Posts Tagged ‘Paramount’
“A free press can, of course, be good or bad; but, most certainly without freedom, the press will never be anything but bad”*…
Your correspondent is writing this post a few days early, on Friday, the 18th, the day after Congress passed the bill terminating federal funding for public broadcasters, now at the White House for signature. It’s a dark day, especially for those rural areas that stand to lose their only local media outlets and journalistic sources. But while this is, your correspondent believes, tragic, it is only a corner of the larger media “battlefield,” most of which isn’t non-commerical…
Rusty Foster on the frankly terrifying moves afoot on that broader terrain…
Yesterday Washington Post Opinion columnist Philip Bump announced he was parachuting out of the Post’s extremely hardcore new right-wing reinvention by taking a buyout. Bump was the last remaining reason to visit the Post’s Opinion section, where he was a thoughtful and methodical practitioner of what we would have called “data journalism” before the spectacular flameout of Nate Silver’s career and the entire existence of David Leonhardt made the term too embarrassing to use. His last column was titled “When institutions crumble, strongmen step in,” and looked at a range of polls quantifying the decades-long decline of Americans’ trust in our institutions, including the news media. Bump’s tenure at the Post ended with the words:
Trump has for years stoked the idea that actually, having your own facts is fine. And even as his base chooses facts that he finds inconvenient in the moment, he’s still pushing toward the next phase: Everyone is entitled to the facts that Trump presents.
What institutions of power will be left to disagree?
In his monologue Tuesday, CBS Late Show host and my former boss’s former boss Stephen Colbert called his (soon to be) former boss’s current boss Paramount Corporation’s $16 million settlement with Donald Trump “a big fat bribe.”
Last night, Colbert announced that CBS will cancel The Late Show entirely at the end of his current contract, in May 2026. Colbert is currently the number one show in late night, and according to Jed Rosenzweig in LateNighter, “CBS’s Late Show was the only show among the nine tracked by LateNighter to draw more total viewers in Q2 than it had in the first quarter of 2025.” CBS released a statement saying that “This is purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night. It is not related in any way to the show’s performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount.”
It’s definitely not part of the Trump bribe. Do not put in the newspaper that this is part of the Trump bribe. We’re just canceling the number one show in its time slot because of… reasons. Backdrops! Headwinds! Serious TV business.
This is, of course, obvious bullshit. Parker Molloy pulled together all the red yarn better than I would’ve had the patience to, so just go read why it’s bullshit over at The Present Age. But the main thing to know is that this whole CBS/Paramount/Trump settlement happened in order to secure Trump administration approval for a media holding company called Skydance to “merge with” (i.e. purchase) Paramount. Skydance is run by David Ellison, a large adult Butthead and the number one boy of Oracle founder, Donald Trump pal, and the world’s second-richest person Larry Ellison, who gave his son $8 billion to buy Paramount and turn it into more of the same cynical garbage that every other media company has become.
Earlier this week I met someone new and he asked me what I do for a living, and I said “I’m a writer,” and he said “Oh, what do you write?” This conversation happens often enough, and in virtually the same words, that I recognized right away where we were headed. I told him about Tabs and at that point although my new friend didn’t know it yet, we were already on a greased slide toward the moment where I would say: “…but these days I only write it once or twice a week, because the American news media has been systematically and intentionally destroyed by a handful of billionaires.”
“I realize that sounds a little crazy!” I always add with an apologetic laugh, because while outwardly he’s nodding and making a polite “oh really!” face, I can tell that on the inside he’s expecting me to bring up MKULTRA and possibly the JFK assassination next. But it’s not crazy, and you don’t need to believe in any conspiracy theories to see what’s happened. For example:
In 2008, Sam Zell bought the Tribune Corp, loaded it with debt like it was a distressed office building, and installed a drunk1 radio DJ to run it. The Tribune Corp promptly went bankrupt and as part of its ensuing slow-motion collapse sold the LA Times to biotech tycoon Patrick Soon-Shiong in 2018. By 2025, Soon-Shiong had purged the LA Times of any elements distressing to his distinctly South African sensibility, such as institutional commitment to newsroom diversity or informing the public about things he would prefer we didn’t know.
Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post for a pittance in 2013, and for several years operated it as a reasonable and hands-off steward. But ten years later, Bezos would have a jacked new physique, a buxom new girlfriend, and soon he’d have a whole new set of buddies to impress. Claiming the Post was “on a pace to lose about $100 million in 2023,” (an amount of money it would take Jeff Bezos fully 28.5 hours of existing in the world to earn back) the newsroom job cuts began. By last summer, Bezos was bigfooting his own Opinion section’s Presidential endorsement and as of today, with craven former British tabloid bagman and drunk2 Will Lewis nominally in charge, almost everyone in the newsroom who could get out has gotten out and the paper continues hemorrhaging subscribers.
Peter Thiel paid just $10 million to kill Gawker outright, without even the pretense of capitalism justifying it, although he did eventually bid to purchase its remains as a bit. Elon Musk paid $44 billion to turn Twitter into a Matrix-style battery farm feeding a slurry of racist posts into his A.I. MechaHitler. Three days after Trump’s second inauguration, as one witty and perceptive media watcher reported at the time, “CNN head Mark Thompson offered Jim Acosta the option of moving his show from 10am to midnight and renaming it “The Jim Acosta Sucks Fake News Hour (Do Not Watch).” Facebook built a trillion dollar business in part by providing its users a centralized and individualized feed of interesting news stories, and then shut off the click tap as soon as Mark Zuckerburg felt he could afford to. Google built a $2 trillion business indexing news stories for search, as well as absorbing something like one third of online ad spend, with much of that also coming from news websites. But the moment that Google could use A.I. to ingest all that news content and serve it up muddled and lightly de-plagiarized right there on google dot com instead, news publishers immediately saw their search traffic crater too.
This list is by no means comprehensive, it’s just what I could immediately pull off the very top of the domepiece before I got tired of typing. Suffice it to say: many such cases.
When I told my new friend that the American news media has been systematically and intentionally destroyed by a handful of billionaires, he asked an extremely reasonable question, which was: “but why?” And what makes this feel like a conspiracy is that there is no single answer to “why?” Sometimes it’s arrogance, sometimes it’s ideology, sometimes it’s purely money. Often it’s a messy combination of all three.
But if you really want to step back a bit, the reason why is that we have a socioeconomic system that concentrates nation-state level wealth and power in the hands of a few individuals, with virtually no checks on what they can choose to do with it. So if Larry Ellison wants to turn CBS News into Bari Weiss’s Free Press TV, or Jeff Bezos wants to make The Washington Post into an ideological subsidiary of the Cato Institute… what institutions of power will be left to disagree?
It’s not a conspiracy, it’s simply what happened: “Billionaires Destroyed American News Media On Purpose,” from @rusty.todayintabs.com in his essential newsletter Today in Tabs.
Every last one of the links above is worth clicking– but perhaps especially Parker Malloy‘s piece.
(Image above: source)
* Albert Camus
###
As we pray for the press, we might send investigative birthday greetings to Paul Reuter; he was born on this date in 1819. A pioneer of telegraphy and news reporting, he was a reporter, media owner, and the founder of the Reuters news agency (that provides stories both to new outlets and directly to the public).
In 2008, Reuters was acquired by the Thompson Corporation of Canda, resulting in the the Thomson Reuters Corporation. Reuters reporting has been hudged fair and fact-based by three independent assessors.
“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.”*…
And as Gail Sherman observes, that principle operates at a pretty basic level…
There is a Royal Order of Adjectives, and you follow it without knowing what it is—a particular sequence to use when more than one adjective precedes a noun. There are exceptions, of course, because English is three languages in a trenchcoat. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, in general, the proper order is:
Opinion
Size
Physical quality
Shape
Age
Color
Origin
Material
Type
PurposeMost people couldn’t tell you this rule, but everyone follows it. If you use the wrong order, it just sounds weird. If you have a fancy new blue metal lunchbox but call it a metal new fancy blue lunchbox, people might be worried you are having a stroke…
“There is a Royal Order of Adjectives, and you follow it without knowing what it is,” from @CambridgeWords via @BoingBoing.
* Tom Stoppard
###
As we parse, we might send powerfully-phrased birthday greetings to a spare but graceful user of adjectives, Seymour Wilson “Budd” Schulberg; he was born on this date in 1914. A screenwriter, television producer, novelist, and sportswriter, Schulberg is best remembered for his novels What Makes Sammy Run? (1941) and The Harder They Fall (1947), as well as his screenplays for On the Waterfront (1954, for which he received an Academy Award) and A Face in the Crowd (1957).
As a sportswriter, Schulberg was most famously chief boxing correspondent for Sports Illustrated. He wrote some well-received books on boxing, including Sparring with Hemingway and was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame (in 2002).
The son of B. P. Schulberg, head of Paramount Studios in its golden age, Budd wrote Moving Pictures: Memoirs of a Hollywood Prince, an autobiography covering his youth in Hollywood, growing up in the 1920s and 1930s among the famous.
“American music starts here”*…
The story of Paramount Records is a fascinating one—the beginning is set about 100 years ago, in a Wisconsin furniture company that began pressing records in hopes that’d help them sell record players, which in their early years were indeed whoppin’ big ol’ pieces of furniture. The middle sees that furniture company curating and releasing a jaw-dropping and still legendary catalogue of classic early jazz and Delta blues 78s by the likes of Charley Patton, Ma Rainey, and Blind Lemon Jefferson. The end of the story sees the closing of the company and disgruntled employees flinging those now priceless shellac records into the Milwaukee River and melting down the metal masters for scrap. The whole story can be found in greater detail online, or in the books Paramount’s Rise and Fall and Do Not Sell At Any Price.
What concerns us here are the label’s print ads, which ran in The Chicago Defender. I’ve tried mightily to find the names of the artists who drew these. People in a better position to know than I assure me their identities are lost to the years, though they may have been staff illustrators at a Madison ad agency. The loss of that knowledge is a damned shame, because without knowing it, those artists altered the history of underground comix, by serving as an acknowledged influence on that form’s grand pooh-bah, Robert Crumb. Even a superficial glance at some of these ads reveals a precursor to Crumb’s famous signature style (it’s strikingly evident in the slouching posture of some of these characters), and Crumb paid direct homage to these artists in a series of trading card sets that have been compiled into the book R. Crumb’s Heroes of Blues, Jazz & Country—the comix artist’s abiding passion for the music of the early recording era has never been a secret…
Appropriately, this slideshow of Crumb’s blues-inspired works is set to a Paramount record, Charley Patton’s “Down the Dirt Road Blues”:
email readers click here for video
More of the Paramount story– and more examples of the extraordinary ads– at “The Amazing Old Paramount Records Ads that Inspired R. Crumb.”
[TotH to friend Ted Nelson]
* Michael Ventura, in the wonderful essay “Hear That Long Snake Moan”
###
As we re-track our lives to twelve-bar blues, we might recall that it was on this date in 1956 that Richard Wayne Penniman– better known as Little Richard– entered the U.S. pop charts for the first time with “Tutti Frutti,” a song he’d recorded four months earlier. As History.com reports,
“Tutti frutti, good booty…” was the way the version went that Little Richard was accustomed to performing in his club act, and from there it got into lyrical territory that would demand censorship even by today’s standards. It was during a lunch break from his first-ever recording session that Little Richard went to the piano and banged that filthy tune out for producer Bumps Blackwell, who was extremely unhappy with the results of the session so far. As Blackwell would later tell it, “He hits that piano, dididididididididi…and starts to sing, ‘Awop-bop-a-Loo-Mop a-good Goddam…’ and I said ‘Wow! That’s what I want from you Richard. That’s a hit!'” But first, the song’s racy lyrics had to be reworked for there to be any chance of the song being deemed acceptable by the conservative American audience of the 1950s.
An aspiring local songwriter by the name of Dorothy La Bostrie was quickly summoned to the Dew Drop Inn [in New Orleans] to come up with new lyrics for the un-recordable original, and by the time they all returned from lunch, the “Tutti frutti, all rooty” with which we are now familiar was written down alongside lyrics about two gals named Sue and Daisy. In the last 15 minutes of that historic recording session on September 14, 1955, “Tutti Frutti” was recorded, and Little Richard’s claim to have been present at the birth of rock and roll was secured.
Now you see ’em…
… Now you don’t.
Consider Wikipedia’s (incomplete* but fascinating) “List of People Who Disappeared Mysteriously“: from Spartacus and Edward V of England to Ambrose Bierce and D.B. Cooper, there’s still no trace…
[TotH to Parijata D. Mackey]
* There are about 900,000 missing persons cases per year– almost 2,500 per day– in the U.S. alone; in countries where politically-motivated “disappearances” occur and/or where human trafficking is an even more regular practice, the rates can run proportionately higher… And then, there are those who vanish while sailing or exploring or otherwise adventuring…
The rate of disappearance in the U.S. has risen six-fold since 1980; but as the Wikipedia list illustrates, vanishing certainly isn’t a recent phenomenon.
As we check the clasps on our ID bracelets, we might wish a hilarious Happy Birthday to writer-director Preston Sturges; he was born (Edmund Preston Biden) on this date in 1898. After a brief career as a Broadway playwright, Sturges sold a screenplay (The Power and the Glory, produced by Fox, starring Spencer Tracy) in 1933; the film did relatively well at the box office, but had a huge impact in Hollywood (e.g., its use of flashbacks and flashforwards was an acknowledged source of inspiration to the screenwriters of Citizen Kane). For the balance of that decade Sturges worked as a studio screenwriter, until, in 1939, he agreed to sell the script for The Great McGinty to Paramount for $1 in return for the chance to direct. The screenplay earned him an Academy Award, the first “Original Screenplay” Oscar; the success of the film assured his chance to continue in the Director’s chair.
Sturges worked in Hollywood for almost 30 years; but his legacy was built in the five years from 1939 through 1943, when he wrote and directed The Great McGinty, Christmas in July, The Lady Eve, Sullivan’s Travels, The Palm Beach Story, The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, and Hail the Conquering Hero. Four of those films– The Lady Eve, Sullivan’s Travels, The Palm Beach Story, and The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek— are on the American Film Institute’s list of 100 Funniest American Films. Arguably they should all be– along with such later gems as The Sins of Harold Diddlebock and Unfaithfully Yours.
Almost the same as not being there…
Further to yesterday’s touristy theme, from the ever-interesting folks at Strange Maps, a guide developed in 1927 by Paramount Pictures, advising producers where to look for foreign locations… without leaving California:
More at “Scene to be Believed: California as the World.”
As we reconsider our packing strategies, we might recall that it was on this date in 1980 that CNN debuted– demonstrating that the whole world could also be found in Georgia.
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