Jethro's Vendetta Against the Media Continues, and the Media Makes Craven Offerings

 

Last month, ABC News paid $15 million to resolve Donald Jethro Trump’s defamation lawsuit against the network and its anchor George Stephanopoulos, who had imprecisely said that the president had been found “liable for rape” in a civil trial in New York. (In fact, Mr. Trump had been found liable for sexual abuse.) If ABC had any balls, it would have fought that, because, after all, the semantics can't hide the fact that the guy's a predator and always has been.

On Wednesday, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, said it had agreed to a $25 million settlement to resolve a lawsuit that Mr. Trump filed after the social networks suspended his accounts in 2021. Meta has the right to suspend anybody's account at any time, but sucking up to the vengeful dictator suddenly seemed more advantageous to Mark Zuckerberg.

Now it's CBS's turn in the barrel. Get this: days before the 2024 election, Trump sued CBS for $10 billion, not over something CBS said about him but rather accusing “60 Minutes” of deceptively editing a  interview with Vice President Kamala Harris. Trump not only wants pitty-pat treatment for himself but also mean treatment for anybody else. Here's the sum context for Trump's claim:

During the “60 Minutes” interview at the center of the lawsuit, which aired in October, the CBS correspondent Bill Whitaker asked Ms. Harris a question about the conflict in the Middle East.

In a preview of the interview that aired on “Face the Nation,” CBS’s Sunday morning show, Ms. Harris was shown giving a different answer than the one she gave in the version of the interview that was broadcast the next evening on “60 Minutes.” (NYTimes)

That's it? As though a network conducting an interview with a prominent figure can't change segments because of time constraints or other (actual freedom of speech) considerations.

"60 Minutes" and CBS are owned by Paramount, where Shari Redstone, the controlling shareholder, strongly supports settling with Trump, slavishly laying down baksheesh to get on his good side, because Shari Redstone stands to clear billions of dollars on the sale of Paramount in a deal with Skydance, an entertainment company backed by the billionaire Larry Ellison and run by his son David.

As our democratic Republic crumbles, looks like it's gonna be big business that greases Trump's path to total control, just as it was in Germany leading up to WWII.