Not now, media merger from hell
As Trump launches us into Israel's war on Iran and plots to rig the midterms, this is the worst possible time for his allies to capture CNN and HBO.
Trump declared war on Iran—rather, that he’s joining Israel’s war on Iran—from his country club in Florida in the middle of the night on Saturday, once again without getting the permission of Congress. In a video posted to social media, he offered various justifications for these sudden attacks that don’t really add up, including that Iran was developing nuclear weapons1 and the recent shootings of Iranian protesters. “When we are finished, take over your government,” Trump said, addressing Iranians. “It will be yours to take.” As for how they should go about doing that, Trump wrote that police and revolutionary guard forces should “peacefully merge with the Iranian Patriots, and work together as a unit to bring back the Country to the Greatness it deserves,” as if it’s not delusional to suggest that the protesters will just hold hands and form a new peaceful government with the same guards who have been massacring them by the thousands.
Trump then spent the rest of the night offering clues as to what was really on his mind as he pretended to care about the freedom of the Iranian people, posting on Truth Social at 4 am that Iran had helped Biden beat him in 2020. “Iran tried to interfere in 2020, 2024 elections to stop Trump, and now faces renewed war with United States,” he wrote with a link to a far-right media site. (He made this same debunked claim about Venezuela after capturing Maduro in January.) A few minutes later—still in the wee hours of the morning and shortly after declaring war—he posted another article unrelated to Iran with the headline, “As Georgia prosecutor pursued Trump, Biden DOJ ‘invited’ her to get lucrative grant, memos show.”
It’s unsurprising that Trump had elections on his mind as he lobbed bombs into yet another country—we already know that he considers attacking Iran to be one obvious tool in a flailing president’s toolbox that they can use to cling to power, because he predicted for years that Obama would do the same.
By the time most of the country had woken up to the news that we are in a new endless Middle East war, the US-Israel missile campaign had already obliterated an elementary school for girls in Iran, killing an estimated 165 people, mostly children, and injuring 96 more. By today, three US troops had been killed in Iran’s retaliatory attacks, and Trump posted a new video announcement declaring that “there will be more before it ends.” And while Iranians are obviously celebrating the death of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, Trump’s own intelligence has warned him that Khamenei is likely to be replaced by hardliners from the country’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Needless to say, it’s critical right now that we have clear-eyed, well-funded, independent reporting on this war that only 21% of Americans support, as well on the motivations of the man who started it. The timing of these attacks strongly suggests that Trump is using war not only as a pretext to declare a national emergency that could help him seize control of the midterms, but also to change the conversation away from the Epstein files and the recent revelation that the Justice Department withheld documents related to the testimony of a minor who accused him of sexual assault. Trump sees attacking Iran as an escape hatch from his domestic problems, and the media shouldn’t accept his framing on any of this.
Unfortunately, the right-wing capture of legacy news outlets continues at an alarming pace. Yesterday Bari Weiss, who was recently appointed editor-in-chief of CBS News after Trump ally Larry Ellison bought it, tweeted a fire emoji in support of the US-Israel attacks on Iran—or specifically, in support of an Iranian activist’s clapback against Zohran Mamdani’s criticism of the war, which amounts to the same thing.
The outlet Weiss ran before she took over CBS, the Free Press, is openly, aggressively anti-Mamdani and pro-Israel, so we can expect CBS now to have the same tilt. Anderson Cooper recently quit his job at 60 Minutes because Weiss was stalling a piece he’d been working on about the “white genocide” Trump claims is happening in South Africa. (CBS obviously axed Stephen Colbert’s show straight away.)
Meanwhile, Bezos’ Washington Post has conveniently gutted its foreign desk and laid off its entire Middle East bureau just weeks before we started a new war there. And Paramount Skydance, the same company that bought and ruined CBS, is about to gobble up Warner Bros. in a nightmare media merger that would include CNN and HBO. That means Trump ally David Ellison would have the power to destroy CNN’s newsrooms and put Bari Weiss in charge of that whole enterprise too, or someone equally fascism-friendly. The last remaining non-state cable news would be MSNOW. And regardless of whether you personally watch CNN or find yourself ideologically aligned with its anchors, they are one of the last well-funded newsrooms willing to pay for on-the-ground war correspondents, and trust that we would desperately miss the stories that they break.
The one thing standing in the way of this merger from hell is California’s attorney general Rob Bonta, who has promised to challenge it and, if he can’t block it entirely, at least put sand in its gears so it takes as long as possible for the deal to go through. Perhaps he can drag it out til the fall, so that Trump and his allies don’t control nearly all forms of media, entertainment, and communications in this country for too long ahead of an election that will decide whether we have still a representative democracy or not going forward.
In the meantime, everybody needs to be subscribing to independent media and emotionally preparing for our breakups with HBO Max.
He claimed last summer after attacking Iran that he had “obliterated” its nuclear program, so he was either lying then or is now
Bravo, yet again.