Last fall, Ezra Klein was getting a lot of attention for his book Abundance, which basically argued that American had become bureaucracy-obsessed and fallen out of love with building things. I thought it was mostly simplistic cack, downplaying or ignoring the fact that the U.S. government has become so blisteringly corrupt, it clearly no longer functions in the public interest.

As a longtime telecom beat reporter I was particularly struck by Klein’s chapter on broadband, which mostly seemed to amplify Republican attacks. One of Klein’s biggest targets was the infrastructure bill and Broadband, Equity, Deployment, and Access (BEAD) program, which was part of the 2021 infrastructure bill, and set aside $42.5 billion for improved internet access.

BEAD was never going to be a poster child for government efficiency. But as I noted at the time, Klein’s criticism of the program was bizarre and simplistic, downplayed why the program was taking so long (we had to remap the entirety of U.S. internet access, for one), and ignored how other legislation that same year (like ARPA) was delivering much of the abundance Klein claimed to be looking for.

I could tell from reading Klein’s Abundance chapter on broadband that he didn’t spend much time talking to telecom policy experts. After Klein’s attacks made inroads on the podcast circuit (including on Jon Stewart’s) they were then picked up again by right wing media, further perpetuating the idea that BEAD was a completely useless boondoggle:

I bring it up because a little more than a year later and this BEAD program really is now a boondoggle under Trumpism, as Sean Gonsalves and I explored in a new feature over at The Verge.

Republicans, it should be noted, voted against the infrastructure bill and ARPA, but can still routinely be found taking credit for the improvements they opposed.

Last election season, Republicans ran on the idea that they’d reshape BEAD and trim the fat. Instead they’ve stripped away all oversight, eliminated any requirements that taxpayer-funded broadband be affordable or equitably deployed, and gone out of their way to redirect money away from future-proof fiber toward Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos low-Earth-orbit satellite broadband networks.

Republicans — and the Joe Rogan infotainment universe — are positively convinced that Starlink is akin to magic. So they’ve decided to throw billions of taxpayer money at Bezos and Musk in exchange for slower, more expensive, congested low-Earth orbit satellite connectivity that chips away at the ozone layer. It’s worth noting they’re being given billions for service that already exists and was already set to be deployed.

In our Verge piece, we talked to minority communities in Louisiana who were slated to get fiber upgrades, but are now being shoveled toward Starlink service (that already existed) thanks to Republican BEAD changes. They are very aware they’re now getting the short-end of the stick:

“The most frustrating part is that it was a zero dollar investment in infrastructure,” Wills told The Verge. “Nothing fundamentally changed. People with Starlink are going to just get mailed a box and many won’t be able to install it. And we still won’t have anybody really served,” leaving the community with “no growth in our economic potential.”

“No money will stay here,” he said. “No jobs will be created from this — no installation jobs, zero construction jobs, or even any small stimulus.”

Republicans are then claiming they “saved taxpayers money” by throwing money at billionaires for satellite broadband they already planned to deploy. States and the Trump administration are now bickering over these $20 billion in “non deployment funds.” Congress said this money had to be used for broadband access; but the law under Trumpism is very clearly optional. It’s a giant mess.

All of this corrupt retooling has caused endless new delays, pushing real-world deployments out by another year or two. As of this writing, the $42.5 billion program has only provided new (fixed wireless) connections to a handful of homes in Louisiana and Nebraska (the Trump administration tried to use this as a press op highlighting how amazingly successful their revamp has been).

Due to the higher costs of deployment created by stupid tariffs and pointless wars, many additional fiber deployment bids originally supposed to be funded by BEAD are likely to go into default and be cancelled, opening up the possibility of Musk and Bezos getting billions more in taxpayer subsidies. It’s expected that this whole mess will get significantly uglier later this year.

Curiously, Ezra Klein hasn’t made a peep. All the press coverage last election season about how BEAD was a boondoggle is nowhere to be found now that the program is a bigger boondoggle than ever. And it’s a bigger boondoggle than ever because the U.S. is too corrupt to function, something that needs to be addressed (and candidly acknowledged by our press) before we can even begin to sniff “abundance.”

I’ve always felt that the abundance movement was an influence campaign by affluent centrists to pre-empt genuine populist progressive reform as the response to authoritarianism. The abundance movement always struck me as Clinton-era vibes-based deregulatory corporatism with a new coat of paint; something seemingly supported by its proponents’ curiously limited attention span.

DOGE was always designed to provide flimsy pseudo-efficiency cover for wholesale corruption. It was designed to pretend that the government was “cutting waste and fraud” while a bunch of velour tracksuit wearing con men stripped the country for parts and sold what was left off the back loading dock.

As we’ve since explored, DOGE also burned through billions of dollars, exposed the sensitive data of untold Americans, killed untold millions of people worldwide, and generally distracted dim and misinformed Americans from the fact their government is too corrupt to function in the public interest and is no longer capable of consistently standing up to corporate power.

Enter Brendan Carr, who appears to be under fire for the FCC’s efforts to hide his agency’s correspondence with DOGE bros. Last year, journalist Nina Burleigh and advocacy group Frequency Forward sued the FCC, alleging that the agency violated the Freedom of Information Act by wrongfully withholding agency records. 

In a new filing (via Ars Technica) in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, Burleigh and Frequency Forward say Carr also hid his use of Signal as a communications tool, which they apparently believe he used to communicate with DOGE:

“The evidence clearly demonstrates that the FCC has acted in bad faith by withholding documents responsive to Plaintiffs’ FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] request. The FCC acted in bad faith when it redefined the search criteria without notice to Plaintiffs or this Court. Further, the FCC acted in bad faith by concealing the fact that the Chairman Carr has a Signal account on a phone he uses to conduct government business.”

While Carr’s obnoxious censorship efforts get all the policy and media attention, he’s also been at work destroying the FCC’s consumer protection authority, eliminating media consolidation limits, and dismantling what little corporate oversight we had left at the agency. This was “cleverly” dubbed Carr’s “delete, delete, delete” agenda. Telecom monopolies and robocallers love the plan.

It’s not clear what a bunch of 20-something Elon Musk cult members could have contributed to Carr’s mindless demolition of public interest governance, but it sure would be nice to take a transparent look, given the vast financial conflicts of interest between Musk’s fake government agency and the multiple Musk-owned companies looking (and getting) giant financial favors from the FCC.

Starlink has been getting a lot of favors in particular, with more likely coming given rumors that Starlink wants to launch a wireless phone provider.

“The evidence strongly suggests that Musk bought his way into the White House and to obtain his position as the de-facto head of DOGE, and that he had used his government authority and access to information to earn huge profits for himself and his companies,” the plaintiffs wrote. “Plaintiffs’ FoIA request seeks documents that shed light on the relationship between the FCC, Musk as regulator and Musk and his companies as regulated entities.”

Meanwhile, I still think it’s embarrassing that the press, and some Dem politicians, initially treated DOGE as if it was a good faith effort they could work with. As opposed to what it clearly was all along: corruption and grift under the flimsy veneer of improved government efficiency.

When right wing billionaire Larry Ellison hired trolling blogger Bari Weiss to run CBS News, Weiss arrived with the promise of “balanced, fact-based news,” “independent, principled journalism,” and a unique “entrepreneurial drive and editorial vision” that would completely modernize the network and reach the “everyday Americans” she claimed were being “ignored by mainstream media.”

In reality, she was hired by the billionaire to take what she did at her weird little troll blog (troll people for clicks, coddle the extraction class, punch left) and weave it into CBS News in a way that would get ratings and go viral on social media. She wasn’t hired to do journalism, she was hired to do attention-grabbing class and race agitprop to entertain and befuddle the electorate for a billionaire.

Weiss’ problem: she’s not good at that either.

CBS News ratings had already hit their lowest point in a quarter century back in March. And it’s now spread across the CBS News ecosystem, from CBS Evening News and 60 Minutes to CBS Mornings:

“Damage was particularly bad at CBS Mornings, hosted by Gayle King, which has long held the third-place ratings spot among network morning shows. But that recently changed: CBS Mornings averaged 1.8 million total viewers earlier this month, then dropped to 1.59 million on June 3, the day after executives fired Scott Pelley, the de facto face of CBS News.

That amounted to an 11 percent slip in audience following what was already the “worst-rated May on record” in CBS Mornings history, according to the ratings data.”

It’s not that you can’t make right wing and oligarch friendly propaganda entertaining. There’s no shortage of those sorts of options across AM radio, broadcast TV, Fox news on cable, and the internet. Bari Weiss just isn’t good at anything. Not running a major newsroom. Not converting a longstanding network into an oligarch apologist-machine, not managing human beings, and not even entertaining people.

She’s a fairly prototypical media industry brunchlord, the type that just keeps failing upward in a way that’s in no way reflective of her competency or what she’s actually accomplished.

Reports from within CBS News have been uniformly negative, and there continues to be rumblings that Weiss will be replaced or at least see her responsibilities scaled down. There’s potential here for Larry Ellison to fuse CBS News, his looming acquisition of CNN, and his co-ownership of TikTok into a very effective propaganda machine. Fortunately for democracy, Larry doesn’t seem all that competent either.

You might recall that one of the conditions of the FCC’s approval of The Ellison family’s $8 billion acquisition of CBS was that the agency would install a “ombudsman” at the network to ensure CBS journalism was appropriately feckless and deferential to our mad, idiot king.

This was particularly ironic given decades of whining by Republicans about stuff like the “fairness doctrine,” and other short-lived government attempts to set acceptable contours for journalistic speech. The appointment didn’t even really appear necessary, given Bari Weiss’ pretty obvious loyalty to oligarchs and autocrats like Trump and Netanyahu.

The guy they appointed, Kenneth Weinstein, unsurprisingly had no qualifications for the role. Weinstein had been the head of the faux-academic right wing Hudson Institute “think tank,” and has absolutely no experience in journalism or television whatsoever.

Similarly unsurprisingly, a new New York Times report indicates that Weinstein has largely been invisible and pointless since his appointment. He doesn’t issue statements, he doesn’t appear to help anybody dealing with internal chaos being caused by Weiss, he doesn’t respond to direct questions from politicians, and he barely shows up at the office:

“In the nine months since he was hired, Mr. Weinstein has issued no public statements about CBS News’s coverage or its controversies. He has not issued any guidance or feedback in staffwide emails or memos, three employees said. He has told some employees that he is scheduled to work only one day per month, two people said, though one said he responded to queries outside his monthly workday.”

As I predicted, there’s just not much for him to actually do at a company that’s innately so dutifully loyal to the nation’s richest assholes. The New York Times at one point seems confused by the idea this “watchdog” does do any useful watchdogging:

“As CBS News has been shaken by infighting between management and its star correspondents this year, Mr. Weinstein’s silence is being criticized by media experts. They say Paramount, the parent company of CBS News, has essentially hired a watchdog who doesn’t bark.”

Of course Weinstein wasn’t appointed to be a “watchdog” or to help the network or its employees. He was hired so that the Trump administration could be ensured a direct line to the leadership of a media company being converted into a propaganda mill, something that’s likely not even necessary due to the ample close connections between the Ellisons, CBS leadership, and the administration.

Weinstein’s other job was to simply ensure that CBS was remaining dutifully loyal to the president, a role that’s also not really necessary since folks like Bari Weiss have no integrity.

The New York Times doesn’t mention how much Weinstein is being paid for his single day of “work” a month, and how many shitcanned CBS journalist salaries it would have paid for.

Earlier this week we noted how ABC has been asking its audience to give the Trump FCC an earful about its clumsy efforts to censor journalists, comedians, and daytime talk show hosts:

The ad only hints at the fact that FCC boss Brendan Carr has launched a fake “investigation” of ABC because The View hosted Texas Senate hopeful James Talarico last February. As we’ve explored repeatedly, Carr is pretending that this appearance violates a dated and irrelevant FCC “equal time rule,” despite the fact the show has had a formal exemption since 2002.

It’s all weird, performative bullshit designed to chill speech and punish ABC because President Trump is a thin-skinned autocrat. It’s also intended to send a message to all major media outlets that if they platform people openly critical of our dim kakistocracy, they’ll be inundated with endless costly legal headaches and bad “press” (read: lots of hostility aimed at them by right wing propaganda outlets).

Despite the ABC ad being relatively timid, it clearly upset the similarly-thin-skinned Carr, who took to Elon Musk’s right wing propaganda website to whine about it:

Again, The View was already exempt from this rule, for more than two decades. Even if it wasn’t, the rule hasn’t been enforced in 26 years because it’s a relic that doesn’t matter. It was crafted for an era where a TV appearance could make or break a political candidacy, requiring that a politician of the opposite party ideology get “equal time” on broadcast airwaves.

But broadcast is increasingly irrelevant, as is the rule, which you’ll notice Carr doesn’t enforce for right wing radio (because this is an ideological crusade by a weak zealot). This is also a giant loser of a case on First Amendment grounds. But it could be a particularly problematic case for Carr during discovery, given the indications that Carr covertly worked with right wing broadcasters to falsely make it look like ABC’s affiliate actively broke the law by not filling out some paperwork.

Carr knows all of this but his audience of bots and MAGA zealots over at ex-Twitter obviously don’t. They will simply see women daytime TV hosts and “news” in the same line of sight and immediately suffer embolisms of hate.

“Some may dislike certain — or even most — of the viewpoints expressed on ‘The View’ or similar shows,” ABC said in one recent filing. “Such dislike, however, cannot justify using regulatory processes to restrict those views.”

Carr doesn’t want this to ever see an actual courtroom. He just wants to intimidate corporate media giants, censor valid speech, and then bask in the adoration of the misinformed and deluded.

But it’s genuinely bad news for Carr and Trump that Disney Corporation is fighting back. If they can openly and legally demonstrate that Carr is a toothless extremist hack, other corporations are likely to be encouraged. And as Trump’s health and political power starts to buckle and fail, that sort of uncharacteristic corporate media courage could prove contagious.

Earlier this year America’s idiot king offered a no-bid contract to one of his ex-con Mara Lago donors to “fix” the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. It… did not go well. Said pool is now full of algae and peeling paint, and it’s created an interesting attention flashpoint for the press and another perfect metaphor for the Trump administration’s corrupt crony capitalist bonanza.

As ABC News reports, Trump has repeatedly (and falsely) tried to claim that the disaster is a result of vandalism, despite there being no evidence (the pool is under 24/7 video surveillance):

“Trump first made the claim the lining had been cut in a post on his social media platform on Saturday, saying then that vandals had put a 250-foot-long “gash” in the lining.

Neither the Interior Department nor the White House has provided evidence that the pool lining had been cut.”

Thin skinned authoritarian that he is, Trump doesn’t like when journalists explain how incompetent and corrupt he is. So he immediately took took his personal money-losing propaganda website to once again threaten ABC with lawsuits for doing (what really is fairly innocuous) journalism:

The man is genuinely not well.

ABC did, of course, pay Trump a $16 million bribe in 2024 to settle a baseless lawsuit the company could have easily won. But as Trump’s FCC has ramped up its censorship and harassment campaign against ABC, there have been signs that Disney Corporation is starting to show some backbone.

For example one recent filing by Disney/ABC makes it clear that Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr concocted a fake scandal in collaboration (with right-wing friendly broadcasters) to make it seem like ABC’s Houston affiliate did something illegal. All to manufacture a controversy surrounding Democratic Texas Senate hopeful James Talarico (whose empathy and hot girlfriend appear to upset Republicans greatly).

ABC has also recently been airing spots urging ABC viewers to give the FCC an earful about its multiple, overlapping efforts to censor ABC journalists and comedians. As Trump’s health and political influence wanes, you may see formerless feckless companies demonstrate something vaguely resembling a backbone; assuming they don’t have active mergers awaiting regulatory review.

ABC continues to send signals that it actually intends to fight back against Brendan Carr’s clumsy efforts to censor the network’s comedians and journalists.

As Mike noted last week, the public had until Monday, June 22 to file public comment with the FCC about the agency’s ongoing censorship efforts. Part of those efforts have involved Carr colluding with right wing broadcasters to pretend that ABC broke the law when The View hosted Texas Democratic Senate hopeful James Talarico last February. MAGA is clearly worried about Talarico’s chances in Texas.

Carr falsely claims Talarico’s appearance violated the dated FCC “equal time” rule, which used to mandate that an election season prime time TV appearance by one party’s politicians had to be countered by an appearance by the other party’s politicians. The rule is no longer meaningfully enforced because television obviously has waning impact in the internet era.

But more importantly, The View had struck very clear agreements with the FCC that it has been exempt from this rule since 2002. Carr knows this. But he still falsely claimed The View violated the law, appears to have worked closely with right wing broadcast affiliates to try and make it look like ABC’s Houston affiliate broke the law, and launched an unprecedented early review of ABC’s broadcast license ownership as punishment.

Carr has a real dead dog of a case here, which would explain why ABC is giving ongoing signs that they intend to fight this (as opposed to that time they paid the president a $15 million bribe to settle a baseless lawsuit). In addition to recent filings calling out Carr for manufacturing a fake legal scandal, ABC is now running ad spots calling on its viewers to file comment with the FCC:

Brendan Carr won’t actually read the comments. And the comment period will be flooded with all sorts of phony bullshit in support of Brendan Carr, because that’s simply how these gentlemen operate. But having public comments in opposition on the permanent record still matters. And it’s good to see ABC indicating that it plans to actually fight Carr instead of rolling over and baring its tummy.

It certainly can afford it. And it certainly has support. And as Trump’s health and political influence wanes, hopefully you’ll slowly start to see more corporations exhibiting something vaguely resembling courage.

In case you’re interested, there are technically two different FCC proceedings involved in Brendan Carr’s censorship charade.

One, The View Inquiry (Docket No. 26-124) had open comments until June 22; and reply comments due by July 6. You can still file an express comment on this proceeding here.

Two, the Broadcast License Renewal Challenge (Docket No. 26-131) focuses on the forced early renewal battle for ABC’s eight owned local affiliate stations. Petitions for this docket are due June 29, ABC’s oppositions are due July 29, and final replies are slated for August 5, 2026.

The Trump Organization still hasn’t shipped their promised Trump “made in America” phone to most of the customers who laid down a $100 deposit a year ago. But they did recently start to ship early review copies to a handful of outlets and preferred cultists. What outlets generally found wasn’t surprising: it’s a pretty substandard smartphone pre-loaded with Trump propaganda apps like Truth Social.

But reporters working with iFixit have also confirmed something that was speculated for a while. Namely that the phone is just a lazy rebrand of the two-year old Taiwanese-made HTC U24 Pro with a garish coat of yellow paint (here’s a non-paywalled iFixit exploration):

“The Trump Mobile T1 phone, originally marketed as “Made in the USA,” is nearly identical to the two-year-old HTC U24 Pro, a phone made by the Taiwanese company HTC using Chinese parts, according to a technical analysis the repair-guide and parts company iFixit conducted in partnership with NBC News.”

As is pretty typical for Trump business ventures, this entire affair is the laziest slop imaginable.

Trump Mobile launched last year with a lot of fanfare. But as we noted when it was unveiled last year, even calling it a mobile company was being generous: the company is really just a lazy rebrand of an existing MAGA-friendly MVNO provider, Patriot Mobile, which itself just resells T-Mobile service (Patriot just got caught up in an interesting influencer marketing dust up, if you missed it).

A cornerstone of the venture was a “made in America” “gold” “Trump phone” named the T1 that was supposed to launch last August. Though shortly after launch the Trump Organization eliminated all the “made in America” claims, shifting to promises that it was “made with American values in mind.”

If by “American values” we mean lazy, poorly secured slop preloaded with spyware and propaganda and slathered with half-assed branding logos and ugly paint then dramatically marked up to exploit suckers, then sure, okay.

The knockoff phone with Chinese internals of course arrives as the Trump FCC pretends to be cracking down on Chinese gear in hardware, routers, and other electronics. It’s also worth noting that the HTC U24 Pro was priced $469.99 retail when it launched two years ago. The Trump Mobile T1 is selling for $500, and they’ve hinted that the price could be going up.

It’s also worth pointing out that before the Trump Organization could even get phones into peoples’ hands, they suffered a significant data breach. A breach that not only revealed customer names, email addresses, mailing addresses, cell numbers, and order identifiers, but also that they’d likely only sold around 30,000 phones, a far cry from the 600,000 they had claimed.

The curious part is that it really shouldn’t have taken even the Trump Organization this long to get a sloppy rebrand into consumers’ hands. It’s not like they even had to manufacture new phones at meaningful volume. Maybe their plans were upended by ignorant tariffs and unnecessary wars? Anyway, it’s just hard to really overstate how very much on brand this all has been.

For a long time organizations like the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) have noted how Elon Musk’s xAI data center in Memphis disproportionately pollutes the air in minority neighborhoods. A joint lawsuit by SELC, Earthjustice, and the NAACP filed last April argued that Musk and friends didn’t even bother to get the necessary permits to run the turbines at its xAI’s Colossus 2 data center.

The lawsuit also notes how these 27 turbines (which has ballooned to 57 turbines since the lawsuit was filed) belch all manner of contaminants, including formaldehyde, into minority neighborhoods already seeing some of the highest asthma rates in the country, violating the Clean Air Act.

But this being Elon Musk, he apparently has been able to leverage the presidency he helped purchase to get those pesky Memphis minorities off of his back. In a filing this week obtained by Wired, the DOJ is trying to claim the lawsuit can’t proceed because xAI and Grok are highly tethered to the country’s national security efforts:

“In a filing, the agency sided with Elon Musk’s company, saying attempts to stop xAI from running the natural gas turbines “threatens American national, economic, and energy security by seeking to shut off the power supply for artificial-intelligence innovation that supports the Department of War’s military operations.”

Musk and his friends at the DOJ are asking the courts to dismiss the lawsuit. In May, the NAACP filed a request for a preliminary injunction, stating that the climbing rates of environmental pollution “increases risks of asthma attacks and heart disease” in communities that already face significant pollution thanks to regulatory capture and systemic racism.

Over on Elon Musk’s right wing propaganda website, Marc Andreessen pretended to not understand why a civil rights group might be upset that unregulated data centers are pumping pollution into minority Memphis neighborhoods:

It’s worth noting that when Musk built the Colossus 2 data center near Memphis, he promised that the facility would largely re-use water via a next-generation water-recycling plant as to not strain the area water supply. But curiously, construction of that part of the project has stalled out completely. Musk says the company needs to focus on finishing their other data center in the region, then will finish construction. But, well, it’s Musk. The guy always saying we’re *this close* to settling Mars.

Meanwhile, you’ve got a lot of rich assholes (and the politicians who love them) increasingly trying to falsely claim that all of the bubbling over animosity at AI is an inauthentic Chinese “psy-op.” And you’ve got CEOs getting booed at their commencement speeches wondering why AI animosity is so white hot.

The youth movement has tethered AI to the country’s growing fascist, racist corruption and income inequality (and the tech sector that openly embraced it at almost every turn), and it’s going to take a lot more than sloppy CBS propaganda and new software updates to shift the perception. I’m not sure the tech sector truly groks what their enthusiastic support of Trumpism will ultimately reap them.

This is the future we’ve built in a country too corrupt to have functional regulatory oversight of obscenely rich men and corporate power. Without a meaningful ethical renaissance and profound political sea change, it only gets uglier and more violent from here.

CNN brass have been waiting to get federal approval of their problematic $111 billion merger with Paramount. As we’ve detailed exhaustively, the high debt load from the CBS/Paramount and Warner Brothers merges is going to result in mass layoffs, higher consumer prices, and sagging quality control at the resulting company. It’s what always happens. It’s not really a debate.

Curiously, while CNN has been waiting for regulatory approval, their resident fact checker, Daniel Dale, appears to have curiously disappeared from the company’s cable TV schedule:

“In late February, Daniel Dale appeared on CNN to dismantle the more than 20 false or misleading claims that he identified during Donald Trump’s State of the Union address…But that appearance, more than three months ago, marked the last time Dale was seen on CNN’s air for his trademark rapid-fire fact checks.”

Shortly after the Status story popped up, Dale just as curiously appeared on air again. Along with a statement of denial from CNN that they’d ever try to court regulatory favoritism by dampening their journalism:

“There is no truth to this. Daniel is a multiplatform reporter whose regular fact checks of the President are an important part of CNN’s political coverage. Like all CNN reporters, his on-air appearances are determined by the news of the day — any suggestion otherwise is false.”

Maybe that’s true. Maybe it’s not. Nothing we’ve seen from major corporate media outlets during Trump’s tenure should indicate they’re deserving of any benefit of the doubt. Last Friday the Trump DOJ approved the deal, falsely claiming it will be great for competition and labor. CNN brass almost certainly already knew approval was coming before they put Dale back on the air.

One thing of note. There’s been a lot of hushed reverential commentary about what’s potentially happening to CBS and CNN. As if these corporate journalism outlets hadn’t been steadily degraded for years by corporate ownership. As if CNN and CBS didn’t go well out of their way to hire more lying on-air authoritarians as a direct act of appeasement to Trumpism even before the mergers.

That said terrible U.S. media can always get worse; and recall the reporting from last fall that Larry Ellison personally met with Trump to carve out which CNN analysts they’d have fired post-acquisition.

Like the CBS Ellison acquisition (where we saw Skydance execs making management decisions before the ink was dry), not yet having a signed deal won’t prevent companies like this — in a country with no working regulators — from getting a running head start on their ambitious censorship plans.