 60 Minutes has just always been there, doing some of the best journalism around.

But as media outlets have gorged themselves on an unholy smorgasbord of smaller outlets, we’ve been left with a few massive companies that own nearly every news outlet. Comcast. Disney. Paramount Global. Warner Bros - Discovery. FOX. Just about every place we get our news rolls up into one of these five companies. The problem is that these giant corporations see news not as a calling to serve the public, but as just another way to make money. I’m old enough to remember when billionaire Sam Zell bought the Chicago Tribune and declared that he wanted more stories about pets, because “What people want are puppy dogs.”

At my last job, we got the sports version of Zell’s rant. “Write about the NFL, write about Lebron, write about the Cowboys — that’s what drives clicks.” There was little time to do actual journalism on important topics, because all management cared about was the bottom line and clicks, which they could parlay into ad revenue. Almost nothing else mattered.

The problem, of course, with seeing journalism only as a for-profit endeavor is that people can be stupid. Sure, we’d all love to watch videos of cute dogs and baby manatees, but at some point, people really do need to know what’s happening in Washington. And readers don’t know what they don’t know. How is Carol in Peoria supposed to know that DOGE is about to make her Social Security a lot harder to get if the news media doesn’t tell her? And there’s the fundamental disconnect between corporate leaders and rank-and-file journalists. One cares about the news and how it affects their readers, the other cares about how to get readers to click. Those two things are not compatible.

Back to 60 Minutes. That incompatibility between corporate news and journalists has caused a mass exodus of experienced journalists, like Bill Owens, from the industry. Those who push back against corporate overlords are moved aside for those who won’t, and plenty of people have resigned rather than write only about whatever Google says is trending that day (how Google has decimated the news industry is a whole different Oprah episode). As a result, we have, by and large, a media where the people with the most access to the powerful are hemmed in on what questions they can ask and what news they can report. Watch the “White House Press Corps,” such as they remain, sometime. You’ll notice that hard questions and follow-up questions are few and far between. A high school senior could do better.

60 Minutes is owned by Paramount Global, whose main shareholder is Shari Redstone. Redstone is trying to get a merger between Paramount and Skydance Media approved. To do so, she needs the FCC to sign off on the deal. The problem for Redstone is that Donald Trump isn’t happy with 60 Minutes, which he is suing for $10 billion for “campaign interference.” Trump claims that 60 Minutes deceptively edited an interview with Kamala Harris ahead of the election. Numerous experts have pointed out that Trump’s claim is without merit and would almost certainly go nowhere in normal times. As you know, these are not normal times.

So Shari Redstone, who has been vocal about wanting Trump’s lawsuit finished before she asks the FCC for merger approval. Another way to look at this, and every lawsuit Trump has won, is as a form of bribery. Trump sues companies he feels were “very unfair” to him, almost always for some petty grievance, and they transfer to him tens of millions of dollars in cash and future services. These are bribes disguised as legal settlements.

It’s no secret that journalists at CBS are vehemently opposed to any settlement with Trump, though Shari Redstone has been pushing for mediation. That would be a typical course of action if Trump’s lawsuit had any merit, but, as I said, it does not. What would happen if we didn’t currently reside in the upside down is this: Trump files his lawsuit, CBS files a motion to dismiss for lack of merit, both parties argue the motion before a judge, who dismisses the suit and possibly sanctions Trump’s side for wasting everyone’s time. That’s what should happen.

Instead, because Shari Redstone, who is reportedly worth around $500 million, needs even more money, CBS is considering capitulating to Trump. And for that reason, Redstone has been reportedly “keeping tabs” on 60 Minutes segments, wanting to know how many are about Trump and in what light they portray him.

All of that led to Scott Pelley saying this at the end of 60 Minutes on Sunday night.

Where does 60 Minutes, or American media for that matter, go from here? That’s the million-dollar question. Has Shari Redstone been sufficiently shamed that she’ll back off and let the lawyers win this case for CBS? Unlikely. There have been some rumblings about a full-scale boycott of Paramount and all its properties, but educating the public about all the stations CBS owns, including Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, MTV, CBS, and BET, is a task that few advocacy groups are set up for. Getting people to simply delete their streaming subscriptions to Paramount Plus may be more successful, but how much of a dent does that make in Paramount’s pocketbook?

I remember, in my early days working in downtown Chicago, everyone on the El, bus, or train seemed to be reading a newspaper that they either brought from home or bought before getting on public transportation. No one complained that their newspaper should have been free, or that it cost them $.50 to read a story on the front page. In hindsight, putting news on the internet, for free, was one of the biggest mistakes the industry ever made. Now, people scoff with indignation when asked to pay to read stories that took journalists days, if not weeks or months, to put together. Every day, I see someone whining about a story being behind a paywall. Remove the incentives for people to subscribe to media outlets, and, it turns out, they won’t.

Just as America is realizing it’s time for them to pay attention to politics, both local and national, it’s time for Americans to take control of their news media. That means subscribing and supporting outlets that are doing good work and shunning and boycotting those that are not. More than 250,000 people canceled their subscriptions to the Washington Post after billionaire owner Jeff Bezos made the decision to stop publishing presidential endorsements. That was the right thing to do. But WaPo has always had a subscriber base of news junkies and political wonks. We need Americans who are casual news consumers to do the same.

This may mean not consuming news in the traditional way. It might mean turning off the evening news and investing in newsletters. It might mean canceling your NYT subscription and sending that cash to outlets like NPR or The Guardian. It may look like cutting back on Starbucks (they’re union busters, anyway) and putting that money in place that’s healthier for America, like college student newspapers (I send $10 every month to the Indiana Daily Student) or media co-ops that are trying to get off the ground. Whatever it is, it can’t be what we’re doing now.

We can not allow multi-millionaires and billionaires to skew the news in ways that favor their wallets but harm the American people. This is just one of those things that we have to care about, or America as we know it will no longer exist. And we’ll have only ourselves to blame.

Just a few other quick stories today, because the above was a lot: DOGE cost us nearly as much as they “saved;” Secretary of the Navy has no idea when Pearl Harbor took place; Young Trumpers aren’t getting dates; and The High Note.

Here we go.

Turns out, DOGE is expensive

Now that DOGE has systematically dismantled almost every service out there that helps the American people in any way, surely we can put all that recovered cash to good use, right?

Right?

Oh.

All of that is before you include the cost of defending the multitude of lawsuits the Trump administration brought on themselves. There were around 200, at last count.

America, I give you the Secretary of the US Navy

Good thing we fired all the women and Black folks. It’s a meritocracy now, amirite?

Look, my posts often have typos. I get it. But I’m also not part of a Pentagon that loves to talk about much more qualified white men are than everyone else. And he did it twice! Twice! In two separate posts!

Of course, he’s blaming it on his spokesperson. 

Everyone is swiping left on Young Trumpers

I came across this piece today, and I laughed and I laughed. Turns out, no one wants to date the young MAGA crowd.

Gosh, what a shame. The whole article is well worth a schadenfreude read.

The High Note

Each Day, I do my best to leave you with a smile on your face, a song in your heart, and the will to fight another day.

It may not feel like it, but some things in the US are still working. Take, for example, Freshkills Park, which used to be the largest landfill known to man. Today, it’s been transformed into a park three times the size of Central Park, and now it’s getting an infusion of 50k native violets to help attract and save pollinators.

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And above all, survive and advance out there today. Don’t let the bastards get you down.