Is Trump AFRAID of the Media?

Has Donald Trump fundamentally changed the relationship between the White House and the American media?

In this episode of SOS America, Charles Feldman is joined by Sharon Waxman, founder and editor of The Wrap, for an in-depth discussion about how journalism has evolved during the Trump era—and whether those changes are permanent.

They explore why news organisations appear to cover Donald Trump differently than any previous president, whether journalists have become more confrontational, and if some members of the media are genuinely intimidated by Trump and his influence.

The conversation also tackles one of the biggest challenges facing modern journalism: the rise of social media as a primary news source. With nothing more than a smartphone and an internet connection, anyone can present themselves as a journalist, publish breaking news, and shape public opinion often without any formal training or editorial oversight.
Is social media exposing the truth the traditional media missed... or creating entirely new narratives that millions accept as fact?

In this episode:
- Has Donald Trump permanently changed political journalism?
- Why does the media treat Trump differently?
- Are journalists afraid of Trump?
- Can anyone with a phone now be considered a journalist?
- Is traditional journalism losing credibility?
- How social media is reshaping news and public trust.
- Are facts becoming less important than narratives?

Subscribe for more conversations examining American politics, media, culture and the issues shaping today's world.

#DonaldTrump #Journalism #Media #Politics #News #SocialMedia #SOSAmerica #CharlesFeldman #SharonWaxman #USPolitics

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

One way of looking at how the Trump administration deals with media is almost from a narrative and entertainment uh perspective. Doings of the White House and the daily um activities of Trump are a running storyline, daily soap opera. And when the attention veers away from that, he quickly does something that tries to pull the focus back to him. And it's a kind of addiction, it seems to me, on Trump's part, this need for attention.

SPEAKER_00 0:52

Hi, welcome to another edition of SOS America. I'm Charles Feldman. Thanks for being with us again for those of you who have been regularly, I hope, watching and or listening. You know that for the past year, every other week, we talk to various experts, attorneys, physicians, scholars, uh, regular people, too. Yeah, there are regular people out there. And we try to answer the question what is going on at this particular point in time here in the United States? And I've mentioned this a number of times on this podcast that initially the idea was to try to be an explainer to people outside the US. But as it turns out, we've ended up being an explainer to people living here in the U.S. So I don't know what that says in terms of in terms of a commentary, but there you have it. So today I'm very pleased to uh welcome to SOS America a very special uh guest. Uh she is a very well-known and very well respected uh award-winning journalist, Sharon Waxman. She is an author, she is a journalist, she is a blogger. She was, at one point in her career, she was a correspondent uh with Reuters, the one thing I think that I actually share with her. Uh the Washington Post, uh, she's also uh been affiliated, of course, with the New York Times. And then in 2009, she founded uh The Rap, which is a, you know, it's described as a Hollywood and media business news uh site. I think it's more than that, actually. Uh, and it has become in the past few years, and I know a lot of people say this, you know, oh, it's a must-read. This actually is a must-read. Uh, I know very few people in uh the industry, and when I say the industry, the the news biz, uh, and also the entertainment business, of course, who don't at some point uh take at least a glance, and more often than that, more than a glance, at the wrap. So I am very, very pleased to have Sharon Waxman with us. Sharon, thank you very much.

SPEAKER_01 2:59

Well, thank you for that introduction. That was so kind. We can end right there.

SPEAKER_00 3:04

Thank you, Sharon, very much. And in our next episode.

SPEAKER_01 3:07

See you soon.

SPEAKER_00 3:08

Yeah. Let me let me start off uh because what we want to do in this episode is really talk about uh the Trump administration and what that has done, is doing to media in this country. And and I always hesitate to say that as simplistically as that, because as you know, uh it encompasses so many different things, uh, you know, from newspapers to radio to television to streaming, you you name it. So uh it's not a monolithic thing, and I suspect that as we go along, what we're going to discover, or our viewers will discover, is that perhaps the Trump administration has a somewhat different relationship with different elements of the media. So that being said, um in the broader context, has there been a kind of fundamental change in the way uh the this particular presidential administration deals with the media? And if so, how?

SPEAKER_01 4:14

Yes, great question and a very big topic and a very important one. So one way of looking at how the Trump administration deals with media is almost from a narrative and entertainment uh perspective. And that's how I really kind of experienced his first term, and in a lot of ways it's how I'm experiencing his second term, which is that the the doings of the White House and the daily um activities of Trump are a running storyline daily soap opera that requires the country's full attention at all times. And when the attention veers away from that, he quickly does something that tries to pull the focus back to him. And it's a kind of addiction, it seems to me, on Trump's part, this need for attention, this need for constant um interaction with, validation by, um, and praise from the media writ large. Of course, by that I sort of mean the news organizations that he has on in his office and always has his whole life, and including the outlets that he feels are uh against him, and that he desperately craves validation from, so say the New York Times, or if it were to be 60 Minutes and CBS News, or um really any major respected news organization. So that's kind of the lens, the broader lens of how I look at Trump as opposed to there is which is another way of framing it. There's a sinister plot underway by the government to undermine free expression and news organizations and their ability to freely report on uh government and hold them accountable. I feel like that's true too, but it's not the main driver and the main impetus. I feel like the main impetus is just this like deep maw of need to be the focus of attention and the hero or the protagonist of the national story at all times.

SPEAKER_00 6:58

But of course it takes it takes two, as I say, to tango. And and my question, I guess, on following what you just said, is why can't let's take television, for example, let's take you know CNN Fox uh MS Now, uh right, or M Now, whatever it is, uh why can't they just turn him off? And and I'll tell you why I I ask that. I remember years ago when I first started when I was at CNN, uh, and this was the very early days, when CNN was experimenting with how long do we cover things live, because up until CNN, that really wasn't the case. You would send reporters, you know this, you would go to a news conference, even the president's news conference. Uh very rarely was it covered live on TV unless it was of earth-shattering importance. Reporters would go, they would file something for the evening news, or the newspapers would do something for the next uh edition. But we didn't carry it live. And I remember discussions, this is now going back to the early 80s at CNN. When do we turn it off? Uh when do we say, you know, we've heard enough from the mayor, the governor, the president, uh, we don't need to carry the next 45 minutes. If something important happens, we will report it. Why can't we do that? Why can't we say, you know, uh Donald Trump, this particular president? He's known for making things up, which is an understatement. Uh he's repetitive, he's often incoherent, he's often uh incapable of stringing together words in one coherent English sentence. Why does the press feel that it must stick with him or else what? What's gonna happen if we'll turn him off?

SPEAKER_01 8:48

I think that uh unfortunately requires higher greater judgment uh and and deeper moral character in terms of kind of thinking about what's good for viewers, what's good for the country from a news perspective, then we can rely on news directors to have. Because when the president speaks, you can always argue that it's news. And it and it is and it is news. So if he starts, you know, uh speaking in tongues or starts you know reading from the Bible or writes things on social, um it's easy imagery. It's easy, it's easy footage if you're a 24-7 news organization, as you know because you were at CNN and I never have been. Number one. And number two, you know, we're Biden never spoke to the media. Trump is like, you can't shut him up. He loves to talk to the media, as do his cabinet members all the time. And you just never know what's gonna come out of their mouth, right? I mean, it could be anything. J.D. Vance, any one day can say one thing, Trump will say one thing, the next day he'll say the other thing, and then he may well start speaking in tongues. You just never know. And so that's what I mean about like this sort of um daily soap opera of like an entertainment, almost like you know, reality show of the Trump administration. And I I do think that turning it off requires a discipline that most people in news just do not have. Whether your narrative is now at MSN, look how terrible this administration is, they're just awful, and here you go, here's some footage. And let me let me um frame that in a bunch of commentary that explains to you why it's so terrible, or whether it's Fox who's like, we love this president, look how great he is for America. Let's ignore all the Jeffrey Epstein stuff that's going on and pretend like that's not happening, but here's a great thing, here's you know, JD Vance playing basketball or something. I like, I don't know. But it's it is um, and and one of the things that we have to actually, you know, point out is that CNN, for example, which is more or less the middle of the road uh you know 24-7 news operation, and it's tried to lean, it was leaning more to the left as like um a strategic choice in terms of ratings, and then uh, you know, this kind of loggerheads with the president all the time. You know, we have to also remind your audience that it was CNN in some ways that helped elect uh Donald Trump the first time by doing exactly what you just mentioned before, which was like running end-to-end his live rallies. They weren't press conferences, they were rallies. So it was just like pure, you know, political propaganda, essentially, um, which was preceded by the same person who ran CNN Jeff Zucker, who used to run NBC, putting making a household name of Donald Trump, you know, not intentionally, but he had um, you know, he had the the uh The Apprentice as his show on on NBC. And so that's how Donald Trump kind of became had enough name recognition to actually run for president in the middle of the country where people really didn't know him except for his television show. So anyway, uh all that to say that people have picked their lanes and this and and CNN no longer, to my great dismay, doesn't actually report on anything else that's happening around the world except when it's blowing up. So we're bombing Tehran, or you know, there's a tanker that's being in, you know, boarded somewhere in the greatest information. And you almost don't see any other news that is happening in this country. Like you see the flashpoint. Okay, there's ICE officers that are shot Rene Good, it, you know, that kind of thing. But if it doesn't, if it doesn't rise to that level, they're very comfortable, like MSN, just staying close to Washington, you know, putting the president and his cronies on television and occasionally the opposition, you don't get anything like a balanced view of what's happening from a news perspective in the country. And I'm really struck by that because I just uh this week was a judge in um uh the the Lobe Awards are the bit they happen to be business journalism awards, and it the entries were uh I was judging this year uh long form video, so it's kind of similar to what you might see on television. It was like, you know, the Bloombergs and the Insiders, all the entries, and it was so interesting because it was a window into all of these topics that I never ever see on MSN now, whether that was um, you know, family, the the state of of farmers across America, whether it was um a story about how a small town was being affected by ice detention centers, whether it was uh a story about um corruption in oil contracts in Iraq, which was a big investigative piece. And it wasn't this wasn't the investigative category, actually, it was just long-form video. And it it really brought home to me how much we're not seeing in our news diet, how much we're not eating, and how much we're not consuming in our news diet, because the news outlets are just happy to go to the lowest common denominator, the easiest and the most entertaining from a ratings perspective. I say entertaining in quotes, as opposed to what is important and meaningful and what is actually telling the American public about what is what are the important issues and how they're impacting the citizens of the country that you know or and their viewers.

SPEAKER_00 14:51

I don't see that no, and but I'll tell you why uh you don't see that. Uh having at one point been on the inside there, not in a good number of years to be fair, but I still know a lot of people who are there. And and a large part of that is because even though CNN, and I don't want to just single them out because Fox has the same issue, and so does uh MSN, um, you know, they they decided that rather than have uh a lot of reporters, which they do, but not nearly as many as they once did, uh filing individual reports, that they made the calculated decision for ratings that the audience wants to hear, you know, allegedly informed people give opinions of the news rather than the news. Uh that people nowadays will get the news from you know their their phones, so they don't need to give them what's actually happening, they need to comment on what is happening. And you know, for a while that bet paid off. It it did help initially, uh, CNN in particular, uh, climb a bit in the ratings. But I would argue that long-term the bet didn't pay off because the ratings cratered.

SPEAKER_01 16:06

I think it's very uh perilous for a democracy. And it's interesting because uh Barry Weiss, who's taken over CBS since October of last year and has done an absolutely terrible job of managing that massive news legacy and the staff, uh, as she has tried to turn to pivot it to the right, she's also done a lot of damage just with um incompetence, in my opinion, and lack of experience, which is not to be surprising, which shouldn't surprise anybody because she had no experience in telling running either in managing a major staff of hundreds and if not thousands of people, but also kind of uh in television broadcast news.

SPEAKER_00 16:47

So um but I'm gonna jump in here because she jumped ahead a little bit. I was going to get to Barry Weiss, but since you did, uh for somebody watching or listening to this who may be scratching their heads going, who the hell is Barry Weiss? Can you give a very brief kind of uh uh, you know, basically Barry Weiss 1.1. Uh who is Barry Weiss and why is she there?

SPEAKER_01 17:11

Yeah. So Barry Weiss is now the editor-in-chief of CBS News, a role that was created for her. So there never had been that job before, which is also a very newspaper-y type job. Um she had been an opinion columnist for the New York Times, uh, right of center, very pro-Israel, and she got frustrated what she felt with what she felt was a very woke um anti-Israel and woke uh sort of like knee-jerk woke um environment at the New York Times opinion page. Again, it's opinion journalism. She was a columnist on the opinion page, not a news gatherer, which is another whole side of the operation. And she called it out and she quit. And she she accused the New York Times of not being willing to publish um ideas that were that were opposed to a certain rigid liberal ideological groupthink. And she went off and she started her own publication called The Free Press, which is in its way kind of like think of like the New Republic, something like that. It's a think magazine, uh, but digital online, where she gathered a whole lot of people who were more in the independent thinking, right of center, maybe libertarian, and generally pro-Israel for whatever that's worth, that however much that topic dominates the the or colors conversations around news, which it turns out quite a bit these days. And um David Ellison, who became the owner of Paramount, which he and his father bought from the Redstone family last a year, a year and a half ago, I guess. Yeah. Um they loved the free press. They thought it was a breath of fresh air, it was a break with kind of the liberal um bias, as they as they see it, in that is sort of inherent in news media. We can talk about the liberal bias if you want to. That's an endless conversation, though. And um they bought her the free press for an insane amount of money, $150 million after maybe, you know, it only existed for a couple of years, kept the free press now as part of the Paramount CBS corporate ownership, and installed Barry Weiss as the uh editor-in-chief of CBS News, which means she's in charge of the evening broadcast, CBS Sunday morning, 60 minutes, and she has set out to make a significant sort of execute her vision of what and fixing what she sees as the problems in the liberal bias that's embedded in media. Now, I think nobody would accuse CBS News of being a liberal institution, not at all like, say, MSNBC or MS Now. That is absolutely to the left of center or Democracy Now with Amy Goodman. Everybody knows that that is decidedly progressive. CBS News always comes from addition from a tradition, as your listeners undoubtedly know of Walter Cronkite of 60 Minutes, and um, you know, uh Don Hewitt, the the legendary executive producer of 60 Minutes, who broke many stories, who have gone toe-to-toe with dictators in in interviews. You know, um Mike Wallace, Morley Safer, all of these, Leslie Stahl, these people who have been there for literally decades. And she has taken an axe. She has literally taken an axe in the past two weeks, three weeks, two 60 Minutes. Anderson Cooper left. She fired Cecilia Vega, who, by the way, was one of the entries that I read yesterday, which was the family farm piece that I'm talking about. 60 Minutes being one of the places that actually does leave Washington and go around the world and find interesting stories. And uh she fired Sharon Alphonse, who's another correspondent, and notably um pushed out the executive producer who'd been there for decades, but also fired his replacement, uh Tanya Simon. So it's a total like, you know, chop off all the heads kind of thing, or else just make it so ex extremely unpleasant that people just say I can't work here anymore after decades. So anyway, I wanted to bring up though originally my point now that I've had this long detour for years.

SPEAKER_00 22:00

It was needed. Go ahead.

SPEAKER_01 22:02

Um, was I wanted to say when she finally gave her manifesto to the staff, it was in January, like three months after she arrived and already made a whole bunch of changes and hired all these sort of right of center people to be commentators or libertarians or other, including this Peter Atia, this longevity guy who turned out to have um some really bad stuff in his background, so he had to quietly step away. That's a story that we broke on the ref, I'm proud to say.

SPEAKER_00 22:28

And I should I should let me just point out to people who may again be scratching their heads when you're referring to Peter Atia. He is a physician, he has a well-known uh podcast. Uh, and the issue you're discussing is he had uh some lengthy communications with Jeffrey Epstein.

unknown 22:46

Right.

SPEAKER_00 22:47

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 22:48

Um, and like admiring uh uh communications of Jeffrey Epstein. And uh it was embarrassing, and he probably had not been vetted fully. And anyway, he quite after after Barry dug in her heels and said, no, we're not cutting him from the lineup, which uh also tells you something about her management style and her willingness to kind of take in in for new information, because I believe it was new information for her before she hired him, and it came out after he was hired and announced. He sort of quietly, you know, crept away. But it took two or three months of her her being of CBS News getting beat up in the press over this. Anyway, what she said at the time was among the many things she said about news ethics and news standards and the glory of journalism and all the things that we all can agree on. She said that what people want is to have the news explained to them. And this goes back to your point about having fewer reporters and more commentators. She they want to understand the world. They want the world to be put in context to them. And I wrote in a column at the time that's absolutely not what the world needs. What the world needs she said, and she said what you just said, which is people can get their news anywhere. They can go on social, they get it here, they get it, they can get it on Facebook. And I feel very strongly uh the opposite, although you won't be surprised because I don't come from opinion journalism. I come from news gathering journalism, and I feel very strongly about the value and the importance of news gathering, is that people actually don't know who to trust for the facts. They don't actually know how they should take a piece of facts, and I think that is a major part of the problem of the confused world we live in today with mixed messages and people speaking past each other because we can't agree on what are the facts. And there are precious few institutions that are left, and the White House sure is not one of them, and the government is definitely not one of them, where you can go and rely on what they said. I believe it because Walter Cronkite said it, or because Mike Wallace reported it and told me, or because whoever is anchoring the CBS Evening News is telling me that that is, then they checked it out and they reported it and they vetted it. I think it's very wrong-headed to say what people need is to put it together in a way that makes it make it make sense. The whole idea of having an educated populace in a democracy is that people can take the facts and figure out for themselves what they make of them and how they want that, how that relates to them and how it shapes their opinions. Don't I I don't think our job as journalists and in media is to hand people a pre-packaged opinion. I think it's to lay out the facts for them and to let them decide. That's clearly not what she feels.

SPEAKER_00 25:49

Well, you know, uh, to go back to a minute to all the ways that people think they were, you know, they're getting the news now. Uh, you know, a lot of that is created by so-called citizen journalists, you know, people who have no real training, uh, but they they put out stuff on TikTok or on X, on Facebook, Instagram, and people take that uh as as as gospel. And uh along those lines, uh I I remember I uh back in 2008, uh I had co-written a book at the time with uh Howard Rosenberg, who in those days was the media critic of the LA Times. And we co-wrote a book together about it was called No Time to Think about the Rapid Speed of Media. And I remember one of the people we interviewed was was Don, because I knew Don Hewitt. Uh, and we said, uh, so Don, what do you think about this whole thing about citizen journalism? And this was really 2008, kind of the beginnings of it. You know, Twitter had just really got going. Uh, a lot of the social media platforms that now we take for granted really didn't exist. So this is just the beginning. And and we quoted him in the book because it was a great quote. He said, you know, I am all for citizen journalists. Just as I am all for citizen neurosurgeons.

SPEAKER_01 27:18

That's great.

SPEAKER_00 27:19

Yeah, it was I it was a it was a great it was a great point. Um but let me backtrack a little bit because we're talking now a lot about CBS. Uh I don't want to pretend, uh, and I think some people either are or maybe have amnesia about history, that CBS has always been this sort of pure, non-ideological uh company or news organization. I mean, you know, you go back to the you know this, going back to the 50s, CBS was actually kind of in the forefront of the black of the McCarthy era blacklists. They got rid of uh writers and performers, and I dare say probably did slant a bit of their news. This is the pre-Walter Conkite uh days. Then you move into the 70s and during the Vietnam War and the Johnson administration, you know, you had the basically the war against the Smothers Brothers comedy hour of all things, uh, which led to that show being yanked off the air. So CBS doesn't actually have a great noble history uh through and through. There are periods when it was the Murrow period, I would agree with you, the Cronkite period. So can you make the argument that now it's just kind of going back to some of its darker periods from the past?

SPEAKER_01 28:41

I think it's not just CBS news. I think all of the news media is going to a darker place, but I don't know. Um I think that, you know, after the 70s, I I would dare say in the post-Watergate era, when the American public learned that they really cannot trust their government. If they didn't know it from the Vietnam War already in the Pentagon Papers, then they certainly should have learned it, or did learn it, from the Nixon administration and what happened in Watergate, and that these two intrepid outsider young journalists uncovered what all the White House correspondents at the time did not, or could not, or would not, were not interested in digging up. And I I would argue that that is, and I'm not like a media historian, but I am somebody who's just very immersed in that. And I myself am among the generation who came out of in the post-Watergate era and said, I want to do that. Like I want to be able to um hold people to account. I want to tell the stories that nobody else is gonna find. And of course, I spent eight years of my career in the Washington Post, and Bob Woodward was the first person I met when I came in as an intern, you know, in all those years ago. And he, of course, was um a legend to me. Uh we learned that as a society, just because the president says it doesn't mean you believe it, you need to check. And I think there that that was a significant difference between the kind of innocence that the American public had pre-Vietnam and this sort of faith that our government was there to serve us and wouldn't do something nefarious, you know, knowingly. And now we're sort of at this complete far end of all of that, which is we don't trust government. We don't trust the media either. We don't trust anybody. More likely, we'll trust this guy who knows nothing who's broadcasting from his basement and telling you that there's a child, a pedophile ring in a pizza store in northwest Washington, and it's run by Hillary Clinton. Can you believe that? Like a complete disconnect from reality, but people will say anything, and some people will believe it because it's not connected to any institutional anything. So that's one thing that I think has fundamentally broken the trust with the American viewers and readers, and it's only the really the more sophisticated people who understand that the major institutions, like say, the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, are really doing their best to tell you the truth of what's going on. They're not really in league, they're not it, there's not like some deep, you know, thing with the deep state where they actually are in cahoots to just tell you some other story. That is actually so more sophisticated viewers understand that. But then on the other hand, you have the this actually sinister layer, which I wrote about saying I wrote a column about this, about that like blew up and was like at the top of Drudge for a couple of days, which basically said Eyes Wide Shut is real. So if you ever saw the Stanley Kubrick movie Eyes Wide Shut, it's basically this really weird uh story that Tom Cruise plays this doctor who uh who is drawn deeper and deeper into this strange, you know, rabbit hole where he discovers this cabal of rich men who have a secret society and are in cahoots with each other to kind of basically keep themselves rich and powerful, and then also having orgies on the time time. So, I mean, the whole Jeffrey Epstein thing, it was like the lesson of that to those who actually look at that story is that that's a real thing. Eyes wide shut, which when I saw it was like, that's so stupid. That's not, that's ridiculous. Like nobody believes that. Actually says, no, no, actually, all the rich and powerful people they cover for each other. They do disgusting things, they do favors for each other, they they get out of jail on the weekend and then they come up with some sweetheart deal because somebody pays somebody money. That's the lesson of Jeffrey Epstein. And so now, today we're speaking on a day. I know this is gonna air in a couple of weeks, but here in Hollywood today, the thing that we're all chasing is the fact that Amazon Studios killed a movie about Sam Altman. They didn't kill it. They're letting it go. They're not like saying nobody will see this movie. They're just saying the movie's done. It's a movie starring Andrew Garfield, uh, it's about Elon Musk, it's about Sam Altman, very powerful people. Amazon did a deal with Open AI a couple of months ago for $50 billion, and today we find out that Amazon is not gonna release the movie, which is done. The movie's shop. So Jeff Bezos, who owns Amazon, clearly has made a decision to favor his business relationship with OpenAI over this movie that his studio has made. Now, they have again, they haven't killed the movie, they're gonna sell it so somebody else can release the movie, but it does show you this kind of top layer of billionaires and powerful people in the Trump orbit who will do what they need to do to stay rich and powerful.

SPEAKER_00 34:37

But doesn't that in this particular case, won't it backfire it? Because once the news gets out that this is what apparently happened, when somebody eventually distributes the film, whether it's good or bad, people will flock to see it, won't they?

SPEAKER_01 34:52

Not necessarily.

SPEAKER_00 34:54

No?

SPEAKER_01 34:55

Not necessarily. If they like a movie, they'll go see it. If they don't like a movie, they won't go see it. Yeah, it's uh it's and and Jeff Bezos has protected his business relationship with OpenAI, just like he protected his relationship with the president when he killed the Washington Post endorsement of Kamala Harris, just like he um, you know, undermined the paper by firing 300 people in January of this year because it's losing money. And uh I don't think that anybody who works at the Washington Post can count on Jeff Bezos standing up for them in any moment of crisis when there's, you know, a question of whether the journalism's gonna stand or whether Jeff Bezos's interests, business interests, or relationships with powerful people are gonna stand. It's pretty clear he's made his choice.

SPEAKER_00 35:52

You know, the uh media consolidation, of course, isn't is not a news story, it's been going on for quite some time. But have we reached a point now where it it's kind of at this pinnacle uh of uh uh it it's just so mind-boggling. You know, we've been talking about uh the Ellison uh family and Paramount and CBS. If Paramount ends up, which it appears it will, right, uh acquiring um Warner Brothers. Uh Warner Brothers Discovery. I always want to call it Warner Brothers Time. Yeah, Warner Brothers. Yeah, but Warner Brothers Discovery. Um you have the Ellison family, uh father and son, between the two of them, controlling at that point CNN, CBS News, and I believe the the dad uh has a fairly hefty uh control or or at least a large number of shares in TikTok, right? So they they they that would cover a lot of bases in terms of demographics, wouldn't it?

SPEAKER_01 36:54

It's a lot of power. It's a it's an insane amount of media power. I still haven't talked to anybody who can who's close enough to the Larry Ellison orbit for me to understand whether he's putting his thumb on the scale anywhere or not. Um I did report recently that um the latest that basically they've been looking for an executive to who would run both CNN and CBS who would not be very wise. So I mean, you know, I I I think that she's she needs help or she needs, you know, to change the way she is thinking about the job because she's quickly destroying the value of the asset that David Ellison bought, and she's already shredded the trust that you that she needs to have with a CBS news operation. And you know, so much of what we do in our society is based on trust, just trusting that, you know, I would show up to do this podcast that because I said I would. There's no contract, but everything we do, and as reporters, Charles, you know this, most of the time you just have to take the word of somebody who tells you something. You don't have time to go do a forensic DP check on somebody saying, Well, I just saw that guy walked in there and he smacked another guy. You just we quote that person because they seem credible, because we have a basic um social contract of trust. And that's completely under assault right now. And we're seeing what happens in a democratic society when that trust is damaged.

SPEAKER_00 38:52

Does this assault uh survive the aftermath of the Trump administration? Because it will come to an end.

SPEAKER_01 39:02

Yes, and not you know, please. Um I do think so, because I think that we uh I that's what I think, but I, you know, I'm a perpetual optimist, and I think that we want to live in a world where we can trust our neighbor, where we can, and then in in a society where things are bigger than just a neighborhood or a street, which is it, you know, modern society, in fact, a global society, we I think we will find a way, find our way to norms and um conventions where we find our way back to trust, and perhaps we discover that we actually need institutions and independent institutions outside of the government. This obviously is very much part of the foundation of a democratic society, having outside watchdogs who can um, you know, have uh a seat at the table or at least ask questions about how our government works, or even about how public companies work, about how organizate big organizations work. So I I do believe we'll get back there. And and part of the proof is that you see all of these individual journalists who've who have left big institutions to start their own um businesses for like or their own kind of channels for like whether that's Jim Acosta or whether that's um Jennifer Rubin from the Washington Post, or and and they're they're not perfect, or there's Don Lemon who left CNN and now has his thing. It's not perfect. I I often feel and I have considered like how I would write this because I think I will. I sometimes I feel like I'm a dying breed, actually. Well, because the rap is very much founded on the principles of news gathering and fact-based reporting. And that's how I personally write. So I've recently, you know, in a strange turn of what I just said, I actually have joined as a contributing writer of the New York Times op-ed page because I think that that it's fun to kind of contribute my sort of accumulated knowledge about Hollywood to a to that audience. And I've been writing there, you know, like once a month for a number for the last period of time. So, but even when I write opinion pieces, they're very much based on factual, fact-based reporting, people I've talked to, my knowledge over a long period of time of like the trends and how how things are moving. So I I just feel like what I'm seeing is especially with a Barry Weiss stating that what we need are not facts, we need people to kind of shape this into a worldview for you so that you can make sense of it because you don't want to make sense of it. We'll do that for you. And also seeing all of these sort of individual people starting their Substacks and their uh YouTube channels, and they're very much focused on giving you a certain flavor of things, a certain framing, a certain opinion. Um, so I yeah, I kind of feel like I'm losing that battle because there's fewer and fewer people, I feel, and certainly fewer people who are vocal about the foundation of what we do as journalists should be gathering facts and presenting those facts to our readers for the benefit of them having greater understanding and making their own decisions. I I never thought that that would be a controversial thing to say, but I I I'm just seeing the trend, and I I do wonder if maybe it'll come back, but that I'm kind of on a shrinking iceberg here.

SPEAKER_00 43:01

Well, I I I hope not. Uh Sharon uh Waxon, uh, you know, I I was remiss uh in the uh intro to you. Uh I should have mentioned that you were a Pulitzer Prize nominee, right?

unknown 43:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 43:15

So in my in my here's an editorial. In my humble opinion, you should have got it then. And maybe you'll get one, I hope, in in the future. The website is the rap. Uh Sharon Waxman is the person. Uh thank you, Sharon, for being with us in this edition of SOS America. As I always say at the end, for those of you who have comments, we uh obviously welcome them. And if you'd like to subscribe, it is absolutely free, so do so. Until the next episode of SOS America. I'm Charles Feldman. Thanks for being with us.