Portside

The CBS merger deal illustrates everything that’s wrong with post-Reagan Revolution America. It’s not just another corporate merger: it’s a road sign on our accelerating march toward oligarchy, propaganda, and the collapse of honest media.

We’ve watched one of the most important legacy broadcast platforms in America pay a $16 million bribe to our convicted felon president, reportedly offer him another $16 million worth of free air time, and try to sell its entire operation to a billionaire with a God complex. It’s the worst of the Reagan revolution coming home to roost, on our screens, in our homes, and in our civic life.

Start with the $16 million payoff: Trump sued CBS and its parent company Paramount over a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, laughably arguing that CBS’s editing of the interview constituted unlawful election tampering. The lawsuit was instantly and widely regarded as frivolous, but instead of fighting it, CBS quietly settled for an astonishing $16 million. No trial. No discovery. Just a big, fat check.

This isn’t journalism: it’s tribute. It’s what oligarchs have done for centuries when they want to please the king.

This should shock the conscience of any functioning democracy, and has the rest of the world wondering about the health of ours. But in the GOP’s America — where billionaires are gods and corporations are people — this is just Wednesday.

Antitrust laws that were once enforced to keep our economy and our media diverse and competitive are now all but ignored.

It wasn’t always this way, as I lay out in The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream. Before Reagan took office, the federal government blocked mergers that would’ve concentrated too much economic or political power.

In 1890, Congress passed the Sherman Anti-Trust Act that said giant companies couldn’t dominate markets simply because they had the financial muscle to buy up their smaller competitors or drive them out of business by dropping prices long enough to run them into bankruptcy. It was later augmented by the Clayton Anti-Trust Act (1914) and the Celler-Kefauver Act (1950).

The law was so rigorously enforced — so the game of business could be played by all comers, not just the “big boys” — that in the 1960s the Supreme Court barred the merger of the Kinney and Buster Brown shoe companies because the new combined company would control 5 percent of the shoe market.

But then Reagan, in 1983, ordered the DOJ, SEC, and FTC to basically stop enforcing the Sherman Act, which is why today Nike, for example, controls about a fifth of the entire nation’s shoe market. It’s the same across industry after industry, from retail to grocery stores to railroads to computer software to social media to chip manufacturing to airlines to hotels…and media.

In the decades since Reagan and the GOP stabbed small businesses in the back, things have deteriorated badly. In 1983, there were about 50 companies that owned 90% of American media, controlling roughly 90% of what Americans see, hear, and read. As of today, it’s six: Comcast, Disney, News Corp, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Paramount (for now). That’s not a free press, it’s an oligopoly.

And now Larry Ellison, the tenth-richest man in the world with a net worth north of $150 billion, and his son are stepping in to consolidate even more control. Ellison already uses his wealth to push far-right political causes; he was the single largest funder of a rightwing PAC. Now he’ll have one of the largest megaphones in America.

This is what oligarchy looks like, courtesy of the Reagan Revolution and, most recently, the corrupt Citizens United decision by five bought-off Republicans on the Supreme Court.

An oligarch buys a media empire. A corrupt president extorts that empire for cash and air time. The journalists there who once held power to account get fired. And now Stephen Colbert — whose nightly monologue is one of the few mainstream platforms consistently skewering Trump and the GOP — is on the chopping block. So is the legendary “60 Minutes” team, neutered to avoid offending Ellison’s political pals. All to grease the wheels for a merger and keep Trump happy.

Meanwhile, the average American gets nothing. No trustworthy journalism. No independent voices. No real debate. Just more billionaire-driven narratives, more Trump hagiography, and more of the toxic sludge that passes for news in post-Reagan America.

We’ve seen this movie before. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán used state subsidies and friendly oligarchs to seize control of that nation’s media. In Russia, Putin arrested or exiled journalists while his billionaire cronies bought up every independent outlet.

Trump’s already following the blueprint to do the same here through Project 2025: purge career civil servants, seize control of the FCC, and turn the media into a mouthpiece for the regime. With CBS in the hands of Ellison and already making cash payments to Trump, we’re more than halfway there.

Make no mistake: this isn’t about entertainment or even profits. It’s about power. When the press becomes the property of the morbidly rich and they wield it to defend their interests, as Jefferson and Adams warned, democracy becomes their plaything.

Trump is running a campaign of vengeance, vengeance against the media in particular, and CBS is handing him a gun. And the kicker? Shari Redstone — the morbidly rich heiress billionaire who’s cashing out of CBS and Paramount — is walking away with billions while the public walks away with nothing.

What’s happening to CBS is not just one network’s moral collapse; it’s a symptom of our national disease. The disease Reagan diagnosed as “government is the problem” when he actually meant: “democracy is the problem.”

Since 1981, Republicans have systematically deregulated, defunded, and dismantled every guardrail of democratic capitalism they could get their hands on. The result is an America where billionaires like Ellison can buy the truth, where the press kowtows to the criminal-in-chief, and where the public interest has no advocate left.

We are reaping what Reagan sowed. In 1996, the Telecommunications Act — passed with bipartisan support but cheer-led by Reaganites — blew open the floodgates of media consolidation. In the years that followed, Clear Channel (now iHeartMedia) gobbled up over 1,200 radio stations. Sinclair Broadcasting used loopholes to flood local news with right-wing propaganda.

And now, legacy TV networks are selling themselves to political oligarchs while laundering bribes to Trump through legal settlements and airtime giveaways.

All of this is happening in plain sight. It’s not even subtle anymore. Trump brags about “retribution,” and CBS offers him a microphone. He lies about the election, and they hand him airtime. He threatens journalists, and their bosses fire them.

And where are the regulators? The Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission under Biden had taken steps to revive antitrust enforcement, but Trump has ended all those efforts and put a bootlicker in charge of the FCC.

And Congress? Half of them are on the take, funded by the very oligarchs who benefit from this media rot. According to OpenSecrets.org, media and internet companies spent over $600 million lobbying Congress in 2024 alone.

What we’re witnessing is the logical endpoint of a 44-year experiment in trickle-down libertarianism called the Reagan Revolution. The billionaires got their tax cuts. The corporations got their deregulation. The politicians got their payoffs. And the people got lies, propaganda, and impoverishment.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We could enforce antitrust laws. We could reinstate the Fairness Doctrine. We could limit media ownership and break up monopolies like Comcast and Sinclair. We could tax the billionaires who are using their wealth to warp our democracy and rebuild public-interest journalism from the ground up.

But first, we have to stop pretending this is normal.

It’s not normal to pay a criminal ex-president $16 million to go away and then invite him back on air; this sort of thing doesn’t happen in any other developed country in the world.

It’s not normal to fire comedians and journalists for telling the truth. It’s not normal for one politician to cow the nation’s news organizations. And it’s sure as hell not normal for the Fourth Estate to become a wholly-owned subsidiary of the neofascist MAGA movement.

This isn’t just a CBS problem. It’s not even just a media problem. It’s a democracy problem. If Congress lets the Ellisons and Trumps and Redstones buy and sell the truth, it’ll be years before we get it back, if ever.

The Congressional switchboard number is 202-224-3121. Pass it along.

Thom Hartmann is a NY Times bestselling author of 34 books in 17 languages & nation's #1 progressive radio host. Psychotherapist, international relief worker. Politics, history, spirituality, psychology, science, anthropology, pre-history, culture, and the natural world.