Media Manipulation Watch: The Forces Behind What You're Reading
CBS caves to Trump pressure as Scott Pelley confirms corporate interference at 60 Minutes, while Silicon Valley's shadow networks coordinate the next right-wing talking points.
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The Trump Administration is pushing a dangerous and sweeping attempt to control our bodies, our families, and our lives and a Supreme Court case this term will shape the future of transgender people’s freedom – and bodily autonomy for all. The state of Tennessee wants the Supreme Court to expand its ruling overturning Roe v. Wade to allow the state to target transgender people’s autonomy over their own bodies. Continuing down this road will hurt everyone's freedom to control their bodies and lives.
The ACLU told the court that everyone deserves the freedom to control their bodies and seek the health care they need. The government has no right to deny a transgender person the health care they need, just as they have no right telling someone if, when, or how they start a family.
Scott Pelley Confirms What We Were Told: Corporate Interference Drove Bill Owens Out at 60 Minutes.
Last week, I wrote about the shocking resignation of Bill Owens from 60 Minutes and how it represented a dangerous capitulation to Trump's intimidation tactics. Now, Scott Pelley has confirmed our worst fears.
During Sunday's "The Last Minute" segment, Pelley delivered a remarkably candid statement acknowledging exactly what pushed Owens out: corporate interference from Paramount executives desperate for Trump administration approval of their pending merger.
Transcript:
In tonight’s last minute, a note on Bill Owens, who until this past week was executive producer of 60 Minutes. He was our boss.
Bill was with CBS News nearly 40 years, 26 years at 60 Minutes. He covered the world, covered combat, the White House. His was a quest to open minds, not close them.
If you’ve ever worked hard for a boss because you admired him, then you understand what we’ve enjoyed here.
Bill resigned Tuesday. It was hard on him and hard on us, but he did it for us and you.
Stories we pursued for 57 years are often controversial. Lately, the Israel-Gaza war and the Trump administration.
Bill made sure they were accurate and fair. He was tough that way. But our parent company, Paramount is trying to complete a merger. The Trump administration must approve it.
Paramount began to supervise our content in new ways. None of our stories has been blocked, but Bill felt he lost the independence that honest journalism requires.
No one here is happy about it, but in resigning, Bill proved one thing: He was the right person to lead 60 Minutes all along.
"Paramount began to supervise our content in new ways," Pelley stated bluntly. "None of our stories has been blocked, but Bill felt he lost the independence that honest journalism requires."
This is as close to a public confirmation of editorial interference as you'll ever hear from a network anchor. The message couldn't be clearer: A once-independent news program is now operating under the watchful eye of corporate executives who need Trump's blessing for their business deals.
Pelley also made sure to emphasize that the controversial coverage of "the Israel-Gaza war and the Trump administration" was at the heart of this supervision. The timing here is no coincidence. As Trump has repeatedly attacked 60 Minutes coverage (most recently over a Kamala Harris interview that prompted his $10 billion lawsuit), Paramount's corporate overlords swooped in to make sure the show wouldn't further antagonize the administration they need to greenlight their merger.
What's interesting about Pelley's statement is how uncharacteristically direct it was. Network news anchors typically avoid calling out their corporate parents. The fact that Pelley felt compelled to acknowledge this interference publicly speaks volumes about how egregious the situation had become.
When Pelley says "No one here is happy about it," he's signaling that the entire 60 Minutes team recognizes this for what it is: a devastating blow to journalistic independence. By praising Owens as "the right person to lead 60 Minutes all along," Pelley is tacitly criticizing the corporate decision-makers who made it impossible for Owens to continue.
The implications here are chilling. If 60 Minutes — a program legendary for its independence and journalistic integrity — can be brought to heel by corporate interests afraid of presidential backlash, what hope do lesser-known news operations have?
This is what happens when news organizations are just small divisions of massive entertainment conglomerates. CBS News isn't independent — it's a tiny slice of Paramount's business. When push comes to shove, journalism takes a backseat to shareholder interests and merger approvals.
Moving forward, we should approach CBS News coverage of the Trump administration with warranted skepticism. Every editorial decision now comes with an asterisk: Did this story pass through Paramount's Trump-friendly filter?
Bill Owens resigned rather than compromise his journalistic principles. As Pelley noted, "he did it for us and you." The question now is whether that sacrifice will matter, or if 60 Minutes will quietly transform into just another neutered news program afraid to challenge power.
Maybe the most important thing Pelley said was that Owens "made sure [stories] were accurate and fair. He was tough that way." What happens when that toughness is replaced by timidity in the face of corporate pressure? When stories critical of Trump get extra scrutiny, softer questions, or aren't pursued at all?
That's the real danger here — not just what we see, but what we'll never see.
The Shadow Networks That Run America's Tech Politics
Silicon Valley's most influential players are making decisions, forming alliances, and shifting American politics in private group chats you'll never see. The results are shaping our world.
Ben Smith at Semafor just pulled back the curtain on the secretive Signal and WhatsApp groups that have become the invisible power centers of tech and politics. What he found is both fascinating and disturbing: a shadow network where billionaires, right-wing activists, and tech elites coordinate their talking points before pushing them to the public.
At the center of it all? Marc Andreessen, the 53-year-old venture capitalist who co-founded a16z. According to Smith, Andreessen "was the most available, the most present, the most texting of anybody in the group — which shocked me because it seemed like he was the most important person in the group," according to one participant.
The massive group chat called "Chatham House" includes figures like billionaire investor Mark Cuban, conservative media figure Ben Shapiro, former Trump official and current White House AI advisor Sriram Krishnan, economist Larry Summers, and historian Niall Ferguson. It's described as a "gladiatorial arena" where these elites hash out their ideas before presenting them publicly.
What's revealing is how these chats served as incubators for Silicon Valley's rightward shift. Chris Rufo, the conservative activist who engineered the moral panic around "critical race theory," openly admits he saw the chats as "a good investment of my time to radicalize tech elites who I thought were the most likely and high-impact new coalition partners for the right."
This isn't how democracy is supposed to work. While group chats themselves aren't inherently problematic, what's happening here is a small cabal of ultra-wealthy tech figures essentially plotting political strategies in private before presenting a unified front to the public. It's coordination disguised as independent thought.
As Thomas Chatterton Williams, a writer who was in one of these groups, told Smith: "If you weren't in the business at all, you'd think everyone was arriving at conclusions independently — and [they're] not. It's a small group of people who talk to each other and overlap between politics and journalism and a few industries."
What's particularly telling is how these spaces have evolved from somewhat ideologically diverse forums to increasingly partisan, pro-Trump spaces. Richard Hanania, a conservative academic who initially helped create one of Andreessen's right-wing chats, eventually left because he found himself "increasingly alienated from the group and the shift toward partisan pro-Trump politics."
According to Hanania, he argued with the group "about whether it's a good idea to buy into Trump's election denial stuff" but sensed that "these guys didn't want to hear it." The group's ethos was that "you don't criticize, because what really matters is defeating the left."
This is how propaganda works: create private spaces where the real conversations happen, coordinate messaging, and then present those unified ideas to the public as if they emerged independently. Political journalist Mark Halperin described these networks as "an overlapping set of text chains that allow their members to share links, intel, tactics, strategy, and ad hoc assignments" running "like 20 hours a day, including on weekends."
The impact? Those carefully coordinated messages flood our social media, shape media narratives, and influence policy decisions. As one participant told Smith, "You'd see that the writers were bending toward the billionaires, and even the ones who prided themselves on being iconoclastic were bending to the tastes and the centers of gravity of power."
This isn't conspiracy theory stuff – it's literally how our information ecosystem now works. The next time you see a sudden wave of tech figures all making the same argument at once, you can bet it was workshopped and fine-tuned in these encrypted chats first.
We're increasingly living in a world where public discourse is shaped by private conversations among elites that we'll never see. That should worry anyone who cares about genuine intellectual diversity and democratic decision-making.
Only one way to deal with this Cabal - "Eat The Rich".
‘No one here is happy about it," he's signaling that the entire 60 Minutes team recognizes this for what it is: a devastating blow to activist journalists to be able to keep manipulating reports to favor their beloved Democrat candidates and to destroy Trump”.
There, fixed it for ya’.