Bill Owens, a “top producer” at “60 Minutes” has resigned, saying that his independence is being threatened by ownership.
‘Paramount’s controlling shareholder, Shari Redstone, is eager to secure the Trump administration’s approval for a multibillion-dollar sale of her company to Skydance, a company run by the son of the tech billionaire Larry Ellison. She has expressed a desire to settle Mr. Trump’s case, which stems from what the president has called a deceptively edited interview in October with Vice President Kamala Harris that aired on 60 Minutes.
‘Legal experts have dismissed that suit as baseless and far-fetched…’
From NYTimes. 60 Minutes has long been one of the finest programs on TV, a wonderful monument of excellent, first-class, heavily-researched, accountable journalism. They do something foreign to Trump-World called “fact-checking”. Of course Trump would go after it. Using manipulation of the FTC to try to strong-arm Paramount into coercively censoring a popular news program is beyond impeachable. He is making similar threats to PBS and NPR.
It’s vulgar, and distasteful, and despicable. And yes, it is incipient authoritarianism.
The surest sign of weakness in any argument is when it resorts to attacking dissent because it doesn’t have faith in the credibility of it’s own “truth”.