The Guardian

09/12/2025

News outlets, including CBS, are free to run their editorial operations as they see fit. If they independently decide to hire a bias ombudsman, that’s their prerogative. If they think the best person to monitor bias at this moment is a career partisan like Kenneth Weinstein, that’s cause to question their judgment, but not necessarily a first amendment concern.

That all changes, however, when the monitoring is at the behest of the federal government. And that’s what’s going on at CBS. The creation of the ombudsman role was one of many capitulations CBS’s owners made to the Trump administration to persuade the Federal Communications Commission to approve the Paramount-Skydance merger.

Other concessions included a commitment to end DEI and, of course, the $16m dollar bribe to Trump, laundered as a settlement payment to resolve his frivolous lawsuit over 60 Minutes’ editing of an interview with then vice-president Kamala Harris. Two days after the check hit, the FCC approved the merger. And though Paramount denies it, Trump claims there was also a side agreement to sweeten the deal with $20m in pro-Trump PSAs.

Given the original sin of that rotten transaction, there is no room for benefit of the doubt when it comes to Weinstein’s hiring.

The day the hire was announced, the FCC chair, Brendan Carr – known for his lapel pin with a golden bust of Trump – told the Wall Street Journal that his supposedly independent agency was “fully aligned with the agenda that President Trump is running”. When it comes to the press, that agenda is clear: censorship and retribution.

Weinstein’s past Trump bootlicking raises questions about whether he’s too biased to monitor bias. Soon after the administration extracted its latest surrender from CBS – a commitment to no longer exercise its constitutional right to edit interviews, in response to criticism from the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem – it was reported that Weinstein had deleted his X account.