Special Edition: How Corporate Greed and the Love of Mergers & Acquisitions Got Us Donald Trump and the 119th Congress:
Or, Why The Corporate Media Model (Better Known Now as the Zaslav Model) is Fundamentally Broken.
Feel free to check the entire blog archives from “Political Pulse” & “Salzillo Report” on the 2024 primary cycle, rural outreach, redistricting litigation, base dynamics, campaign organization, the current media landscape, the issues at stake, Project 2025, Build Back Better, the progressive movement, the 2024 Election Autopsy, the true story about former 2024 VP contender Gina Raimondo, and much more.
First, my tip of the week…
Need advice for email hoarding? I’ve been doing that for a while. Until now.
I didn’t enjoy it, but I finally tackled my inbox. What did I learn from the experience? Well, if you get campaign emails over the years that are no longer relevant to the current or next election cycle or year, just delete them all—or as many of them as practicable. It adds up on your account storage if you let it clutter up for too long, as I did. I just deleted all the campaign emails from 2020, and the data storage I saved was immense. Most of them enter the Promotions tab on my end, so it should be pretty easy to delete them almost all at once.
If you write blog posts, delete the email versions. You can check them out on the website without the used storage taking up your personal accounts. Links are not hard to find for posts on Substack, Medium, LinkedIn, and the like. And it absolutely can be done without unsubscribing from those blogs.
Also, tell your lawmakers to oppose the Anti-Trump Nonprofit Crackdown Bill Congressional Republicans are going to vote on in this very Congress. Your emails, phone calls, voicemails, DC office visits, and letters may very well determine whether that bill passes the House & Senate, or not. GOP Cancel Culture at its finest.
Useful housekeeping for the future. Anyways…
We got the somewhat anticlimactic vote for Speaker of the House. Mike Johnson survived the first round of what will be many hard votes to come in advancing Donald Trump’s agenda. Trump’s agenda, which will be the entire Republican Party agenda. If they somehow do miraculously well, I guess they will reap the benefits.
And this was just the vote for Speaker. Wait until they do the hard part: governing on issues, having to work with the other chamber, the executive branch, and when necessary, the other side of the aisle that they will need for a lot of votes. Including to fund the government and prevent the default on our debt.
Congress in its current makeup could very well be one of the most dysfunctional ever in history. Kinda like it was the last time around. Besides, historically-speaking, we have been through this type of dysfunction before.
Consider the Gilded Age in the late 1800s, a time similarly rife with rowdiness, inefficiency, gridlock, chaos, inequality, and corruption on Capitol Hill. Then, like now, policy was influenced by the wealthy—auctions and biddings and bribery and all the rest. Eventually, the anger of the common people boiled over, culminating in the Progressive Reforms leading the way to the New Deal Era.
But hey, maybe with all the C-SPAN cameras and smartphone videos, we won’t have to worry about the excessive drinking, tobacco smoking, and the attendance problems (absence of a quorum, etc) that plagued the Congresses of the late 19th century. Though only time will tell. It’s not like this Congress serves the people, at any rate.
With such a Congress in a time so similar to the First Gilded Age, one may ask, how did we get into this mess?
Well, here are the factors we talked about before:
Big Money usurping power in the current campaign finance system as a result of Citizens United (2010), with Special Interests Inc. growing more and more powerful since.
Partisan & racial gerrymandering green lighted by politicians in black robes, who allow lawmakers to pick the voters and thereby disincentivized legislative compromise and competitive elections via decisions like Shelby County (2013).
The bitter partisanship created in a large part by Republicans. No one can deny that Newt Gingrich, Mitch McConnell, and Donald Trump all made their names as polarizing political actors willing to divide-and-conquer. Unlike the politicians of earlier days, they characterized their opponents as outright enemies and traitors instead of mere political rivals.
Yes, conservative economic policies binded together with culture war messaging win elections by pitting various demographics against each other. That got us to this point too.
Still, there is one more factor that deserves much more attention, particularly from Democrats: the influence of the corporate media in furthering the agenda of the oligarchic class, which grows richer and richer and more and more powerful by the day.
And have no doubts about it: this Second Gilded Age Hellscape will be worsened by the corporate media landscape.
For example, take what happens in state governments, and how little people know about it. That will likely get worse with the help of media conglomerates like Sinclair, Nexstar, and Gannett who decide it is in their financial interests to lay off reporters and staff, close down newsrooms, and move production facilities out of local communities. That is all being done as we speak, including in my hometown of Providence, RI.
Yes, that absolutely hurts rural areas and small town newspapers and TV/radio stations the most, as Missouri’s Lucas Kunce referred upon in his most recent post on Heartland Politics.
Meanwhile, on a national scale, many larger news outlets are laying off journalists and reporters on the prospects of looking for better ratings and making more money. That is the story of many national outlets—such as, for example, CNN.
On a similar note, many news outlets are now equating what Trump and Republicans do as just regular politics. Now, that’s not to say Democrats are undeserving of any scrutiny whatsoever. But seriously, who on earth would think Trump has a greater mental capacity than President Joe Biden, if not for the media focusing on Biden so much over the past 4 years?
Somehow, we equate Trump’s policy contradictions and promise failures as equal to the supposed misdeeds of President Biden or Vice President Harris’s changing of a position on…fracking. Somehow, the media will tell you that Trump’s election denialism is equatable to what Democrats did in 2000 or 2004…apples and oranges my friends. No one did what Trump tried to do in 2020. Look no further than the attempted coup on January 6, with police officers being brutally attacked, and some committing suicide after the 6th. Let us never forget the horrible footage of riled-up Trump supporters beating police officers with flag poles and threatening to hang Mike Pence and kill members of Congress.
The media is supposed to tell us the reality, not spin it into something we like.
At the very least, I hope we see the age scrutiny on Trump from 2025 to 2029, and I hope CNN focuses on Trump’s age queries in the same way that they chased after questions about Biden’s age from 2021 to 2025. If not, their downward trajectory in credibility would be well-earned. Because we all know Trump got a substantial pass by corporate media on the concerns over his own aging and cognition slowing down.
How about gaffes? Biden’s flubs were almost always covered, but where were the cameras and microphones when Trump slurred his speeches? Or praised Hannibal Lector, “reminisced” about Arnold Palmer’s genitalia, and read the Snake Poem? Don’t think Biden, or Harris, or Sanders, or Warren, or Obama would have been given such a pass.
Let’s go into other similar examples of CNN’s pivot from “keeping them honest” even post-election. Outside of the few journalists left on the payroll (like Jim Acosta and Manu Raju), CNN made little mention of Trump’s factually incorrect statement about the New Orleans terrorist attacker being an illegal immigrant. Which is a pretty big thing to not fact check on the spot—specifically when you otherwise give the terrorist attack wall-to-wall coverage at the expense of everything else.
How about sensationalism and melodrama of driving up more social media activity clicks and ratings? Watch Harry Enten’s segments leading up to the 2024 elections and you’ll see what I mean. Before the election, he said that “it would be obvious” why either Trump or Harris would win. He said alarm bills should be ringing for Democrats one day, and then said that he didn’t know why Democrats were so nervous.
In effect, he both predicted everything and nothing about what would and did happen in the 2024 election cycle. In all his many segments, he ended up stating nothing beyond the very obvious. Cover all the bases that needed to be covered, for ratings. Because what else was the point of airing so many of these segments if not to fill up airtime that could have been devoted to real journalism?
To be sure, this is a media problem larger than just CNN. Politicians seem to avoid scrutiny when they are more friendly to pro-free market business policies. I have most often talked about how this happens with US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo. At the same time, not only do critics of corporate media like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren get less TV airtime, but they also get much more of the negative coverage and less positive spotlight than people like Raimondo, Hillary Clinton, Michael Bloomberg, Jeff Bezos, and even Elon Musk.
But let’s return to the sad and shameful spectacle of CNN, now a shadow of its former self.
Thanks to old archived clips on YouTube, I did see what the old CNN was like. What it used to be capable of. It was not favorable to any side, and it always gave a fair shake and allowed a real debate on the merits. They had incredible reporters and analysts, like the treasures in Jeff Greenfield, Bill Schneider, and Stuart Rothenberg. They had commentators you could learn from, and especially conservatives like Robert Novak, Tony Blankley, Haley Barbour, Mary Matalin, J.C Watts, and Bill Bennett. Straight shooters.
Now, CNN runs a clown show, with warning signs as early as Donna Brazile leaking primary debate questions to Hillary Clinton in Brooklyn, NY, all while Bernie Sanders got an unusually hostile grilling in 2016 and 2020 (as independent watchdogs picked up on).
It hit a crescendo now in 2024 heading into 2025. Seriously, who thinks Scott Jennings’ rant on Jimmy Carter offers anything of use to any political discussion? Outside of provocation and clickbait so that CNN gets some more YouTube views? And who thinks Scott’s shamelessly dishonest, Lindsey Graham-style 180 on Trump makes him worthy of prime-time commentator slots?
That is hardly the worst of it. CNN’s more glowing coverage of Donald Trump, in fact, might very well be called a conflict of interest.
For you see, David Zaslav, the owner of parent company Warner Bros. Discovery, which runs CNN, has now regularly praised Trump’s election as being good for his media deregulation agenda. Why? Because apparently he was not happy with the Biden Administration’s focus on curbing corporate power and the rise of monopolies that harm the American worker and consumer.
After Biden’s debate performance last June, Zaslav openly expressed his desire for another administration that would allow more mergers & acquisitions (M&As) to make even more money by consolidating “holdings” and discarding more '“potential costs” (i.e., reporters, etc.).
As Zaslav might say, “Oh well, democracy dies in darkness. So long as I get my M&As.” What does it really mean? Screw the truth. Let the country rot, so long as I can hold onto my power and my money and my prestige.
That should be the motto of the modern-day corporate media titan, because that is the kind of cynicism the business runs on today. Yet to Zaslav’s credit (????), at least he’s saying the quiet part out loud about how this media business really operates for all to see. And I thought Les Moonves’ 2016 commentary was atrociously obvious.
So here’s my question for you: would you have trusted CNN’s 2024 coverage as much in how they changed their tune on Trump scrutiny from early on if you knew about Zaslav then? Knowing what you know now, would you trust CNN in its future coverage of Trump, when its company executive is speaking so glowingly of the new Trump era? To say CNN is unbiased is almost farcical these days.
Corporate media at its lowest standards.
At its best, the United States is a democratic capitalist country, that put guardrails on huge corporations and allowed everyday Americans to share in the wealth of American prosperity. At its worst, the United States is an oligarchy that widens the gap between the rich and the poor and sells our government and our democracy to the highest special interest bidder.
Unfortunately, Donald Trump is not making America great again. He is making America an oligarchy again. And it will be up to the people to call foul. Because, for the time being at least, the media is too busy playing a game of real-life Monopoly.
Fantastic! Absolutely fantastic!