In an appalling but ultimately unsurprising sell-out of free markets and the First Amendment, California Attorney General Rob Bonta (who buckled under pressure from state politicians nervous that Paramount would leave the state) brokered a sweetheart deal with Donald Trump ally David Ellison to merge media giants Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery. The merger puts CBS and CNN under joint ownership of the MAGA-friendly mogul. Despite weak promises to invest in production, the merger will inevitably reduce jobs and media diversity.
That’s not the worst of it for democracy, however. In a feeble effort to maintain the patina of editorial independence for CBS and CNN, the deal envisions an editorial board, which ultimately is nothing more than a creature of its corporate owners.
Freedom of Press Foundation’s statement is precisely on point and worth reading in full:
A Paramount-appointed editorial independence board for CNN and CBS is worthless. The fish rots from the head, and this particular fish is headed by a compromised oligarch with a history of throwing journalists under the bus to advance his business interests.
The editorial board creates the same First Amendment problems it’s supposed to solve — the government meddling in the news. It’s unclear how the attorneys general or courts can constitutionally hold Paramount accountable for the board’s actions or inaction without themselves interfering in content. The attorneys general might be fine with censorship when they’re the ones doing it, but what happens when successors with opposing political views inherit enforcement powers?
And with respect to CBS, the editorial board makes even less sense. Ellison already traded away CBS’ editorial independence in his negotiations with Federal Communications Commission Chair and Trump loyalist Brendan Carr, hiring a career partisan as a “bias ombudsman” and committing in regulatory submissions to truthful and unbiased reporting — practically the same words Bonta uttered at his shameful press conference. To Carr, of course, that means reporting that is uncritical of the administration.
Carr has said that he’d attempt to punish failure to abide by those terms, as he interprets them, as false statements to a federal agency. Bonta says his agreement is enforceable in court. So who will decide whether the news is fair, true, and unbiased? Will it be Carr, the bias ombudsman, the attorneys general, or the editorial board?
Ultimately, the answer is Ellison, and by extension his buddy Donald Trump.
The ramifications of this capitulation to Silicon Valley Tech Bros. for our media and news environment, for consumer prices, and for jobs in these industries will be felt for years.
In the short run, two points deserve mention.
First, California Governor Gavin Newsom, who seems to have supported the deal (and was praised by Ellison!), now will face a huge challenge to a possible presidential run. The last thing Democrats want these days is a slick dealmaker cozy with Silicon Valley who underestimates the threats to the free press.
Second, as we saw with CBS’s ratings bomb for 60 Minutes, the audience is the ultimate arbitrator of media success. If the new Ellison media empire — as CBS News — has been offering MAGA-friendly fare (or even innocuous coverage that proves less threatening to the MAGA movement), audiences very likely will react to the new CNN the way it has to the new CBS. The appetite for hard-hitting, truly independent journalism remains — and will continue to fuel the appetite for new independent journalism, nonprofit outlets, and those few legacy media operations that reject false equivalence and access journalism.
Trump lawlessness — not ‘Noncitizen voting’ — is the problem
After the Supreme Court denied Donald Trump’s desperate effort to destroy mail-in balloting with a scheme to bollix up the Post Office, voters are free to choose whatever voting method suits them (e.g., mail, early in-person, in-person, drop-box). The U.S. election system will continue to be a model of accuracy and security, despite MAGA’s multi-year, deliberate hysteria and conspiracy theories about noncitizen illegal voting, a scam designed to suppress voting or just spread confusion and distrust of the results.
Noncitizen, illegal voting in this country is practically nonexistent, even by the MAGA fear-mongers’ own findings. What is increasingly evident is not only that the Trump team is lying about the problem, but that its own investigators may be breaking the law.
The nonpartisan Center for Election Research and Innovation’s major study confirmed that reports of a vast number of noncitizens voting are flat-out wrong:
Public discussion appears to be largely driven by high-profile claims in a subset of states. Careful search identified no allegations of noncitizen registrants or voters in several states, even after expanding parameters to include relatively minor or unsubstantiated claims. Election officials in these states take steps to protect the integrity of their elections, but claims about noncitizen registrants or voters appear not to be a major part of public dialogue. . . .
Even the largest claims (which are the most likely to be severe overestimates) never allege numbers that are more than roughly one-tenth of one percent of the number of active registered voters in the state. This indicates that existing safeguards are broadly effective, as even high-profile and highly motivated efforts identify only a very small number of records of potential concern. Election officials and other authorities thoroughly investigate these concerns, moving swiftly to address any evidence of improper registration or voting that may be found. These small numbers highlight the overall integrity of the system.
The number of actual incidents is tiny, verging on statistically zero. To great fanfare, for example, a 2025 audit in Michigan of over 7 million active, registered voters in 2024 turned up…16 questionable cases or “roughly 0.00028% of votes cast by Michiganders in the 2024 general election.” Those were flagged (without oppressive rules of the type Trump’s regime would implement) for investigation.
In Ohio, as the Bipartisan Policy Center documented, “Secretary of State Frank LaRose flagged 521 cases of potential noncitizen voting between 2019 and September 2023.” But there was just one single case charge, and that was “due to a combination of accidental registration and a lag in how the Department of Motor Vehicles updates an individual’s citizenship status after naturalization.”
In Nevada, officials’ inflated claim of 278,000 noncitizens registered to vote turned out to be, at most…185 potential noncitizens. The feds have yet to provide hard and fast proof even of those. As the New York Times reported:
Unproven claims that large numbers of noncitizens have voted in elections have been at the core of President Trump’s political message and central to his justification to enact the SAVE America Act, which would require people to show proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections. Democrats and voting-rights advocates say the legislation is aimed at tipping the scales in this year’s midterm elections for Republicans, in part by making it more difficult for some eligible Americans to cast ballots, notably younger voters and people of color, who tend to vote for Democrats.
Even in New Jersey, where a computer glitch at the Motor Vehicle Commission allowed 6600 noncitizens to register, fewer than 400 actually did (out of millions); errors that affect no races.
When actual, specific cases of noncitizen registration appear, they are shockingly few in number, and often unrelated to noncitizen voting of the type Trump claims is rampant in federal elections. For example, the Justice Department trumpeted a case of six (!) persons in a total of three states, but these involved “paying people on Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles to sign petitions using stolen identities of registered voters to qualify initiatives on ballots in California elections.”
In their frenzy to find even such meager numbers of possible issues, the feds — according to a whistleblower complaint — are acting lawlessly. Senator Alex Padilla (D-CA), Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration, last week announced a whistleblower found the Department of Homeland Security was directing officers “to violate state laws as a part of its ‘Unlawful Voter Initiative,’ an effort aimed at substantiating President Trump’s unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud.” Padilla’s press release explained:
Agents assigned to the “Unlawful Voter Initiative” are directed to use personal information from DHS data to lie to access voter information on state voter registration websites, making false attestations that they are a voter or are acting with a voter’s express authorization in order to access sensitive voter data.
And although its data “can conflict with state records and contain both uncertainties and inconsistencies,” officers are told to rely on it “even if officers believe it to be unreliable.” In addition, “Naturalized U.S. citizens are being investigated through this initiative without their knowledge or ability to correct erroneous data, with law enforcement records being generated against them.”
The feds’ scheme has now come under state scrutiny. “The attorney general of Virginia sent a letter on Thursday warning Markwayne Mullin, the homeland security secretary, that the department’s hunt for evidence of election fraud ‘potentially violates several Virginia laws’ and demanding that the investigation cease immediately,” the New York Times reports. All of this stems from the horde of investigators “assigned to an intensive, weekslong hunt for noncitizens among the nation’s registered voters despite an absence of evidence of widespread fraud.”
Meanwhile, Aakash Singh, the top lieutenant to the Deputy Attorney General, warned subordinates that “prosecutors could be fired if they decline to investigate and pursue cases of reported election fraud,” MS NOW reported on Friday. Even when line prosecutors find no evidence to pursue cases, they are told that political stooges appointees could pursue the prosecutions. This is a rogue, reckless operation in search of a problem.
Democrats should make clear that when they win back the majority, they will investigate any allegations of harassment, vindictive prosecution, or other DOJ misconduct. DOJ attorneys must understand that they have an independent obligation to follow the law and DOJ guidelines, their hack bosses’ bullying notwithstanding.
In short, the hysteria about illegal noncitizen voting has always been a red herring. Immigrants who live in terror (especially these days) of arrest, incarceration, and deportation are not about to draw authorities’ attention by trying to vote illegally. The system is remarkably secure, with ample ability to detect any rare cases of mischief.
What we are seeing, however, is the rampant lawlessness of a rogue regime out to manufacture evidence, intimidate voters, and sow confusion. We should, in short, stop obsessing about the non-problem of noncitizen voting, and start cracking down on a regime that will go to extraordinary lengths to suppress voting. We have an anti-democratic election suppression problem, not an illegal noncitizen voting problem.
'California Governor Gavin Newsom, who seems to have supported the deal (and was praised by Ellison!), now will face a huge challenge to a possible presidential run. '
This is just Newsom's latest display of his dedication to the billionaire class and the most recent affirmation of his status as a corporate Democrat, through and through.
Hopefully he will not only 'face a huge challenge to a possible presidential run' - he should not even be considered. He is exactly the wrong kind of Democrat the party and the country need right now.
If/when Dems take control, there must be consequences for the law-breakers in the Trump administration. Congress must make clear that supporting future Trump lawbreaking will result in jail time. First priority, however, must remain setting the stage for continued wins by addressing the issues voters care about most. But a 545 member Congress certainly has enough members to address the full range of things that need doing. That is, if they can stop spending so much time fund raising and traveling home. We need a level of commitment from the people we elect that hasn't been in evidence in quite a while. If they won't do that, throw them out and try again.