CBS didn't air Rep. James Talarico interview out of fear of FCC
nbcnews.com
nbcnews.com
It is long past time for everyone in tech to take a long hard look at the current situation and stop doing anything that financially benefits Musk, Ellison, or Thiel.
It goes back even further, just see the 1941 FCC “Mayflower Decision” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayflower_doctrine
He said this once and did not describe the pressure. In that same letter, he said that the company didn't agree and government officials "expressed a lot of frustration." There were no threats of fines or lawsuits.
They certainly did not ignore the request [0] (which came at the same time as the FTC were suing Meta for monopoly).
Hundreds of millions of posts were taken down or suppressed.
0 - https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/biden-administration-repeate...
> In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn't agree. Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own our decisions, including COVID-19-related changes we made to our enforcement in the wake of this pressure.
Did you read the first two paragraphs?
> In a letter to the US Congress, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has alleged that the US government under Joe Biden "repeatedly pressured" Meta to censor certain content on its platforms.
> In the letter addressed to US House of Representatives, Mr Zuckerberg said that the platform had to make some changes, that "with the benefit of hindsight and new information," they won't make today. He added that he regrets not being "more outspoken" about it.
We know for a fact that Meta had removed over 20 million Corona posts by April 2021 alone [0]. Some of those were genuine misinformation - but a hell of a lot were legitimate and important questions from reputable sources. It's simply not reasonable to believe this wasn't due to pressure.
0 - https://www.cnet.com/news/social-media/facebook-removed-more...
You're right, thanks. If I could edit I would
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...
So OPs argument that it’s both parties doing it falls flat on its face.
Both science and democracy require active conversation that permits dissenting viewpoints and challenges to the accepted wisdom. Once we have an organization deciding what "the truth" is, we're doomed to stagnation and extremely vulnerable to organizational capture by self-motivated people.
In other words, once you build the political, legal, and technical machinery of censorship, you're half way to having it co-opted by people with anti-social intents.
Even today, you can find like, hundreds of articles of dissenting opinions that were posted at the time of covid. In fact, no one quite yelled "I'm being silenced" as loudly as covid deniers who were demanding to share untested hypotheses.
What I can't find, is any articles that were pulled-from-the-air for going against the then-administration's opinions. But if you have them, please share. Importantly, they need to not be pulled for "false, harmful, or misleading takes."
As the pandemic wore on, we began to see a fight over "fact-checking". Mostly, it played out on Facebook and YouTube, not in traditional media. At the height, I saw a lot of channels self-censoring by avoiding any mention of the words "COVID", "virus", "coronavirus" etc to avoid the AI bot that would capriciously ban or demonetize their videos because it clocked them as COVID misinformation, even when they weren't primarily talking about the virus or proposing any sort of false, harmful, or misleading takes. Many channels do similar today, saying "PDF files" instead of pedophiles or "SA" / "Sea Ess Eh Em" instead of "sexual assault" or "kiddy porn" while talking about the Epstein files. Or everyone's favorite, "unalive" or "self-delete" instead of "dead"/"kill" or "suicide".
I don't have a good source for most of that handy - I just remember living through it. I'm sorry, I know anecdotes aren't data!
Indeed, my original post ("Both political parties have tried to silence dissenting views") was simply about censorship being bad no matter which political party does it. I hate that the current administration is doing it. I hated it when the prior administration did it. If we can't acknowledge that both parties did it, then when the parties switch again, there will still be secret soft censorship happening. It's a moral hazard to reflexively discount when a side I may agree with does something wrong.
It's getting increasingly harder to point out when both parties are wrong without people assuming it's a back-handed defense of the other party.
Not by the government. This was by companies that wanted their customers not to die, so they could make money.
> "The United States government pressured Twitter to elevate certain content and suppress other content about Covid-19 and the pandemic... Take, for example, Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Kulldorff often tweeted views at odds with U.S. public health authorities ... Kulldorff’s statement was an expert’s opinion—one that happened to be in line with vaccine policies in numerous other countries. Yet it was deemed “false information” by Twitter moderators merely because it differed from CDC guidelines."
How Twitter Rigged the Covid Debate: https://www.thefp.com/p/how-twitter-rigged-the-covid-debate
Weren't there huge monopoly cases being furthered against Meta, Twitter and TikTok at that time? And more action against other major tech companies
If I'm threatening you over your 'possible' monopoly with one hand, and 'politely' asking you to censor millions of stories with the other - are those things completely unrelated? Or is there possible an implied message there?
A mafioso will never tell you straight-up that they're threatening and extorting you. But if you look between the lines even a little bit you can discern the message.
(Sometimes the person delivering that message isn't even aware of the threat they're sending; afaik it's entirely possible that Lina Khan was completely genuine with her push.)
> and none were levied.
Well everyone did what they were 'politely asked', didn't they. Meta alone removed or suppressed well over a hundred million posts.
None of these antitrust cases were dropped for doing what was in their mutual interest. You're grasping at straws.
> Well everyone did what they were 'politely asked
Zuckerberg said Meta didn't do everything they were asked.
I'm not understanding either what you're claiming or why you believe it. Keep in mind that I don't believe in always taking what the government says at face value.
> You're grasping at straws.
Why would I be desperate? I've no skin in this game, beyond a general wish not to have legitimate and important speech suppressed and censored.
> Zuckerberg said Meta didn't do everything they were asked.
They didn't do everything, they say (did they ever say what they refused to do?), but they did a lot. As did Twitter. We know this for a fact.
There was no punishment for not following the government's recommendation or reward for following it.
> Why would I be desperate? I've no skin in this game, beyond a general wish not to have legitimate and important speech suppressed and censored.
You're desperate because you claimed that the government had censored COVID speech, and I showed that it had not, which makes it difficult for you to advance your nonsensical "both sides" narrative.
You don't know that, and it's not reasonable to assume that. They all mostly caved, hence the letters of regret and the Twitter files etc.
> You're desperate because you claimed that the government had censored COVID speech, and I showed that it had not
You certainly did not. You showed that you don't even know what happened, couldn't be bothered looking into it, and yet are happy to pronounce 'the truth' as if it didn't contradict well known and documented reality.
That's called 'arguing in bad faith' and it's highly discouraged here.
I do know that, and what's more, I assert that you know that too. Hence, why you wrote "mostly" and why you have so far been unable to show any punishment for the "some" who didn't "cave" to the suggestions given without any threat of punishment.
The Twitter files also did not show any threat of punishment. The letters of regret came from Zuckerberg, who, as we have already seen, did not claim any punishment was threatened or meted when he did not agree with some claimed recommendations.
> That's called 'arguing in bad faith' and it's highly discouraged here.
Pot calling the silverware black.
https://undark.org/2024/01/08/covid-misinformation-censorshi...
How Twitter Rigged the Covid Debate: https://www.thefp.com/p/how-twitter-rigged-the-covid-debate
It turns out that when you have millions of doctors (or scientists) in the world, at least some of them are going to say things that go against scientific consensus. This does not mean they're correct.
Here are 2 more examples of people saying things:
> [Kulldorff's] declaration was widely rejected, and was criticized as being unethical and infeasible by Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization. Francis S. Collins, NIH director, called him a "fringe epidemiologist". [0]
The lesson here is, if you're cherry picking individuals, rather than going with peer-reviewed scientific consensus, you're liable to be blown way off-course at some point. Personality cults are bad no matter who it is.
He's describing the same administration in two different terms. Mark has no problems lying to people that Biden administration sued Meta (it was Trump's [1]) and individuals like Joe Rogan have no problems not calling him out on it.
Trump was president in 2019, 2020. Covid starts in 2019. It's his administration that the twitter files is talking about when they mention censorship. It's his administration that started the big tech lawsuits.
There are also correspondence about moderation right after Biden was elected from his admin. So he's not blameless here. https://www.congress.gov/118/meeting/house/115561/documents/...
Personally I don't care, but we should at least be factual in criticism.
That's an misleading description of the "conclusion" (and incorrect if by "involvement" or "pushing" you meant unconstitutional behavior). The conclusion of Murthy v. Missouri is that the plaintiffs lacked standing to seek a preliminary injunction against the federal government's (under the Biden administration) requests/"demands" to social media companies to remove users' speech [1]. Why was there no standing? Because the plaintiffs failed to demonstrate a minimum of evidence that the Biden administration had coerced or threatened social media companies to censor users' speech [1]:
> To establish standing, the plaintiffs must demonstrate a substantial risk that, in the near future, they will suffer an injury that is traceable to a Government defendant and redressable by the injunction they seek. Because no plaintiff has carried that burden, none has standing to seek a preliminary injunction.
Or rather, the plaintiffs did not demonstrate sufficient evidence that, in the period leading up to the original lawsuits, the social media companies' decisions to remove the relevant speech mentioned by the Biden administration had been anything other than the social media companies' voluntary choices.
[1] https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/603/23-411/#tab-...
I think you're coming at this from the angle of the court is always correct, and not actually examining the case itself.
> Read the dissenting opinion
Dissenting opinions are often irrelevant, equivalent to a loser shouting into the void because they lost. By definition, dissenting opinions are incorrect, because to be correct, they would need to be shared by the majority, in which case they would be in the non-dissenting opinion, if anywhere.
> I think you're coming at this from the angle of the court is always correct
By definition, the court is always "correct" unless contradicted by a constitutionally higher authority. In particular, a court consensus of 9 co-equal judges is more correct than a subset of 1 or 2 of those same judges. And while I'm sure you're a nice, competent person, perhaps even a lawyer, the court is more correct than you here.
Courts and judges are not perfect. Are you just clinging to that belief to justify a predetermined opinion?
What if it ruled the opposite (the status quo), and you used your same argument to say that the courts are wrong and that chattel slavery actually is legal and just?
What makes you, 1 random person out of billions, more correct than the courts, just because you might personally feel chattel slavery is legal and just?
> Courts and judges are not perfect.
If courts and judges are not perfect, then that means that you and your dissenting opinions are even less perfect. Even if we were to accept mob rule, the people don't share your dissenting opinion, so your proposal seems to be that a randomly-small minority of random people unaccountably decide matters of law based on whatever criteria they feel at the time -- a worse option than courts in every way.
There were many "ground rules" in American society and politics that Trump has just proved can be thrown completely out the window, and it feels like there is no unringing that bell.
They evidently also don't apply this rule to talk radio, which is overwhelmingly conservative. Talk about putting your thumb on the scale.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/21/james-talarico-miri...
A man in seminary renounced christian nationalism. Ruling party wants to own the religion-party entanglement
You are talking about Texas, an also ran mess that has a lot of work to do. Lets put aside the fact that they love their unique flavors of voter suppression. At best, for now all we can hope is whichever nobody gets elected does not cause trouble for the party like Fetterman.
And lets be real, they will be gone once the heat dies down post Trump and the state flips back to Republican.
All states seem to be going towards an enlightenment towards the left but at wildy different rates. Progressives focusing on the coasts + the rust belt make sense as those states have a history of economic populism (and are swing states) whereas Texas might come around a long time from now once the oil companies decline enough and the modern company towns made by people like Musk fall apart like they always historically have. You need a trigger of extreme economic pain for the people to finally bite the bullet and try something new. Texas is not there yet. They have better cost of living and enough industry but they are definitely on the road to disaster in many areas.
Do you realize people can read what you post?
https://www.npr.org/2025/09/12/nx-s1-5537152/cbs-news-elliso...
Maybe a cynic will say "this was the plan", but if it was, its not a very good plan? If anything, tech executives benefited enormously from their opponents being overly attached to legacy media communication strategies. When Bezos kills the Post or Ellison kills CBS, the talent doesnt magically disappear.
- Once print newspapers were no longer a thing, even local news outlets are struggling to stay alive, and are resulting to sensationalism and entertainment as news - Corporate sponsors retain a huge influence in mainstream news (or have outright purchased it and use it for partisan politics). - "Social" media resides in (you guessed it) corporate-owned walled gardens. - Even those willing to speak out are being targeted by federal agencies
Wondering where others are finding great places to learn what's going on, what's actually relevant to me, and what I can actually do about it.
Follow trusted journalists that have a history of superb journalism. You have to decide what is good for yourself. Also industry specific journalists for deeper insight into industry you care about. Many of the greats realize that all the news companies are sinking ships and are trying to establish their own thing before things completely collapse.
Focus on what each journalist specializes in and don't read too much into it when they report on topics that are not their forte (like Breaking points talking about AI). Many journalists stay in their lane but the groups covering all the news don't. I wish all journalists would stay in their lane but this is not the world we live in anymore.
For everything else that you are not willing to invest the time in, just accept you are not going to get great coverage.
My (typically far left) biases are comfortable with the following (these are not all far left)
Zeteo + dropsite for foreign middle east leaning coverage
Breaking points for daily news
Ken Klippenstein, Glenn greenwald for national security state/us government news. Klippenstein is more fun (when he gets an FBI email asking for info but also politely asking to not release it, he goes ahead and provides a download link). Greenwald feels a bit more dry.
Industry specific: autoline (youtube+website) for automotive, semianalysis for semi.
Again this is just my opinion, please decide for yourself.
Is this what kids mean when they tell people to touch grass? My generation would accuse you of having lost the plot.
CBS doesn't "fear the FCC"... who didn't even have a rule. It's just open corruption.
The administration wants to signal what it wants to CBS, without actually doing anything that they could lose in court.
CBS wants to signal they are willing to help the administration by doing the censorship "out of fear" when really they just want a friendly relationship with the administration.
It's exactly the way oligarchs will give patronage to maintain their position in the hierarchy where the leader gives the orders.
It's what happens in Russia. It's literally how the mob does shit: "I didn't tell anyone to pay me any bribe. I just said that I'm in need of money and I'm kind to my friends. They chose to pay me of their own volition."
Given that, I believe the higher ups at CBS wanted this to happen, but are colluding with the executive branch or misrepresenting the situation to shift responsibility.
I know the timing makes this seem cravenly partisan, but revoking an exemption like this could be motivated by a desire to ensure fairn-
> while the FCC chair was targeting late-night talk shows, he had made clear that right-wing talk radio would not be subject to the equal time notice.
Ah, well.
You are not allowed to say anything bad about the current administration and Israel. Little country pulling the strings here.
[0]: https://www.fox7austin.com/news/fcc-opening-probe-the-view-a...
Separately, currently elected politicians are pretty much always considered to be bona fides interview subjects, even if they happen to be running for reelection, because e.g. the Governor of Pennsylvania expressing opinions is news.
If CBS lawyers wanted to fight and bring Talarico on, they would probably win- the letter is not actually changing the rule, and the FCC would have to defend the rule change in court and would probably lose. But the point is that CBS has determined to be working towards the Fuehrer, and wants to do so, and so they are doing what they are doing.
...??
Both current Texas Senators are Republicans. Talarico (a Democrat) is running for Cornyn's seat
[1] https://latenighter.com/news/jon-ossoffs-colbert-fcc-equal-t...
CBS self censoring is basically the same thing.
The Chinese government can then say "What censorship?" or "It's rare" and now the FCC can do the same.
Playing whack-a-mole is not a good strategy for censorship. The chilling effect of self censorship is the winning strategy.
And yes, Larry Ellison is a hardcore Trump supporter, but even if he weren't, this is how every network is behaving. Disney's Bob Iger is a Democrat and ABC still paid Trump and suspended Kimmel. When the government holds regulatory leverage over your business, "obeying in advance" isn't cowardice you can blame on the network, it's the intended mechanism of state pressure.
No, there is no reason to absolve the agency of anybody with power (eg money and platform). The ownership class is kowtowing to Trump because they think regardless of whatever happens, they personally will be relatively fine as long as they go along. And they are probably right, even as Trump leads our country off a cliff. But that doesn't mean they get to escape judgement for being cowards.
Resistance requires an active, costly choice. The entire structure of public companies, fiduciary duty, short-term shareholder pressure, regulatory dependency, incentivizes compliance. That's not an excuse, it's the point. The system is designed so that capitulation is the path of least resistance, which is exactly why the blame has to center on whoever is exploiting that structure rather than on each individual institution for failing to be heroic. The firms and universities that did fight back (Perkins Coie, Harvard, Jenner & Block) won in court every time, while the ones that cut deals (Columbia, Paul Weiss, Brown) gave up money and autonomy for nothing the fighters didn't get for free. But fighting required leaders willing to accept real personal and institutional risk. Expecting that as the default rather than addressing the coercion creating the dilemma is how you end up with a system where everyone folds and nobody's responsible except the victims.
Of course, increasing the cost of capitulation is one place where consumers actually have power. Disney suffered 1.7 million streaming cancellations after suspending Kimmel, and Kimmel was back on the air within five days. That works. But notice what it required: massive organized public pressure aimed at the company and political pressure aimed at the FCC. Not just finger-wagging for being cowards.
That's fair, this lines up with where I am mostly coming from - we shouldn't absolve blame from one group by focusing it on another.
But your second paragraph then goes on to do that? We're dealing with a societal attack where the fascists are trying to topple all of our societal institutions into a self-perpetuating low-trust low-authority state. If they achieve in doing that, then the Schelling point becomes to not resist as it will be costly and ineffective. But the point we're at now, we should all be pushing to resist the fascists to prevent them flipping the dynamic.
Practically, you're overstating what fiduciary duty to shareholders requires. I'd also say you're also overstating the regulatory threat, as you went on to point out how the organizations who have resisted the fascists haven't really lost out by doing so. You can also apply this argument to politicians like Congress, judges, etc who don't want to rock the boat. But surely it's not sensible to absolve them!
It's not just a matter of "finger-wagging", rather it's pointing out that if the people with outsized power just go along rather than standing up to this, then they're in the same exact camp as the hardcore openly-Trump fascists. Maybe that camp will be lucrative if the fascists do succeed at conquering our society, or maybe they can be stripped of their stature and power when they fail. A lifetime ban on being a corporate officer or board member for abusing that position to try to overthrow the United States wouldn't be out of line.
I was thinking about this a bit in the context of that "March for Billionaires". Why did that seem preposterous? Because billionaires don't deserve a gold star simply for being billionaires! Rather they get credit for what they do with that wealth to help our society. And no, the value they created by growing a business doesn't count - rather when you get that level of wealth, you can use it to move back up the gradient of market optimization, and fix the problems we have that come from being stuck in local minima. If they want recognition and goodwill, this is the work they have to do. And if the poor billionaires really can't think of anything useful to do with that wealth, there is some really low hanging fruit like ending food poverty in the US.
And to be clear, I'm not saying fiduciary duty requires capitulation. CEOs can absolutely make the case that resistance serves long-term shareholder interests, and the evidence backs them up. Costco is thriving after, and arguably because, they held firm on DEI. Target capitulated and lost $12.5 billion in market value and its CEO resigned. I started shopping at Costco for this reason and haven't been in a Target since Trump took office, after shopping their regularly. What I am saying is that the short-term incentive structure of public companies makes capitulation easier, which is exactly why the coercion works so well and why it's the bigger problem. The system erects hurdles to doing what's right, and often what's even in a company's own long-term interest.
FWIW your post nudged me to focus on Costco again. I had signed up for a membership to buy some appliances, but I haven't really incorporated it my day to day household purchases. A bit of activation energy because their warehouse is somewhat far away, the parking lot is always swamped, their website experience is clunky and hostile, etc. But I should at least be able to add them to the rotation.
But then you have to trust the government that manages the regulatory agency to act in a socially-beneficial; and only at most half the US population does at any given time.
As for the corpos.. Cancelled Disney and Hulu when Kimmel was taken off. Maybe it's time to cancel Paramount+ too.
i know this is a contrivance but nevertheless: we don't consult the entire hospital how to treat my heart condition yet we accept on face value that obeying the vagaries of the hoi polloi is the best way to decide who controls the levers of power in civil society.
the people get what they deserve. if democracy was a functional system of government then by its own underlying assumptions the citizenry right now would be shooting, bombing, & stabbing these so-called elites. But we are held in subjugation as a result of our own fealty. It is a choice.
"Unaccountable elites" are enabled by know-nothings in corporate management, software engineering teams, accounting, HR "just following orders".
The lack of muscle memory to be self sufficient keeps people in their lane and unable to look away, fix their own stuff, make their own stuff.
When labor knows nothing but just following orders leadership is empowered to build and fill gulags; what are the people going to do? Resist en masse? Not when they are addicted to GrubHub delivery of Subway.
Yes.
And the most surprising thing about this particular story to me is that a lot of people (here in the comments) seem surprised about it.
I don't mean to normalize this, because it isn't normal, but anyone surprised by this hasn't been paying attention over the past year+, this didn't arrive out of the blue.
If an opposing candidate sees this, they can then request equal air time from that broadcaster.
The rule is in place so that one party or viewpoint can't dominate broadcast media. That's a good thing right?
The rule change here is that traditionally "bona fide" news programs have been, by default, issued an exception to the rule. That has spawned a bunch of "pseudo-news" shows that have also been claiming this exception. Here, the FCC is now saying "hey, you don't just automatically get granted an exception to the rule and get to call yourself a bona fide news program if you're not actually one"". That seems completely reasonable to me.
Broadcast media is held to this FCC standard because they are granted a monopoly for a broadcast spectrum, and it isn't physically possible for a competitor to broadcast on the same spectrum. Streaming etc... doesn't need to follow these rules.
I do think it's wrong that talk radio doesn't seem to be held to the same standard, though.
How?
Everything I've seen is that is specifically what's going on, do you have different information?
The only threat to pulling a license would be if they didn't comply with the FCC rule change, that we've both agreed is reasonable, correct?
Do you have specific examples of the administration threatening to pull a license due to criticism? If that's the case, I'd certainly be vehemently against such action, just as I was when the government illegally acted to suppress and censor alternate viewpoints during covid.
As you say, the FCC has declined to pursue talk radio programs over this issue, even though they're clearly subject to the rule in principle. That's not a mistake, it's because those programs push viewpoints the President favors so he doesn't want to punish them.
I think the article and the video summaries I've seen of that interview are a little deceptively edited, but the idea appears to be the same.
Apparently, it's illegal to knowingly broadcast false information [1] within certain guidelines, and that can indeed cause a license revocation:
"The FCC prohibits broadcasting false information about a crime or a catastrophe if the broadcaster knows the information is false and will cause substantial “public harm” if aired. FCC rules specifically say that the “public harm must begin immediately, and cause direct and actual damage to property or to the health or safety of the general public, or diversion of law enforcement or other public health and safety authorities from their duties.”
The FCC chair referenced this law in response to Jimmy Kimmel claiming that the Charlie Kirk shooter was "maga":
“We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang trying to characterize this kid who killed Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it,”
While this was demonstrably untrue, and it was widely known to be untrue at the time, I agree that it doesn't appear to meet the FCC standard I quoted above.
I actually find the FCC rule itself a bit disturbing, as it seems to position the government as an arbiter of truth.
It isn't a new problem, Jefferson struggled with how to deal with it too [2]
"Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle"
What do you suggest as a solution? Should false information be ok to broadcast with a FCC license? Who gets to determine whether it's false?
[1] https://www.fcc.gov/sites/default/files/broadcasting_false_i...
[2] https://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/amendI_sp...
This seems like begging the question. The issue here obviously isn't truth vs untruth, it is fealty to the regime vs opposition to the regime. All the evidence points in this direction, and there isn't a better case yet made in the opposite.
Witness the example cited above: right-wing talk radio, famous for spreading untruthful info and agreeing with the regime, is let off scot-free. Or how the regime itself spread untruths about Alex Pretti after they killed him. That categorically debunks any purported "truth vs untruth" decision criteria and seems to confirm the fealty vs opposition decision criteria.
Fun thought experiment: re-read this situation, but imagine it took place in russia, by putin's hand. Like seriously, what oppressive regime in modern history HASN'T had some variation of silencing the opposition "for broadcasting 'false information'"?:
> On the morning of March 4, the last remaining independent news outlet in Russia — the award-winning Novaya Gazeta — announced the end of its reporting on the war in Ukraine in response to Russian government demands.
> A new law that bans the “dissemination of knowingly false information” about the Russian armed forces — and carries up to a 15-year penalty — was the final blow. [0]
The problem isn't simple, and there don't seem to be obvious answers - civilizations have been struggling with it since recorded history.
I assume you're not trying to make the point that exceeding authority is a characteristic limited to the current administration are you?
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
We've been asking this since at least 1st century Rome.
I think it's more important to evaluate systems, institutions and their effectiveness than specific politicians.
Neither the conversation nor the country can really move forward without that shared understanding of where we're at now.
If you aren't able to see how the issue is much broader than any specific politician, it's difficult to move a conversation forward.
You may want to take a serious and critical look at how these problems have been a part of all politics throughout history.
If your viewpoint is that the current team is the bad guy, but some other team is the good guy, it just means that their propaganda has been effective with you.
When they come for YOU.
Seriously this is why people use to take every government transgression and overreach so seriously. Now multiple times a day it's something that would have been a straight SCANDAL in the past.
It's happening right now y'all because it was always happening and will always happen without constant push back.
Don't wait!
Right now they're 'flooding the zone' - a Steve Bannon slang for confusing and causing fatigue among people with far too many scandals far too often. I hope history will will remember him and his ilk with the reputation they deserve.
CBS and its parent company are greedy cowards. If they won't defend free speech they're the ones causing its downfall.
Governments rule only with the consent of the people.
If you lay down and give away your freedoms you aren't the victim, you're the perpetrator.
Greedy for trying to stay in business.
If you didn’t fight hard enough it’s your fault?
You let the government of the hook to easily.
By your logic you‘re a perpetrator too because he don’t blame the real bad guy
If CBS were headed by someone with gumption and less willingness to kowtow to the government, they could resist this pressure and still be fine. Worst case scenario, a merger would get rejected and they would be targeted by some spurious lawsuits. Going out of business is not a realistic risk.
What is a risk, however, is non-optimal shareholder value. We live in a world where the stock price is more important than anything else, including doing the right thing.
Precisely. See also: TACO
But it seems this is just business between billionaire buddies
That is victim blaming. Heard the same from judges about rape victims.
> CBS is controlled by Ellison, which makes this look a lot like collaboration.
That changes this completely. That isn’t being a coward, that’s just good old quid pro quo from billionaire buddies.
Were the leaders of Vichy France victims? No, they were collaborators.
Where all the people of France that didn't choose to fight to their death collaborators?
Where all the people in the concentartion camps collaborators. Do you blame them or the real perpetrator?
I find it strange to put the blame on the middleman instead on the source of all that.
There's a difference between not fighting and obeying in advance.
Without people there is no corporation.
And I‘m pretty sure the people in corporations are still alive so your Soylent Green example is nonsense.
> There's a difference between not fighting and obeying in advance.
Sometimes not. If you know in advance what will happen, not fighting can be the better option. At least for the moment.
I'm blaming victims.
If you're suffering from government oppression and you go home and cry instead of stand up for your rights, I'm blaming you for your oppression.
You're only a victim if you die with your boots on, so to speak.
It’s not on you to decide they have to die with you.
But the fact that Trump buddy Ellison owns CBS takes that in a completely new direction.
Beside this case I guess you never where responsible for hundreds of peoples lives.
Or maybe talk to some mothers and fathers what they endure to protect their families what you would call appeasement.
> On the morning of July 27, 1943, I was told that, according to radio reports, fascism had collapsed and Mussolini was under arrest. When my mother sent me out to buy the newspaper, I saw that the papers at the nearest newsstand had different titles. Moreover, after seeing the headlines, I realized that each newspaper said different things. I bought one of them, blindly, and read a message on the first page signed by five or six political parties — among them the Democrazia Cristiana, the Communist Party, the Socialist Party, the Partito d’Azione, and the Liberal Party.
> Until then, I had believed that there was a single party in every country and that in Italy it was the Partito Nazionale Fascista. Now I was discovering that in my country several parties could exist at the same time. Since I was a clever boy, I immediately realized that so many parties could not have been born overnight, and they must have existed for some time as clandestine organizations.
What I think is fascinating here in this case isn't just the suppression of any old free speech, it's trying to hide the presence of political options.
Support for such measures (welfare, healthcare, unionization, high taxes etc) is usually low among Americans.
https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/10/welfare-cuts...
Source: https://archive.org/details/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_th...
People think that's crazy talk, even though it's happening right in front of their faces since Obama, we're cooked.
Think about it: A bernie Sanders type candidate not taking corporate PAC money is currently in the running for the White House! We saw with Mamdani they will throw everything at her. Will she falter? Hope not but feeling better than I have felt in a while.
Since the end of WW2, Democratic administrations have presided over significantly higher job growth than Republican administrations. https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.c...
"A broad middle class can act as a counterweight against oligarchy." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_class
The US right wing doesn't do "middle class". It does tax cuts for the rich and hunger games for the rest. If you pander to them, things will just get worse and the far right will surge even more ... which is probably what they want.
You can do a lot when you have a mandate and you are determined to get things done. How to determine if a candidate is like this? After many cycles of election in my experience there is only one reliable barometer. The only determining factor seems to be money in politics. If your candidate has corporate contributions, you can pretty much guarantee that nothing is going to get done. On the other side, we've seen non‑corporate‑backed candidates actually try, at the very least.
Now, talking about the actual specifics of how you get past a gridlocked Congress and a hostile Supreme Court: with the advantage of being at the top of the party, you have the ability to whip your party into falling in line. We saw this with FDR. He wasn't pulling any punches. If someone got in his way, including the Supreme Court, he made their lives miserable. One of the reasons bernie people feel fond of him.
A lot of these politicians are only there for the corporate donations and in hopes of a job afterwards. So a very low‑hanging fruit is to go after the corporations that are donating to the politician who is holding things up. Make the public aware that this SOB is the one holding up plans that are very popular. Do what Trump did: go into that person's district and get his voters to realize that this is the person that's holding everything up.
For example, paid family‑leave polls show ~71% overall support, including Republicans, Independents, and Democrats. Yet when Biden campaigned on it and then immediately dropped it at the first sign, it showed that he didn't even try.
A lot can be done if the candidate actually tries.
In contrast the right does whatever Trump says, no matter how many kids he rapes. They have an idea where the country should be in 50 years, whatever the cost. I haven't seen that level of discipline from the left. I hope it's there now post-Trump, but it certainly wasn't there during the Obama midterms.
I think part of the problem is capitalism itself. Most US companies are run like tiny little fascist dictatorships, which is a great training ground for the real thing. It doesn't socialize people to cooperate. Contrast eg Norway, where businesses operate inside a formal 3-way agreement (Trepartssamarbeidet) between the government, employers associations, and trade unions.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cbs-tv-stations-affiliates/
Better yet, call their advertisers:
https://stopmediabiasnow.com/cbs-advertisers/
Watch/like/comment/share the YouTube upload:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiTJ7Pz_59A
More indirectly, you can support the Talarico campaign (fueling a financial Streisand effect could help discourage similar moves in the future):
Change the administration.
CBS is complicit. The Ellisons bought it and installed Bari Weiss for this very purpose of being a (very) lightly camouflaged state media.
That said, their day will come. Just like in Russia, after the low-hanging fruit is cut, the state will come for The Bulwark and Steve Jobs's widow, because The Atlantic is going be get increasingly annoying.
The US government is telling a comedian who he can and cannot interview.
Russia has a pretty professional riot police that does not pop off cannons for funzies. Russian corruption has to be exposed. It's not out in the open - Putin is not excepting gold bar bribes on live TV.
So, yeah, we are not Russia, in a way.
What was normal is gone and it'll take the rest of my life to fix things if we're lucky because the damage they've done is generational.
But fix it we can and must, and they aren't actually all that popular. They're even underwater in polling on immigration.
But they're still on the right, and crucially in writing in because sometimes people don't actually know that. Do read/listen! But please be aware. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bulwark_(website)
(In case it's not obvious Liberal Currents is quite left.)
Reputational damage is a less useful tool today, when so many of the people in power at CBS have personal reasons for wanting to curry favor with the administration. So, loss of business: simply boycotting or changing the channel can help.
Note that newspapers are an older technology than radio, and they function in exactly the same way that the internet does, and there's never been a question of whether they are secretly "broadcast media".
Many people in or related to the current administration have spoken in favor of free speech, which feels quite ironic.
Indeed. Our government, like most governments across the world in 2026, has moved way beyond the naive notion of "free speech." Talking about it now is either nostalgia, or lies
Show me the Fascism, please.
His final show is coming in May, and I'm sure that they can expect Colbert to continue to embarrass them (as the spineless sycophants they are) every week until then. It's a tremendous self own.
Because they already have?
If you don't like a coworker questioning your behavior, maybe don't engage in questionable behavior;
If you just want them to do what you say unquestionably, maybe you should have been born during a time when slavery was more common;
If you are having trouble getting good output out of a direct report that previously has produced good output, chances are you are currently a failure of a boss; and if you use terms like "insubordination" instead of asking "what am I doing wrong?", you probably have pointy hair, too.
Really? CBS's lawyers cited the equal time rule, which only applies to broadcasts sent over limited airwaves. I think the equal time rule doesn't actually apply in this case (because why couldn't CBS provide equal time in the near future? who even requested equal time and was denied it?), but more relevantly the equal time rule does not apply to publishing the same interview over the internet instead of over the "air".
She famously left the NY Times after defending the publication of a contrarian op-ed by (Republican) Sen. Tom Cotton.
https://www.npr.org/2025/10/06/nx-s1-5563786/bari-weiss-cbs-...
Although apparently not a fan of Jimmy Kimmel as a comedian, her Free Press objected to his suspension. "... the FCC’s coercion undermines our most fundamental values"
https://www.thefp.com/p/jawboning-and-jimmy-kimmel-free-spee...
And on the same topic, the FP editors wrote: "At last, something we can all agree on: Pam Bondi has no idea what she's talking about."
https://www.thefp.com/p/pam-bondi-vs-the-first-amendment-fre...
For president, she has voted for Mitt Romney, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden.
It's fair to call her a centrist.
That's not fair. She left the Wall Street Journal because they didn't want her to write anti-Trump op-eds.
https://reason.com/2018/01/28/bari-weiss-it-was-heartbreakin...
Trump, while an objectively horrible person who belongs in prison for many distinct types of crime, is primarily a minstrel for people to hate on. While he is (unfortunately) a good first-pass litmus test for an individual's politics/intelligence, criticizing him is not really the same as critiquing all of the entrenched interests that installed and continue to enable him.
What? I thought she was associated with & supported by Republicans.
That is, this interview has been seen by fewer people than it would have, had it been on television.
It will surpass Colbert's normal viewership before the sun goes down.
That means exactly what I thought it meant. It's still just as bad.
It isn't. CBS is owned by the Ellisons, who are big Trump supporters. They are absolutely complicit in attempts to quash dissenting voices.
You're right that the Streisand effect is in play here, but it's not 4D chess. It's garden-variety incompetence, because the policy makers in the government are too old to see anything other than broadcast TV as the most valuable medium.
> "Let's just call this what it is: Donald Trump's administration wants to silence anyone who says anything bad about Trump on TV because all Trump does is watch TV," Colbert joked.
I see that it's become harder to track because the White House doesn't disclose what he's doing as much, but yeah, lots of golf still.
But also, the few times I've been unfortunate enough to have to go to mega golf venues, the clubhouses generally have TVs prominently all over the place. So there is quite the demographic overlap.