News commentary

Bari Weiss’s ascent at CBS News was 50 years in the making

Media | The Guardian · David Sirota and Jared Jacang Maher · last updated

A half-century ago, CBS’s own president was boasting of his support for an antidemocratic political project. Our new book uses never-before-reported documents to tell the story of a scheme to undermine accountability journalism

If you only just started paying attention to the inner workings of the media industry, you might think America’s information environment transformed overnight.

In the past few months, a president extracted settlements from media giants as his apparatchiks vowed state retribution against his opponents – all as they defunded public media at a time when the president’s biggest boosters own the algorithms that decide what information is amplified and suppressed.

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