12 Comments
User's avatar
Stephen Robinson's avatar

Great piece on a disturbing topic

Expand full comment
Loren Bliss's avatar

I have said this before, but it cannot be said too often: the U.S. mainstream media monopoly is the world's first privately owned, for-profit re-creation of Josef Goebbels' Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda, the infamous Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. This is not hyperbole. A near-lifelong journalist -- I got my first daily newspaper job, as a sports stringer and copyboy at age 16 in 1956, and I thus experienced the national transition of news media from 90-percent independent ownership to 90 percent ownership by a mere six monopolies. (See https://techstartups.com/2020/09/18/6-corporations-control-90-media-america-illusion-choice-objectivity-2020/) I've also experienced the (invariably negative) consequences of the transition, among them the increasing control of information by ecogenocidally greedy plutocrats whose recognition that their only safeguard against revolutionary justice is zero-tolerance theocratic nazification -- thus the slaying of the Republic, the trashing of its Constitution and its replacement by the Christonazi "Unified Reich," literally Auschwitz Nation with Trump as Führer. That's why I'm actually thankful I'm diagnosed as terminally ill and soon dead; I'll (probably) escape the looming extermination of all dissenters, not just those of us who dare denounce the MAGATs for the wanna-be Reinhard Heydrichs they truly are, but eventually anyone accused of the even smallest indication of being non-Christian. That's what's coming, and Stephen Colbert is obviously already on the regime's target list.

Expand full comment
David Roberts's avatar

Parker,

Thanks for writing this. Your piece was particularly effective because you let the extremely ugly facts speak for themselves. I'm glad as well that you highlighted the 200 people who will lose their jobs. I wish them the best and I also hope that they know the ugly truth as to why.

Expand full comment
Rick Massimo's avatar

Ten years of submediocre white people screaming about cancel culture and this is the second person to ever actually be canceled. The first was Colin Kaepernick. (And you could make a case for the _____ Chicks.)

Gosh I wonder what they have in common? I’m sure Bari Weiss will get right on it, highly principled defender of free speech that she is.

Expand full comment
Davis's avatar

I really hate Weiss. She cares not for the schoolteachers and librarians who have been fired for being "woke" or some such shit. She only cares abut her rich friends.

Expand full comment
SteveB's avatar

Elise Stefanik was demanding of CUNY's president that a law faculty member be fired simply for working on the defense team of Kilmar Garcia.

Expand full comment
Joseph Mangano's avatar

Evidently, CBS now stands for "Corrupted by Skydance."

Expand full comment
Dawn Aberg's avatar

I would give just about anything (I can say that because I don't have much) to be a fly on the wall listening to what Colbert and Jon Stewart are scheming up for their next moves. What we do know - it will be brilliant. One possible prediction - Colbert goes balls out these next few months, and gets yanked early.

Expand full comment
MysteriousTraveller's avatar

Didn’t Edward R. Murrow work for these guys?

It’s the name of the high school in my neighborhood.

They should put black crepe around it.

Expand full comment
Jennifer's avatar

Excellently put, Parker.

Expand full comment
Frank Lee's avatar

Cobert sucks. He was funny, but went full partisan comedic bully. He fired himself. His small appeal to coastal and big city liberals, people that lack a sense of humor but will snigger with cynicism, snark and invective with a good enough cut at those ugly and stupid working class people... well that is not enough.

Expand full comment
SteveB's avatar

Eh, those snooty liberals, makin' fun of a buncha workin' class lawyers drivin' their pickup trucks to the law-makin' fact'ry to hammer out a deal between our workin' class billionaire President and workin' class billionaire Larry Ellison, who just wants to buy hisself a lil' TV network, a thing any workin' class guy might do on a Friday night when he's got his pay envelope burnin' a hole in the pocket of his jeans.

Expand full comment