CBS / Paramount caved to Trump’s extortion by paying a multi-million dollar ‘bribe’ to settle Trump’s baseless law suit so his corrupt FCC Chief would approve the Paramount-Skydance merger, plus agree to cancel Stephen Colbert, turn CBS into the new FOX NEWS PRO-TRUMP PROPAGANDA outlet and end DEI.

While the ultimate decision to settle involved multiple actors within Paramount, including the board of directors, reports indicate that Shari Redstone, the chair and controlling shareholder of Paramount, was a key proponent of exploring a settlement with Trump. Some executives viewed Trump’s lawsuit as a potential hurdle to completing a proposed sale of the company to Skydance Media, which required the Trump administration’s approval.

Other individuals involved in the settlement process included CBS News executives and legal teams who initially opposed a settlement, citing the First Amendment and the perceived lack of merit in the lawsuit.

In a secret meeting between CBS and CBS News’ new owner (Skydance) and the Trump Administration promised Trump that they would effectively be the new Fox News Propaganda outlet, running Trump approved ads, and putting Trump friendly news and programming on the air.  Trump’s FCC just approved the sale of CBS’ parent to a big Trump supporter’s son. As stated in an article below; “Trump’s FCC Chief Brendan Carr Is Acting More Like a Mob Enforcer Than a Federal Regulator“.

 

 

Brian Stelter explains $16 million settlement between Paramount and Trump

 

Veteran reporter Dan Rather Blasts CBS for Caving to Trump’s extortion so a corporate merger can proceed without being blocked by Trump’s LAWLESS administration

 

Per the photo above which is being shared on Social Media; “Billionaire Trump donor Larry Ellison who believed the 2020 election was stolen from Trump used his own money to buy CBS and install his son as the boss”

 

Larry Ellison Just Quietly Became the Most Powerful Man in America

With the Paramount-Skydance merger approved by the FCC, Larry Ellison just showed the world who is the real shot caller in the White House.

Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, the 80-year-old software tycoon and second-richest man in the world, became the Most Powerful Man in the World

On Thursday evening, the Federal Communications Commission voted to approve Paramount’s $8.4 billion merger with fellow entertainment firm Skydance Media. The controversial, long-awaited deal only came about thanks to Paramount’s appeals to this administration: settling a baseless lawsuit that Trump brought against 60 Minutes for “deceptively” editing its Kamala Harris interview, pressuring subsidiary CBS News to shift its “balance” in a right-wing direction, and canceling presidential foe and beloved comedian Stephen Colbert’s highly rated late-night talk show.

Skydance is owned by Ellison’s son, David, who personally met with both Trump and FCC Chair Brendan Carr to get the deal done. The elder Ellison is covering most of the cash to close the Skydance-Paramount merger, which will give him significant control over the new company and a chance to carry out, as he detailed in federal filings, a wholesale transformation of CBS in his vision—including broadcasts of complimentary PSAs for Trump administration initiatives.

When Carr announced the merger approval, he positively affirmed “Skydance’s commitment to make significant changes at the once storied CBS broadcast network,” including the impending hire of an “ombudsman” who’ll monitor CBS News broadcasts for “bias” as the overall company slashes its diversity, equity, and inclusion guidelines. Said Trump himself of his “friend” Larry Ellison: “I think he’s going to run CBS really well, and I think he’s making a good deal to buy it.”

Through this brazenly corrupt arrangement, the U.S. president has granted one of his pals uninhibited control over a longtime bastion of mainstream, fact-based news, which he openly intends to bend toward his conservative vision. And that’s just one of the ways Trump is helping Larry Ellison become the most powerful and not-so-secretly influential tech mogul in the country.

Oracle, which Larry still runs as chief technology officer and board chairman, is also in talks with David Ellison’s Skydance for a major deal that would see the latter pay the former $100 million a year to run all of Paramount’s tech through Oracle’s valuable cloud-computing software. Skydance already pays Oracle $2.2 million a year for its cloud and platform products, and the FCC explicitly signed off on David Ellison’s plan to run all of Paramount’s and Skydance’s software on the same cloud tech, which will be provided by Oracle.

(the above text is from facebook.com/TheAttitudeWithArnieArnesen/posts/what-does-larry-ellison-the-second-richest-man-in-the-world-the-totally-corrupt-/1461463645410540)

 

Ending DEI, clash over freedom of press: Inside the Paramount-Skydance merger

The Trump Fascist Regime approved the sale of CBS’ parent company Paramount to Skydance. Puck founding partner Matthew Belloni joins Katy Tur to explain more on the details of this $8 billion merger and to react to “South Park” making fun of Trump and Paramount.

 

Nicolle blasts Paramount’s capitulation to Trump: ‘The short-sightedness is what’s stunning’

President of Media Matters for America Angelo Carusone and President of Brialliant Corners Research Cornell Belcher join Nicolle Wallace to discuss the FCC’s approval of Paramount’s merger with Skydance after they made a series of decisions favorable to the Trump administration.

 

Senator Chris Murphy discusses Paramount-Skydance merger and Trump’s censorship

 

The politics behind the $8B Paramount-Skydance merger

The FCC approved Skydance Media’s $8 billion bid to acquire Paramount, the parent company of CBS. The green light from the FCC comes after Paramount agreed to a $16 million settlement with President Trump over his lawsuit accusing “60 Minutes” of deceptively editing an interview with then-presidential candidate Kamala Harris.

 

‘Climate of fear’: Fmr Air Force secretary warns of Trump’s ‘abuse of power’ in chilling TV interview

 

 

In 1969, CBS canceled The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour after their anti-war satire and civil rights advocacy clashed with right-wing network censors. 56 years later, in 2025, history repeats as CBS axes The Late Show with Stephen Colbert its Top-Rated Program — after Colbert condemned Paramount’s $16M settlement with Trump, calling it a ‘bribe’.

Both shows were silenced under the guise of ‘financial reasons,’ but the truth is clear: CBS has always aligned with fascist, anti-free-speech agendas when power feels threatened.

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

— George Orwell, 1945

 

Trump’s FCC Chief Brendan Carr Is Acting More Like a Mob Enforcer Than a Federal Regulator

With a new GOP majority, the incoming FCC boss aims to punish criticism, reward obedience-and screw the public.

Per the above article: Trump’s FCC Chief Brendan Carr Is Acting More Like a Mob Enforcer Than a Federal Regulator

“With a new GOP majority, the incoming FCC boss aims to punish criticism, reward obedience—and screw the public.

Once a wonky telecom regulator that mostly avoided politics, the FCC is now at the leading edge of President Donald Trump’s crusade to turn the federal government into an instrument of his own will.

Since January, Trump’s FCC chief Brendan Carr has weaponized the agency to intimidate news organizations and media companies by threatening their broadcast licenses and launching sham investigations into their business practices and diversity programs. Carr is also racing to roll back FCC regulations, eliminate consumer protections, and unleash further media consolidation. Last week, the Senate confirmed former GOP congressional staffer Olivia Trusty to the agency, giving Carr the majority he needs to forge full-steam ahead with his MAGA agenda.

Free speech advocates call Carr’s actions a blatant violation of the First Amendment and federal law, and an egregious and unprecedented abuse of the agency’s power. A bipartisan group of former FCC commissioners recently accused Carr of turning the agency into the “White House’s personal censor.” In addition to cracking down on disfavored speech, the agency has already begun offering favors like merger approvals to media companies in exchange for their loyalty to the president.

“This is the most corrupt FCC in the agency’s history,” Victor Pickard, a professor of media policy at the University of Pennsylvania, told The Nation. “What we’re seeing now is outright Mafia-style behavior where the FCC is trying to shake down corporations and entire industries to carry out Trump’s agenda.”

Carr has threatened Comcast, which owns MSNBC, with the loss of its broadcast licenses because Trump was offended by the network’s coverage of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man the administration admits was mistakenly sent to a prison in El Salvador. And he’s launched an investigation into CBS after Trump repeatedly called for the cancellation of the network’s broadcast licenses and demanded that the FCC impose “maximum fines and punishment” over a disputed 60 Minutes broadcast.

“The idea that we would revoke a broadcast license based on editorial decisions is antithetical to the First Amendment,” Anna M. Gomez, the FCC’s lone Democratic commissioner, told The Nation. “We need the FCC to honor the Constitution, to comply with the Communications Act prohibition against censorship, and to stand up to these types of attempts to weaponize the agency in order to retaliate against broadcasters.”

It’s quite a turnabout for Carr, who in 2021 declared that “a newsroom’s decision about what stories to cover and how to frame them should be beyond the reach of any government official, not targeted by them.”

For nearly a century, the FCC operated mostly outside the realm of politics, regulating the nation’s airwaves, licensing TV and radio stations, and promoting competition and diversity across the media landscape. Although FCC commissioners are nominated by the president, Congress designed the agency to act independently from White House influence, and for the most part, FCC chiefs treated that independence as essential to ensuring free speech and diversity over the nation’s airwaves.

Trump and Carr’s complete disregard for that principle is evident in their campaign of coercion against 60 Minutes, which has infuriated the president with its critical coverage of his hostility to Ukraine and imperial ambitions for Greenland. In an apparent attempt to bolster Trump’s bogus $20 billion lawsuit over last summer’s disputed Kamala Harris segment, Carr launched a “news distortion” investigation into CBS and has slow-walked approval of its parent company Paramount’s merger with Skydance Media. Paramount, in turn, has reportedly begun influencing 60 Minutes news coverage, leading to the resignation of two senior executives.

Carr, who has recently taken to wearing a gold Trump-head lapel pin, is also doing his part as a loyal MAGA minion by pressuring media giants like Comcast and Disney to join Trump’s anti-diversity crusade and abandon their DEI hiring policies. He’s threatened to block merger proposals from companies that fail to do so. In an abject display of corporate capitulation, Verizon dutifully obliged in order to win approval of its $20 billion buyout of Frontier Communications.

The Trump FCC’s assault on the First Amendment has been so shocking that it has diverted attention from Carr’s extreme pro-business, anti-consumer agenda. In April, Carr launched what he called a “massive deregulatory initiative” that public interest group Free Press described as “a brazen attempt to roll back consumer safeguards on a widespread scale for industry’s convenience.” The pro-consumer FCC policies on the chopping block amount to a big-business wish list that includes eliminating broadband label and truth-in-billing requirements, rolling back restrictions on scam robocalls and texts, and watering down digital discrimination rules that encourage equitable broadband deployment.

Given Trump’s illegal firing of two Democratic commissioners at the FTC, public interest advocates warn that Trump could fire Gomez, the remaining Democratic FCC commissioner, while elevating recently departed GOP commissioner Nathan Simington’s former chief of staff, 31-year-old MAGA ideologue Gavin Wax, who once declared that Trump’s reelection would be a “time for retribution.”

Wax would fit right in. If President Trump behaves like a Mafia boss, then Carr is acting like a MAGA enforcer, threatening Trump’s media enemies while doling out favors for corporate interests with little regard for the collateral damage done to the rule of law or the public interest. It’s a familiar Trump formula: weaponize the federal government to punish criticism, reward obedience—and screw the American public”.

 

After settling with Trump, CBS News staffers fear what comes next | CNN Business

Paramount Global is being hammered for bowing to presidential pressure and settling a lawsuit that it likely could have beaten in court.

Per the above article: “Employees at CBS News, which produces “60 Minutes,” feel the same way. “There is great fear about what comes next,” a CBS News staffer told CNN on condition of anonymity. Even though Trump’s “60 Minutes” lawsuit is now history, his bullying tactics will continue to challenge media companies for the foreseeable future.

“Behavior that gets rewarded gets repeated,” the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression said Wednesday. “This settlement will only embolden the president to continue his flurry of baseless lawsuits against the press — and against the American people’s ability to hear the news free from government intrusion.”

A ‘monument to Paramount’s surrender’

According to the terms of the settlement, which were announced late Tuesday night, Trump will drop the suit in exchange for $16 million toward his presidential library. The financial terms mirror the deal that Disney’s ABC struck with Trump last December.

“Trump’s presidential library will be a permanent monument to Paramount’s surrender,” remarked Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.

Other press freedom advocates called the CBS parent’s decision a “spineless” and “shameful” capitulation.

Veteran media reporter Paul Farhi said on X that it was “fascinating how Paramount has borne the bulk of the criticism for agreeing to this payoff. As if Trump is a passive bystander who played no role.”

The conservative editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, controlled by Rupert Murdoch, focused on Trump’s conduct in a sharply critical piece on Wednesday night.

“The President is using government to intimidate news outlets that publish stories he doesn’t like,” the Journal wrote. “It’s a low move in a free country with a free press.”

David Ellison, son of the billionaire Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, was seen schmoozing near Trump at two different UFC matches earlier this year, stoking speculation that he was leaning on personal relationships to help get the merger approved.

On Wednesday, Paramount pushed back on a New York Post report about a “side deal” between Ellison and Trump involving TV airtime for public service announcements promoting Trump-aligned causes.

“Paramount has no knowledge of any promises or commitments made to President Trump other than those set forth in the settlement proposed by the mediator and accepted by the parties,” the company said.

But the report only intensified questions inside CBS News about how Ellison might approach owning the news division in the future.

While journalists at “60 Minutes” and across CBS News are concerned about the situation, they ultimately want to move on and continue doing their jobs.

“This settlement is not a reflection on the essential and bold work of 60 Minutes of CBS,” Tompkins told CNN. “It is a reflection of a vindictive president and corporate heads who did not value one of the fundamental principles that underpin the ownership of a news organization.”

“That principle,” he said, “is stated as the second tenet of the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics: Act Independently.”

 

Skydance pledges to Trump’s FCC it’ll eliminate DEI, install ‘ombudsman’ to root out ‘bias’ at CBS News | CNN Business

Skydance needs FCC approval in order to take over Paramount. It’s now promising to root out “bias” at CBS News in order to get it.

 

Right-wingers turned Hungary into a anti-democratic fascist one-party-rule dictatorship. Trump & Republicans have followed the same playbook

 

Trump Endorses Right-Wing Autocrat In Hungary

Former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul and former FBI special agent Clint Watts discuss with Nicolle Wallace the former president’s endorsement of Viktor Orban ahead of the Parliamentary elections in Hungary.

Trump is following Viktor Orbán’s playbook of how he destroyed Democracy in Hungary and became a de-facto Dictator

 

Thom Hartmann explains in the video above how Victor Orbán and his Radical Right-Wing Party took over the once Democratic government in Hungary and turned it into a anti-democratic authoritarian fascist one-party-rule dictatorship where elections & the courts are rigged, all of the media is state controlled and praise for Victor Orbán Propaganda is seen everywhere.

This is where the United States is headed unless Trump is stopped by impeachment or exposing him as a Illegitimate President (as detailed this site).