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GELFAND’S WORLD - By the time that this column runs, the last Stephen Colbert show will be in the can. Everything about the show’s cancellation is fishy, and that is being generous. What we do know is that CBS was part of a business group that includes Paramount, and the owners wanted very much to enter into a merger or buyout deal with another giant company. This is the sort of thing that, under Teddy Roosevelt or some other trust buster, would have been forbidden.
But the owners got a break. Here’s how it happened: Donald Trump sued CBS for multiple millions of dollars on wholly specious grounds. Remember how this came down? Trump complained that an interview with his opponent Kamala Harris was edited in a way that didn’t work out well for him, and contrary to the principles of the First Amendment, he asked for monetary damages for himself on those grounds. Read about it here.
Anyone with half a brain saw the lawsuit as utter nonsense in terms of its legality, but others recognized that Trump was merely signaling that he was open to a bribe. So CBS paid the lawsuit and then gave even more – it extracted one thorn out of Trump’s paw by announcing the cancellation of Colbert’s show. And that got them the sought after permission to go ahead with the merger.
It was just one example of how this administration has to be the most corrupt of all time. And they are not even pretending otherwise. We might mention in passing that Trump has pulled the same stunt again, but this time by suing his own government because somebody in the IRS made public his tax returns. This was an excuse for the government that Trump oversees to act on his behalf by offering to create a slush fund to be used to pay the jailed Capitol rioters.
But I digress.
I used to watch mostly CBS, with Colbert the leader. It’s going to be hard to generate any fondness for the network’s shows now that Colbert is gone. There were some claims that CBS was losing money on the show, but this seems questionable considering that the show was doing well compared to its competitors, and the NBC and ABC shows are still around. Jimmy Kimmel offered an argument that there are various other sorts of revenues that together make such shows profitable.
However you look at it, the optics of this cancellation are awful.
So what, if anything, can be done about it? Right now, nothing. But when a Democratic administration comes in after the 2028 elections, there should be a renewed anti-trust effort. And among the first actions, CBS should be sundered from whatever conglomerate it is a part of. And then the rest of the conglomerate itself should be broken up.
And then, the rest of the communications industry should be looked at very carefully. It is way too consolidated, and a lot of trust busting is indicated.
And lastly, every penny of bribe money paid to Donald Trump should be recovered from CBS and, if possible, from Trump himself. Trump will argue that he received a legitimate settlement from CBS, but courts are allowed to look beyond transparent subterfuge and reach findings on what the reality was.
We ought to be talking about money in politics
Remember when people used to talk about the illegitimate effect of money on politics? You know, some millionaire would put a couple of hundred thousand dollars of his own money into a campaign where the opponents could barely scrape up a few grand?
And then came Supreme Court decisions that basically wiped out all control over spending.
Obviously, I’m simplifying things here, but we can tie the story together locally by reminding ourselves of Rick Caruso and Tom Steyer. You all remember Caruso, so there’s no reason to dig it all up. But Steyer is beginning to get on my nerves what with the constant television advertising – including the increasingly prevalent hit pieces on his main opponent, Xavier Becerra. And the anti-Becerra pieces are starting to sting, even if the substance is that Becerra accepted contributions from an oil company and admitted it on camera. Maybe it’s a weaker argument to make to voters, but for me, watching Steyer throw mud on Becerra is reason enough to vote against him, because in a Becerra-Hilton runoff, those ads will be dusted off and replayed by Hilton’s campaign as evidence that even Democrats don’t want Becerra. How will Hilton do that? Simple enough – the ads show what seem to be ordinary people who sound like Democrats and don’t like Becerra. It might be useful for the Becerra campaign to investigate who those people actually are – like are they paid actors or real voters?
And that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? When you have unlimited funds like Steyer does, you can put together a tv ad and find the people to appear in it as if they really cared where candidate money comes from. Then you can write a check for another million or so to get it on the air. And before that, you did all the opposition research that any candidate could ever do in order to dig up those old videos.
The point is that unlimited money provides a substantial advantage, even if the billionaires don’t always win. We used to worry about this happening. It has now become the norm.
One final tidbit. The San Francisco Chronicle wrote their own editorial endorsement piece, and they do not agree with anything I’ve presented here in CW regarding the governor’s race. They don’t take Republicans seriously, but they don’t like Becerra or Steyer either. You can read it here.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at amrep535@sbcglobal.net)
