craiyon logo

Photorealistic newsroom scene with screens displaying breaking news and anchors working at desks.

Photorealistic newsroom scene with screens displaying breaking news and anchors working at desks.

The situation went From Bad to Worse when CBS's parent company, Paramount Global, merged with Skydance Media—the company founded by David Ellison, son of right-wing tech billionaire Larry Ellison—in 2025. In an unprecedented move, CBS settled a $16 million lawsuit brought by President Donald Trump over its coverage of his conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election, a decision widely seen as a bribe in order to entice Trump's FCC to greenlight the merger. Afterward, Paramount Skydance purchased the right-wing opinion website The Free Press and merged it with CBS News, installing the site's co-founder, Bari Weiss, as the bureau's new editor-in-chief, with the expectation that Weiss would skew CBS's news output to suit the Ellisons' tastes and appease the second Trump administration. What ensued was a series of scandals which either laid bare Weiss's role as a pro-Trump toady or exposed the shocking ineptitude in which she ran the news division (sometimes both). In the former folder, controversy erupted when Weiss ordered 60 Minutes to "temporarily" shelve an investigative piece about inhumane conditions in El Salvador's CECOT prison complex, which would have cast negative light on the Trump administration's immigration policy, only for people to watch the piece online anyway when it turned out that CBS had neglected to remove it from a version of the episode sent to the Global Television Network for broadcast in Canada. In the latter folder, the CBS Evening News Mehr sehen