We can gain courage from our heroes of this moment: Scott Pelley is unintimidated, telling us bluntly that the new owner and management of CBS tried to force him to lie to us on the air and spin stories so they could please wannabe-Emperor Trump.
US journalist Scott Pelley attends a celebration of the announcement of CBS’s new fall schedule at Paramount Studios in Hollywood, May 2, 2024.
(Photo by Michael Tran / AFP via Getty Images)
Thom Hartmann
Jun 05, 2026
Common Dreams
I started in radio news as a teenage reporter at WITL-AM/FM in Lansing, Michigan, then the number one station in the capitol city. I began reporting from the Capitol and City Hall, and was writing and reading the morning newscasts within a year.
The station owner was a hardcore Goldwater Republican, our news director was a liberal but Libertarian-curious Democrat, and I was a long-haired anti-war hippie member of Michigan State University Students for a Democratic Society
I did the news there for years, and nobody ever told me how to spin it or what to insert or delete. I knew that I couldn’t bias it to reflect my own opinions: the news—accurate, factual, honest information—was sacred.
It was also the cost of our broadcast license, and we all knew it. The widely misunderstood Fairness Doctrine’s main demand was that radio and TV stations “program in the public interest” and that was widely understood to mean straightforward, reliable, faithful-to-reality news at the top and bottom of every hour on radio and an hour-long news block in prime time on TV.
As anti-democracy billionaires continue their march across the American media landscape and pour billions into elections, it falls to us to resist.
We did this—and embraced the Fairness Doctrine—because we knew it was part of the price of freedom, of democracy in our republic. When Thomas Jefferson said he’d rather live in a country with newspapers and no government than in one with a government but no newspapers, he wasn’t knocking government; he’d help create ours and was its president for eight years. He was talking about the vital importance of an honest and free press.
Part of that honesty came from the competition; there were multiple stations in Lansing and most had an in-house news operation like ours, and the ones that didn’t ran the CBS or AP radio newscast twice an hour. Honesty and clarity were essential to get and maintain an audience, as well as hanging onto our license.
Then-President Ronald Reagan ended the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, and now President Donald Trump and his oligarch enablers are trying to bury the entire concept of honest, straightforward news.
Over the past year and a half we’ve watched Brendan Carr, Trump’s hitman at the Federal Communications Commission, go to Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) conferences and brag about how he’s going to assault stations that say things he and Trump dislike. He’s trying to intimidate ABC affiliates into muzzling Jimmy Kimmel—again. And he succeeded in taking down Stephen Colbert.
And a Trump-adjacent billionaire nepo baby has acquired CBS and is systematically stripping it of its journalistic integrity, starting with the evening news and now gutting the nation’s No. 1 news magazine show, “60 Minutes.”
Storied journalist and “60 Minutes” reporter Scott Pelley isn’t taking it lying down, even though it’s a virtual certainty that he has the standard non-disparagement clause that most media operations now require for talent, which forbid them to ever speak ill of their former employer should they leave for any reason. He’ll probably get sued for it, but he’s a man committed to the truth.
Trump, David Ellison, Bari Weiss, the billionaire owners of Sinclair, the billionaire Murdoch family’s Fox “News,” the 1,000+ billionaire-owned radio stations across the country, the billionaire-subsidized podcasters, and billionaire-owned social media sites like Facebook and X that have apparently been algorithmically slanted toward Trump’s neofascist movement are all following an ancient script.
Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Hideki Tojo, and Francisco Franco all seized control of the news in their countries in their first year in power. It took both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán two or so years, because they wrote a new script for the takeover: Sue the news outlets and reporters into bankruptcy for “defamation” or “slander,” then have friendly oligarchs take over the outlets.
Orbán even came to CPAC in Dallas to tell Republicans that they should do the same thing as he had done by turning America’s media over to right-wing billionaires. He also told the American CPAC conference in Budapest four years ago, during the Biden administration, that they should do the same in America when Republicans next seized control of the US government.
“Have your own media,” he said. “It’s the only way to point out the insanity of the progressive left. The problem is that the Western media is adjusted to the leftist viewpoint. Those who taught reporters in universities already had progressive leftist principles.”
He added:
Of course, the GOP has its media allies but they can’t compete with the mainstream liberal media. My friend Tucker Carlson is the only one who puts himself out there. His show is the most popular. What does it mean? It means programs like his should be broadcasted day and night. Or, as you say, 24/7.
Thus, this is now the Putin-Orbán-Trump formula:Manufacture a crisis.
Declare an “emergency.”
Seize powers the Constitution doesn’t grant.
Bypass Congress.
Bully or ignore the courts.
Use masked, secret police and the military against your own residents.
Send people to foreign concentration camps.
Build concentration camps within the United States.
Prosecute lawyers and judges.
Assert control over universities.
Merge corporate and state interests.
Cow the media into silence about your corruption and crimes.
Then call it all “law and order.”
Trump is 18 months into his project, and he’s already taken down the Voice of America, defunded PBS and NPR, seen the Washington Post and LA Times acquired by sycophantic billionaires, and turned CBS over to a nepo-baby billionaire who’s going after CNN next. As Jefferson pointed out, this is how democracies are fatally corrupted, which is apparently Trump and his billionaire enablers’ goal.
Combine that with a capture of the police and prosecutorial agencies of the government so, like in Putin’s Russia, they can harass and prosecute anybody who dares speak up against their destruction of our way of life and you have the classic formula for turning a democratic republic into an oligarchic dictatorship.
The classic symbol of authoritarian governance dating back to ancient Rome and Caligula—violence as entertainment—will come to the White House as musclebound men will beat each other bloody and senseless for spectacle and the amusement of our 80-year-old “president” on our nation’s birthday.
Masked thugs snatching people off the street without warrants and putting them into concentration camps in violation of the Fouth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Amendments also plays well for the fascist Klan-remnant Republican base, so long as the people they beat, pepper spray, or murder are either dark-skinned or “liberal agitators.”
We’re now way down the road to the complete destruction of America, all in less than two years, as I wrote and warned of in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy in 2020.
The courts are packed with Trump toadies; thousands of lawyers have been purged from government; the FBI is now weaponized against Americans; Blacks and women are being pushed out of senior military commands by an openly white supremacist defense secretary; our history is being whitewashed in national parks, museums, and every federal property; and Trump’s face hangs, 60 feet tall, on multiple federal buildings.
And now they’re coming for the news. If it falls, recovering our republic will be possible—the examples are Hungary with Peter Magyar and Volodymyr Zelenskyy being elected in Ukraine—but very, very difficult. It will take years and cost a fortune both in work, cash, and probably blood, as it did in those two countries.
But we can gain courage from our heroes of this moment. Scott Pelley is unintimidated, telling us bluntly that the new owner and management of CBS tried to force him to lie to us on the air and spin stories so they could please wannabe-Emperor Trump. When they tried to lie their way out of the PR mess Pelley created for them, he immediately called out their falsehoods.
This crisis isn’t limited to CBS: the same nepo-baby billionaire who’s taken over that network also, according to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), now owns, controls, or soon will control:
TikTok, Warner Bros., Paramount, DC Studios, The Discovery Channel, CNN, CBS, HBO, BET, Fandango, Rotten Tomatoes, Nickelodeon, MTV, Cartoon Network, Food Network, Travel Channel, Investigation Discovery, Animal Planet, Comedy Central, Showtime, TBS, TLC, HGTV, and more.
Oligarchy and monopoly are two sides of the same anti-democratic fascist coin. They’re always tied together.
As anti-democracy billionaires continue their march across the American media landscape and pour billions into elections, it falls to us to resist.
To register our discontent with those outlets. To boycott them. To demand that our politicians start breaking up the monopolies that Reagan legalized when in 1983 he ordered the Securities and Exchange Commission, FCC, and Federal Trade Commission to stop enforcing the antitrust laws that went all the way back to the 1890s (leading to three decades of “merger mania”).
Monopolies are destructive, but media monopolies are pure Putin-style poison.
We all must become truth tellers, regardless of whether our platforms are, like mine, on radio, TV, and Substack, or if the place we can make our mark and speak our voice is on social media, the local newspaper’s letters to the editor, financial or volunteer support for a fighting progressive politician, or the town square with a protest sign.
We are all Scott Pelley.
Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
Thom Hartmann
Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of "The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream" (2020); "The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America" (2019); and more than 25 other books in print.
Full Bio >
I started in radio news as a teenage reporter at WITL-AM/FM in Lansing, Michigan, then the number one station in the capitol city. I began reporting from the Capitol and City Hall, and was writing and reading the morning newscasts within a year.
The station owner was a hardcore Goldwater Republican, our news director was a liberal but Libertarian-curious Democrat, and I was a long-haired anti-war hippie member of Michigan State University Students for a Democratic Society
I did the news there for years, and nobody ever told me how to spin it or what to insert or delete. I knew that I couldn’t bias it to reflect my own opinions: the news—accurate, factual, honest information—was sacred.
It was also the cost of our broadcast license, and we all knew it. The widely misunderstood Fairness Doctrine’s main demand was that radio and TV stations “program in the public interest” and that was widely understood to mean straightforward, reliable, faithful-to-reality news at the top and bottom of every hour on radio and an hour-long news block in prime time on TV.
As anti-democracy billionaires continue their march across the American media landscape and pour billions into elections, it falls to us to resist.
We did this—and embraced the Fairness Doctrine—because we knew it was part of the price of freedom, of democracy in our republic. When Thomas Jefferson said he’d rather live in a country with newspapers and no government than in one with a government but no newspapers, he wasn’t knocking government; he’d help create ours and was its president for eight years. He was talking about the vital importance of an honest and free press.
Part of that honesty came from the competition; there were multiple stations in Lansing and most had an in-house news operation like ours, and the ones that didn’t ran the CBS or AP radio newscast twice an hour. Honesty and clarity were essential to get and maintain an audience, as well as hanging onto our license.
Then-President Ronald Reagan ended the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, and now President Donald Trump and his oligarch enablers are trying to bury the entire concept of honest, straightforward news.
Over the past year and a half we’ve watched Brendan Carr, Trump’s hitman at the Federal Communications Commission, go to Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) conferences and brag about how he’s going to assault stations that say things he and Trump dislike. He’s trying to intimidate ABC affiliates into muzzling Jimmy Kimmel—again. And he succeeded in taking down Stephen Colbert.
And a Trump-adjacent billionaire nepo baby has acquired CBS and is systematically stripping it of its journalistic integrity, starting with the evening news and now gutting the nation’s No. 1 news magazine show, “60 Minutes.”
Storied journalist and “60 Minutes” reporter Scott Pelley isn’t taking it lying down, even though it’s a virtual certainty that he has the standard non-disparagement clause that most media operations now require for talent, which forbid them to ever speak ill of their former employer should they leave for any reason. He’ll probably get sued for it, but he’s a man committed to the truth.
Trump, David Ellison, Bari Weiss, the billionaire owners of Sinclair, the billionaire Murdoch family’s Fox “News,” the 1,000+ billionaire-owned radio stations across the country, the billionaire-subsidized podcasters, and billionaire-owned social media sites like Facebook and X that have apparently been algorithmically slanted toward Trump’s neofascist movement are all following an ancient script.
Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Hideki Tojo, and Francisco Franco all seized control of the news in their countries in their first year in power. It took both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán two or so years, because they wrote a new script for the takeover: Sue the news outlets and reporters into bankruptcy for “defamation” or “slander,” then have friendly oligarchs take over the outlets.
Orbán even came to CPAC in Dallas to tell Republicans that they should do the same thing as he had done by turning America’s media over to right-wing billionaires. He also told the American CPAC conference in Budapest four years ago, during the Biden administration, that they should do the same in America when Republicans next seized control of the US government.
“Have your own media,” he said. “It’s the only way to point out the insanity of the progressive left. The problem is that the Western media is adjusted to the leftist viewpoint. Those who taught reporters in universities already had progressive leftist principles.”
He added:
Of course, the GOP has its media allies but they can’t compete with the mainstream liberal media. My friend Tucker Carlson is the only one who puts himself out there. His show is the most popular. What does it mean? It means programs like his should be broadcasted day and night. Or, as you say, 24/7.
Thus, this is now the Putin-Orbán-Trump formula:Manufacture a crisis.
Declare an “emergency.”
Seize powers the Constitution doesn’t grant.
Bypass Congress.
Bully or ignore the courts.
Use masked, secret police and the military against your own residents.
Send people to foreign concentration camps.
Build concentration camps within the United States.
Prosecute lawyers and judges.
Assert control over universities.
Merge corporate and state interests.
Cow the media into silence about your corruption and crimes.
Then call it all “law and order.”
Trump is 18 months into his project, and he’s already taken down the Voice of America, defunded PBS and NPR, seen the Washington Post and LA Times acquired by sycophantic billionaires, and turned CBS over to a nepo-baby billionaire who’s going after CNN next. As Jefferson pointed out, this is how democracies are fatally corrupted, which is apparently Trump and his billionaire enablers’ goal.
Combine that with a capture of the police and prosecutorial agencies of the government so, like in Putin’s Russia, they can harass and prosecute anybody who dares speak up against their destruction of our way of life and you have the classic formula for turning a democratic republic into an oligarchic dictatorship.
The classic symbol of authoritarian governance dating back to ancient Rome and Caligula—violence as entertainment—will come to the White House as musclebound men will beat each other bloody and senseless for spectacle and the amusement of our 80-year-old “president” on our nation’s birthday.
Masked thugs snatching people off the street without warrants and putting them into concentration camps in violation of the Fouth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Amendments also plays well for the fascist Klan-remnant Republican base, so long as the people they beat, pepper spray, or murder are either dark-skinned or “liberal agitators.”
We’re now way down the road to the complete destruction of America, all in less than two years, as I wrote and warned of in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy in 2020.
The courts are packed with Trump toadies; thousands of lawyers have been purged from government; the FBI is now weaponized against Americans; Blacks and women are being pushed out of senior military commands by an openly white supremacist defense secretary; our history is being whitewashed in national parks, museums, and every federal property; and Trump’s face hangs, 60 feet tall, on multiple federal buildings.
And now they’re coming for the news. If it falls, recovering our republic will be possible—the examples are Hungary with Peter Magyar and Volodymyr Zelenskyy being elected in Ukraine—but very, very difficult. It will take years and cost a fortune both in work, cash, and probably blood, as it did in those two countries.
But we can gain courage from our heroes of this moment. Scott Pelley is unintimidated, telling us bluntly that the new owner and management of CBS tried to force him to lie to us on the air and spin stories so they could please wannabe-Emperor Trump. When they tried to lie their way out of the PR mess Pelley created for them, he immediately called out their falsehoods.
This crisis isn’t limited to CBS: the same nepo-baby billionaire who’s taken over that network also, according to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), now owns, controls, or soon will control:
TikTok, Warner Bros., Paramount, DC Studios, The Discovery Channel, CNN, CBS, HBO, BET, Fandango, Rotten Tomatoes, Nickelodeon, MTV, Cartoon Network, Food Network, Travel Channel, Investigation Discovery, Animal Planet, Comedy Central, Showtime, TBS, TLC, HGTV, and more.
Oligarchy and monopoly are two sides of the same anti-democratic fascist coin. They’re always tied together.
As anti-democracy billionaires continue their march across the American media landscape and pour billions into elections, it falls to us to resist.
To register our discontent with those outlets. To boycott them. To demand that our politicians start breaking up the monopolies that Reagan legalized when in 1983 he ordered the Securities and Exchange Commission, FCC, and Federal Trade Commission to stop enforcing the antitrust laws that went all the way back to the 1890s (leading to three decades of “merger mania”).
Monopolies are destructive, but media monopolies are pure Putin-style poison.
We all must become truth tellers, regardless of whether our platforms are, like mine, on radio, TV, and Substack, or if the place we can make our mark and speak our voice is on social media, the local newspaper’s letters to the editor, financial or volunteer support for a fighting progressive politician, or the town square with a protest sign.
We are all Scott Pelley.
Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
Thom Hartmann
Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of "The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream" (2020); "The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America" (2019); and more than 25 other books in print.
Full Bio >
Fight the Trump Media Takeover With Tax Credits for Independent Reporting
If 150 million people took advantage of a $100 credit, that would make $15 billion available to support independent media.
People walk by the CBS Broadcast Center in Manhattan on December 23, 2025 in New York City.
(Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Dean Baker
Jun 05, 2026
If 150 million people took advantage of a $100 credit, that would make $15 billion available to support independent media.
People walk by the CBS Broadcast Center in Manhattan on December 23, 2025 in New York City.
(Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Dean Baker
Jun 05, 2026
Beat the Press
It is terrible to see Bari Weiss, under orders from Trumper owner David Ellison, dismantle “60 Minutes” and the rest of CBS News. CBS was never close to being a paragon of unbiased reporting; the rich always had a disproportionate voice, but the network, and especially “60 Minutes,” did much excellent investigative reporting.
The Weiss-Ellison team is explicitly saying that this will no longer be the case under their leadership. Any investigative reporting this crew does will most likely be on President Donald Trump’s political opponents. And the material they present will likely be as distorted as the lies that Trump spouts on a daily basis.
The problem goes well beyond CBS. The Ellison family is also planning to take over CNN through its acquisition of Warner Bros., the parent company. The Trumper trio of Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk own TikTok, Facebook and Instagram, and X, respectively. They do not hide their efforts to use their control of these social media platforms to push their political agenda.
And it goes beyond just outright control. Trump and Brendan Carr, his chair of the Federal Communications Commission, have said that they would use the federal government’s regulatory powers to punish outlets that broadcast material they don’t like. Trump used this threat to extract tribute from both ABC News and CBS News (pre-Weiss) over absurd lawsuits.
The media matter hugely for democracy, much more than campaign financing.
All in all, this is a really bad story. But there are things that can be done other than whine. First, the Ellison’s takeover of Warner is not a done deal. People can protest this monopolization of both movie production and news. Even Trumper politicians can be forced to respond to public pressure. Note the seeming retreat from Trump’s $1.8 billion slush fund for his criminal friends. Giving tax dollars to Trump’s chosen criminals was too much for people to stomach, and the Republicans in Congress were forced to nix it.
There are also a large number of independent outlets that continue to do solid reporting. I would put ProPublica at the top of that list, but there are many others. I would also include The New York Times and NPR, despite my many criticisms of both outlets over the years. And there are dozens of smaller publications, way too many for me to list, that people should look to support. Instead of buying something you see advertised on CBS or any other corrupt media outlet, send the money you would have spent to The Nation, In These Times, Payday Report, or any of a number of other independent outlets.
But we really need to go beyond what people cough up out of goodwill. The billionaires have endless money to push their Trumpian nonsense. The nickels and dimes that ordinary people can afford is not a match. We really need to have government support for independent media, and I’m not talking about going back to the old days with the federal government coughing up $500 million a year (0.007% of the budget) for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
We need an individual tax credit or voucher, modeled on the charitable contribution tax deduction. The difference is that this money would be designated for news outlets, and that it would be a credit (say $100), available to everyone, not a deduction from taxes. This way the money would go to the outlets that people find valuable, not the ones the government has chosen. (There is a question of eligibility, but this has generally not been a major problem in qualifying for tax-exempt status with the Internal Revenue Service.)
This route can make a huge amount of money available to support independent reporting. If it was set up nationally and 150 million people took advantage of a $100 credit, that would make $15 billion available to support independent media. That is roughly 300 times ProPublica’s annual budget.
Needless to say, not everyone will use their credit to support media progressives will like. Some may support tabloid-type reporting on Hollywood figures. Some of it will go to support right-wing Fox News- type propaganda. But if even 20% went to support real news, it would be an enormous boon for independent reporting.
And the great thing about this credit is that it can be done at the state and local level, so we don’t have to wait for the forces of good to retake Washington. There have already been some efforts in this direction around the country. In this respect, it’s worth noting that Katie Wilson, Seattle’s new progressive mayor, is a big proponent. If Seattle or some other progressive city or state led the way, it could set an example for others to follow.
To many, this sort of media tax credit will be a new idea. We all know the old line about intellectuals having a hard time with new ideas. But it is really important that people overcome their difficulties. The media matter hugely for democracy, much more than campaign financing. (Sorry, but it’s a bit nuts to think that campaign ads affect voting, but not what people see between the ads.)
I’ve pushed this scheme for a long time, and maybe it’s not the best plan. But if people have better ideas, put them on the table. Whining over the right’s takeover of the media is not a political strategy.
It is terrible to see Bari Weiss, under orders from Trumper owner David Ellison, dismantle “60 Minutes” and the rest of CBS News. CBS was never close to being a paragon of unbiased reporting; the rich always had a disproportionate voice, but the network, and especially “60 Minutes,” did much excellent investigative reporting.
The Weiss-Ellison team is explicitly saying that this will no longer be the case under their leadership. Any investigative reporting this crew does will most likely be on President Donald Trump’s political opponents. And the material they present will likely be as distorted as the lies that Trump spouts on a daily basis.
The problem goes well beyond CBS. The Ellison family is also planning to take over CNN through its acquisition of Warner Bros., the parent company. The Trumper trio of Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk own TikTok, Facebook and Instagram, and X, respectively. They do not hide their efforts to use their control of these social media platforms to push their political agenda.
And it goes beyond just outright control. Trump and Brendan Carr, his chair of the Federal Communications Commission, have said that they would use the federal government’s regulatory powers to punish outlets that broadcast material they don’t like. Trump used this threat to extract tribute from both ABC News and CBS News (pre-Weiss) over absurd lawsuits.
The media matter hugely for democracy, much more than campaign financing.
All in all, this is a really bad story. But there are things that can be done other than whine. First, the Ellison’s takeover of Warner is not a done deal. People can protest this monopolization of both movie production and news. Even Trumper politicians can be forced to respond to public pressure. Note the seeming retreat from Trump’s $1.8 billion slush fund for his criminal friends. Giving tax dollars to Trump’s chosen criminals was too much for people to stomach, and the Republicans in Congress were forced to nix it.
There are also a large number of independent outlets that continue to do solid reporting. I would put ProPublica at the top of that list, but there are many others. I would also include The New York Times and NPR, despite my many criticisms of both outlets over the years. And there are dozens of smaller publications, way too many for me to list, that people should look to support. Instead of buying something you see advertised on CBS or any other corrupt media outlet, send the money you would have spent to The Nation, In These Times, Payday Report, or any of a number of other independent outlets.
But we really need to go beyond what people cough up out of goodwill. The billionaires have endless money to push their Trumpian nonsense. The nickels and dimes that ordinary people can afford is not a match. We really need to have government support for independent media, and I’m not talking about going back to the old days with the federal government coughing up $500 million a year (0.007% of the budget) for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
We need an individual tax credit or voucher, modeled on the charitable contribution tax deduction. The difference is that this money would be designated for news outlets, and that it would be a credit (say $100), available to everyone, not a deduction from taxes. This way the money would go to the outlets that people find valuable, not the ones the government has chosen. (There is a question of eligibility, but this has generally not been a major problem in qualifying for tax-exempt status with the Internal Revenue Service.)
This route can make a huge amount of money available to support independent reporting. If it was set up nationally and 150 million people took advantage of a $100 credit, that would make $15 billion available to support independent media. That is roughly 300 times ProPublica’s annual budget.
Needless to say, not everyone will use their credit to support media progressives will like. Some may support tabloid-type reporting on Hollywood figures. Some of it will go to support right-wing Fox News- type propaganda. But if even 20% went to support real news, it would be an enormous boon for independent reporting.
And the great thing about this credit is that it can be done at the state and local level, so we don’t have to wait for the forces of good to retake Washington. There have already been some efforts in this direction around the country. In this respect, it’s worth noting that Katie Wilson, Seattle’s new progressive mayor, is a big proponent. If Seattle or some other progressive city or state led the way, it could set an example for others to follow.
To many, this sort of media tax credit will be a new idea. We all know the old line about intellectuals having a hard time with new ideas. But it is really important that people overcome their difficulties. The media matter hugely for democracy, much more than campaign financing. (Sorry, but it’s a bit nuts to think that campaign ads affect voting, but not what people see between the ads.)
I’ve pushed this scheme for a long time, and maybe it’s not the best plan. But if people have better ideas, put them on the table. Whining over the right’s takeover of the media is not a political strategy.
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