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This week’s media kerfuffle perfectly illustrates the era of Trump, complete with his manifest excesses and the relatively quiet deceit of his opponents. The president’s ham-handed response to negative coverage has large media outlets claiming an assault on free speech because he denied them White House privileges unavailable to the average citizen—or even the average journalist. Meanwhile Democratic state attorneys general execute a sly trampling of the First Amendment to ensure that their views will continue to be reflected in news coverage by CBS and CNN. Try to recall the last time there was a media uproar over the possibility that a Democrat would take over a
large media outlet and pull its programming further leftward. When a left-leaning citizen or nonprofit outfit emerges to buy a struggling newspaper, the typical response in media circles is to hail the arrival of a savior of essential local coverage. But when a nonleftist or suspected nonleftist buys a media property, the default setting for Democrats is to erect structures to prevent his new asset from expressing his views. In direct conflict with the First Amendment, Democratic state attorneys general have extracted from Paramount, owner of CBS, a concession to allow the company to complete its purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery, owner of CNN. Interestingly, the Democrats seem to have driven a relatively soft bargain on the big-money aspects of this merger of movie giants. But as for the news operations, under
the terms of a settlement of a lawsuit brought by these attorneys general, there will now be a layer of nonshareholders empowered to interfere with the free speech of shareholders. California Attorney General Rob Bonta calls it “a News Editorial Independence Board to help CNN and CBS maintain editorial independence.” What right does he have to interfere in speech that is not his? The attorneys general who forced this settlement on Paramount are not independent. They are all Democrats. Mr. Bonta claims the agreement protects fact-based, objective journalism but the idea that he and his partisan colleagues are arbiters of straight news is laughable. Word is that the board will consist of experienced, established journalists. One of the reasons so many Americans don’t trust established media is because it is biased so heavily toward the views of Mr. Bonta and his Democratic colleagues who forced this settlement. A board stacked with highly credentialed members of the media establishment almost by definition leans sharply leftward. So the attorneys general have used the power of government to drive a settlement that creates a mechanism to ensure that CBS and CNN will have difficulty moving toward the center. As a CEO suspected of nonleftist sympathies, Paramount’s David Ellison had to go to great lengths to assure media folk that he is not necessarily opposed to their views and that he
would not control what he has every right to control. Mr. Ellison wrote in the New York Times in August about the objections to his proposed merger:
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