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GELFAND’S WORLD - This was the news organization that battled Hitler and covered the rise and fall of Richard Nixon through the Watergate investigation. Edward R. Murrow spoke from London as it dug out from German bombs each morning. Walter Cronkite represented integrity and accuracy as he delivered the news of John Kennedy's death and reported from Viet Nam. CBS reported on the space program and the moon landings. In later years it reported on more recent presidents, wars, and epidemics. In an even more recent era, Stephen Colbert reported on Donald Trump.
Edward R. Murrow, after having survived the Blitz and ridden on allied aircraft over the flak-filled skies of Germany, returned to eventually battle Senator Joe McCarthy over his red-baiting and took on the powerful tobacco industry.
But this is an era in which the old television networks have become objects to be owned and traded by even larger corporations, and with that, they have gradually lost both their independence and whatever sense of honorable courage they previously represented.
CBS news once had our trust and our respect. Both of these attributes died a hard death over the past week. The story involves extortion and bribery, but it also involves the loss of an institutional sense of pride and principle that seemed to exist at one time and obviously has been jettisoned.
Let's look at the story. Back in the presidential campaign, the CBS program 60 Minutes interviewed candidate Kamala Harris. It is of note that Donald Trump was offered the chance to be interviewed, but ultimately declined. During the interview, Harris was asked about our national relationship with Israel and Netanyahu. Some of that interview was shown as a teaser on Face the Nation, basically as a promo to gain 60 minutes viewers. When 60 Minutes ran, CBS had used a different clip of the Harris answer or had done some additional editing.
You can read a summary from USA Today here. It includes links to the two different Harris responses. Now what's of interest here is that Donald Trump then chose to file a lawsuit against CBS, apparently on the theory that CBS somehow owed him a duty to edit the tape in a particular way, or perhaps was obligated to show every second of every take. This is of course nonsense. Editing happens every day for every television story. It's how television gets delivered to the public.
But Trump filed a lawsuit.
Just to make clear how absurd this lawsuit was, let's refer to the conservative/libertarian periodical Reason. You can read their take here. Reason makes it simple, referring to Trump's "disregard for freedom of the press." That is, of course, nothing new. Trump has been going after newspapers and journalists for his entire time in office. He dusts off the old term "fake news" for any story which displeases him.
But then it got ugly, not because of the lawsuit but because CBS has a financial interest in being extorted and paying bribery. As everyone has heard by now, CBS is part of a corporate bloc that is looking to carry out a merger. That merger is worth a lot of money to the seller.
And now the problem. The U.S. government has some say over corporate mergers under the antitrust laws. That CBS merger is therefore at some risk.
But the President of the United States -- the person entrusted with faithfully enforcing the laws -- is not only the highest official having say over antitrust enforcement, he is also a personal litigant against the corporation that seeks the merger. This is a conflict of interest under any possible interpretation. In a different era under a different presidency, we would expect the president to recuse himself from the antitrust action or to drop the lawsuit. He could even do both, but he is duty bound to do at least one.
But that's not how things work in this government. Everyone expects Trump to act in a corrupt way, at least when it comes to conflicts of interest. He collects money from the government for housing the Secret Service at Mar a Lago and he got large rental fees from foreign governments for the use of his hotel during his first term.
In the Trump world, that lawsuit against CBS was a quasi-legal approach to negotiating for a cash payment. Trump wasn't in a position to demand money in order to allow the merger, but CBS and Trump think that they can engage in a $16 million payment that is ostensibly to settle that lawsuit.
It is easy enough to hold the opinion that this is something else besides a legitimate legal settlement -- it is extortion and bribery. The Writers Guild makes clear that there is great concern among those who engage in free expression.
It's interesting that the news media haven't been flogging the conflict of interest element of the story, but they certainly have seen through the nonsense of the lawsuit itself. And since the lawsuit is so totally bogus, they have figured out that the $16 million payment is but a bribe paid in response to the extortion that the lawsuit was.
Trump's behavior is clearly an impeachable offense. What other opinion could one hold when considering these items:
A phony lawsuit
A corporate desire for a favor from the government with regard to its merger
A $16 million offer in settlement
OK, so we've got extortion and bribery. That's bad enough, but the fault falls mainly on the part of Trump. He got the ball rolling with the lawsuit and has failed to make clear that he expects fair dealing on the part of the government in the way it treats the merger.
But then there is the rest of the story, and this is where CBS goes from being merely a victim to joining in the villainy.
As most everyone knows by now, CBS announced that it is cancelling the Stephen Colbert show. OK -- technically it's called The Late Show With Stephen Colbert -- but everyone thinks of it as "Colbert." He has been the foremost critic of Trump in the working entertainment industry. He has been the bone in Trump's throat and the thorn in his paw, and represented the substance and symbol of freedom of expression in the American media. It's not that there aren't hundreds of other critics, many more learned and better published, but Colbert made resistance to Trump's overreaching into a part of the popular culture.
So now CBS has caved to Trump by firing Colbert. They use slightly different wording, claiming that the decision is purely financial. You can fill in your own wording about selling the Brooklyn Bridge if you like -- nobody believes the CBS story for a minute. For one thing, if the decision really had been financial, CBS and Colbert himself would have handled it a lot differently, and the timing would have been different.
So say goodbye to the memory of Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, and so many others. So long to the organization that stood up to rapacious tobacco interests, the war machine, and the White House plumbers under Nixon's crew. There was a long moment in time when CBS and the Washington Post presented the Watergate scandal to the American people. All we've got left is this epitaph.
Addendum
Monday morning was the time that a new Tesla Restaurant was supposed to be opening in Hollywood. One local television station was out on the street interviewing a couple of dozen people who had been waiting around since before sunrise for the grand event. As of this writing, we are still waiting, but the promise of a Tesla eatery writes its own jokes. Perhaps we can look forward to steak and eggs cooked over flaming lithium ion batteries. And will the logo of the newly promised chain be a Nazi salute?
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
