Anderson Cooper decides to walk away from broadcast TV’s most prestigious news show, 60 Minutes. Stephen Colbert takes his interview with a rising Democratic politician to YouTube instead of his own late-night show. The CBS Evening News anchor presents a misleading version of the network’s own exclusive reporting on Ice arrests. And a news producer writes a farewell note to her CBS News colleagues blaming the loss of editorial independence.
If you connect the dots, the picture of what’s happening at CBS becomes all too clear. That picture comes into even sharper focus once you recall an underlying factor: the network’s parent company is trying to get a big commercial deal done and needs the help of the Trump administration to bring it over the finish line.
“Media capture” is the name that University of Pennsylvania scholar Victor Pickard gives to what we’re seeing unfold before our eyes.
What’s happening at CBS and elsewhere “isn’t a singular breakdown”, Pickard writes in a new analysis.
It’s a whole cascade of layers – media ownership, control and market structure – that “endanger our information and communication systems, our First Amendment freedoms, and our democracy”.
In the CBS situation, the immediate motivation is easy to understand. The network’s parent company, Paramount Skydance, wants to buy Warner Brothers Discovery, which also owns CNN – one of Donald Trump’s favorite punching bags and a news organization he would love to see take the same rightward turn as CBS.




Top US trade negotiator Jamieson Greer insisted on Sunday that the Trump administration was set to persist with its tariffs policy, two days after the supreme court declared many of Donald Trump’s tariffs illegal.
In 1850, Andrew Benjamin Tarbutton enslaved 25 people in central Georgia. A year later, he purchased more than a dozen additional people off the docks in Savannah and marched them toward his home, setting the foundation for his family’s generational wealth.
The final day of competition at the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Olympics has concluded and the Games have reached their end.
In Sikonga village, Kisii County, a mother's wails fill the house. Dennis Bagaka Ombwori, 39, the second-born son of John and Esther Ombwori, is the latest Kenyan confirmed dead in the Russia–Ukraine war.
Arab and Islamic countries jointly condemned remarks by the US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, who suggested Israel had a biblical right to a vast swath of the Middle East.





























