“During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.” -George Orwell
Mark McInerney
September 16, 2025
Mark McInerney
September 16, 2025
The football game runs long, the commercials pile on, and finally the stopwatch appears: tick-tick-tick, once a metronome for accountability. For decades, people sat through overtime just to hear someone ask the questions power tried to dodge. That ritual begins again this fall—but something new sits in the control room: a corporate censor with a polite title, invited in by regulators and seated above the newsroom.
And what exactly is under leash? A broadcast institution. The house Murrow built, where he stood on air and confronted a coward who hid behind power and lies. His indictment of McCarthy was not just of a man but of a system, closing with Shakespeare’s warning: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”
And what exactly is under leash? A broadcast institution. The house Murrow built, where he stood on air and confronted a coward who hid behind power and lies. His indictment of McCarthy was not just of a man but of a system, closing with Shakespeare’s warning: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”
Cronkite, once “the most trusted man in America,” said in 1968, “For it seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate.” 60 Minutes, where Reasoner and Wallace cornered liars until they stammered, where Ed Bradley’s precision cut through fog, where Dan Rather pressed against White House stonewalling, where Morley Safer dragged the war into America’s living rooms, where Stahl and Kroft carried the flame forward—and where Andy Rooney, with cranky wit, ended the show as the jester, firing spitballs at power. A Sunday ritual where power had to squirm.
That flame is now treated as a risk on the balance sheet instead of a covenant with the public.
On August 7, the newest nepo prince finally cut the rubber-band chinstrap from the crown he’d been wearing since birth. David Ellison, son of Larry, ascended to Paramount’s throne. The ticker flipped, the empire shifted, and Orwell would have dismissed all of it as too vulgar for fiction. The stopwatch now ticks behind glass in the Ellison family collection.
The FCC blessed the deal 2–1, stapling editorial conditions to the license: install a “bias ombudsman,” pledge “bias-free” programming, accept a political “course correction.” Chair Brendan Carr called it exactly that, smiling for the cameras, and in the process turned the FCC from First Amendment guardian into Trump’s speech police—brandishing dead rules and bogus probes like a commissar who traded his flag pin for a Trump cereal-box badge.
The “ombudsman” is Kenneth R. Weinstein, longtime Hudson Institute chief. Watchdog? Hardly. This is a partisan apparatchik posing as an editor. Not a public advocate, but a prefect reporting to the palace.
When Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem threw a fit over edits to her Face the Nation appearance, CBS responded with a pledge: interviews live or uncut “live-to-tape,” exceptions rare. The slogan is transparency; the practice is surrender. It signals to guests: watch the clock. Burn the minutes with distortions and lies, and the broadcast carries them into millions of homes unchecked. A lie sprints while the truth fumbles for airtime. The only defense is real-time interruption with receipts on screen. Stop the guest. Demand the source. Flag the claim as true, unsupported, or false before moving on. Anything less is an open microphone for liars and frauds.
And the chill isn’t limited to CBS. ABC/Disney just settled Trump’s absurd multibillion-dollar defamation suit over a single noun from George Stephanopoulos. A billion-dollar shakedown over a noun. Al Capone would’ve called it crude. That isn’t accountability. It’s protection money.
Meanwhile, trust collapses. Left-leaning outlets punish their own commentators to appease shareholders or online mobs. Right-wing networks turn cruelty into prime-time. On one side, honesty becomes a firing offense; on the other, sadism becomes a ratings stunt. This is what Orwell meant: not censorship by principle, but censorship by allegiance.
And conquest begets conquest. Barely a month after seizing Paramount, Ellison set his sights on Warner Bros Discovery. The prize: Warner Bros, HBO, DC Studios, CNN. Imagine CBS and CNN under one family’s hand. In another era, the FTC would have laughed it out of the room. Today, regulators baptize monopolists so long as they kneel to power. Once law stopped them; now law crowns them.
That flame is now treated as a risk on the balance sheet instead of a covenant with the public.
On August 7, the newest nepo prince finally cut the rubber-band chinstrap from the crown he’d been wearing since birth. David Ellison, son of Larry, ascended to Paramount’s throne. The ticker flipped, the empire shifted, and Orwell would have dismissed all of it as too vulgar for fiction. The stopwatch now ticks behind glass in the Ellison family collection.
The FCC blessed the deal 2–1, stapling editorial conditions to the license: install a “bias ombudsman,” pledge “bias-free” programming, accept a political “course correction.” Chair Brendan Carr called it exactly that, smiling for the cameras, and in the process turned the FCC from First Amendment guardian into Trump’s speech police—brandishing dead rules and bogus probes like a commissar who traded his flag pin for a Trump cereal-box badge.
The “ombudsman” is Kenneth R. Weinstein, longtime Hudson Institute chief. Watchdog? Hardly. This is a partisan apparatchik posing as an editor. Not a public advocate, but a prefect reporting to the palace.
When Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem threw a fit over edits to her Face the Nation appearance, CBS responded with a pledge: interviews live or uncut “live-to-tape,” exceptions rare. The slogan is transparency; the practice is surrender. It signals to guests: watch the clock. Burn the minutes with distortions and lies, and the broadcast carries them into millions of homes unchecked. A lie sprints while the truth fumbles for airtime. The only defense is real-time interruption with receipts on screen. Stop the guest. Demand the source. Flag the claim as true, unsupported, or false before moving on. Anything less is an open microphone for liars and frauds.
And the chill isn’t limited to CBS. ABC/Disney just settled Trump’s absurd multibillion-dollar defamation suit over a single noun from George Stephanopoulos. A billion-dollar shakedown over a noun. Al Capone would’ve called it crude. That isn’t accountability. It’s protection money.
Meanwhile, trust collapses. Left-leaning outlets punish their own commentators to appease shareholders or online mobs. Right-wing networks turn cruelty into prime-time. On one side, honesty becomes a firing offense; on the other, sadism becomes a ratings stunt. This is what Orwell meant: not censorship by principle, but censorship by allegiance.
And conquest begets conquest. Barely a month after seizing Paramount, Ellison set his sights on Warner Bros Discovery. The prize: Warner Bros, HBO, DC Studios, CNN. Imagine CBS and CNN under one family’s hand. In another era, the FTC would have laughed it out of the room. Today, regulators baptize monopolists so long as they kneel to power. Once law stopped them; now law crowns them.
The framers weren’t naive. Jefferson preferred newspapers without government to government without newspapers. Madison warned that a people without information are condemned to tragedy or farce. They did not imagine regulators attaching editorial leashes or networks pledging not to interrupt a lie. They assumed the citizen would be the only monitor that mattered.
So watch this season with clear eyes. What vanished between tape and air? Which questions never made it out of the pre-interview because someone with a badge or a checkbook might complain? The stopwatch still ticks, but not in the people’s hands. It ticks in the Ellison collection—a trophy of conquest.
If the barons of this century can seize not just property and labor but thought itself, then the burden is obvious: break the glass, take back the instrument, and use it as it was meant. Against them.
So watch this season with clear eyes. What vanished between tape and air? Which questions never made it out of the pre-interview because someone with a badge or a checkbook might complain? The stopwatch still ticks, but not in the people’s hands. It ticks in the Ellison collection—a trophy of conquest.
If the barons of this century can seize not just property and labor but thought itself, then the burden is obvious: break the glass, take back the instrument, and use it as it was meant. Against them.
What the World Needs Now Is Love (Bacharach/David) — Bill Frisell (2020)
Begin with the grainy footage of Robert F. Kennedy on a flatbed truck in Indianapolis, April 4, 1968, the night Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered. He does not roar; he pleads. He quotes Aeschylus. He reminds the crowd that what is needed is not vengeance but love—“love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another.”
Begin with the grainy footage of Robert F. Kennedy on a flatbed truck in Indianapolis, April 4, 1968, the night Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered. He does not roar; he pleads. He quotes Aeschylus. He reminds the crowd that what is needed is not vengeance but love—“love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another.”
That call still stands. Love must not be sentimentalized or reduced to a slogan; it must be chosen, defended, carried into the public square as both shield and weapon.
This is why Bill Frisell’s reading of What the World Needs Now Is Love matters. He pares Bacharach’s hymn to its bones. The melody, almost on a single string, lands note by note like words spoken carefully. Silence is part of the phrasing. Nothing hurries, nothing forces itself forward.
When harmony arrives, it does so with humility. Open strings glow, inner lines shift quietly beneath, then comes the slip into minor—sorrow admitted before the tune steadies again. It feels like church: not triumph, but honesty. Grief acknowledged, then light returned.
Behind him, the rhythm section doesn’t dictate, but listens. They sway, nudge, or wait, always in service of the truth. Together they insist survival is possible. That is the message: love as defiance, speech as necessity, the republic as fragile but still ours to steady. Frisell reminds us: clarity, not spectacle, is what must be defended.
And in that defense, there is comfort.
This is why Bill Frisell’s reading of What the World Needs Now Is Love matters. He pares Bacharach’s hymn to its bones. The melody, almost on a single string, lands note by note like words spoken carefully. Silence is part of the phrasing. Nothing hurries, nothing forces itself forward.
When harmony arrives, it does so with humility. Open strings glow, inner lines shift quietly beneath, then comes the slip into minor—sorrow admitted before the tune steadies again. It feels like church: not triumph, but honesty. Grief acknowledged, then light returned.
Behind him, the rhythm section doesn’t dictate, but listens. They sway, nudge, or wait, always in service of the truth. Together they insist survival is possible. That is the message: love as defiance, speech as necessity, the republic as fragile but still ours to steady. Frisell reminds us: clarity, not spectacle, is what must be defended.
And in that defense, there is comfort.