Stephen Colbert Cancelled; Monopoly Media Again Defines Fascism Down

🎵 Don't wanna be an American idiot. Don't want a nation under the new media. And can you hear the sound of hysteria? The subliminal mindf*ck America - Green Day, "American Idiot"

Corporate Media’s Dying in Their Self-Imposed Darkness—Let Them

Last night Stephen Colbert announced that his late night show would be ending next year at this time—and he made it clear it was not by his choice.

Yes, the monopoly-media morons for whom he’s entertained tens of millions of ad-viewing viewers have deemed it so, and I’m sure it has nothing to do with how Colbert has used his brilliant timing and razor-sharp wit to disembowel Don-Don on the regular.

Why no, that would never bunch the collective panties of the very same autocracy-bangers who stuffed a wad of cash in Trump’s g-string—$16 million, to be precise—to settle a ludicrous lawsuit as coherent as Rush Limbaugh. If he spoke to you today.

The facts of this lout-inspired lawsuit? 60 Minutes decided to engage in arcane and rarely utlilized practice of “editing”an interview with Kamala Harris. I know, the anger’s welling up inside me as well. I mean, JFC, what’s next!? Using b-roll? Adding a voiceover? Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria!

But that didn’t stop Paramount from giving Trump a currency-based oil massage. Or was it CBS? Viacom?? It’s hard to keep track these days when only SIX companies with like 8,247 divisions, partnerships and subsidiaries own 90% of what we watch, hear, attend and play. Just take a look below and tell me this makes any economic or political sense—ya know, if you like silly things—transparency, honesty, context, no conflicts of interest—in journalism:

Awesome! How could that much conglomerated power be a bad thing for democracy?!? I mean, as long as you don’t care about the little things like healthcare, family stability, crap-quality, childcare, good working conditions, price gauging, the environment, Eric Trump…

Hell, you look at all of this and it’s almost like the head of CBS back in 2016, Les Moonves, said this about Trump’s election: “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” Oh, right, that’s because he f*king did.

So, yeah, you should definitely be counting on the patriotism, geniality and forthright nature of that ridiculous pile of corporate crap above. They’d absolutely report honestly on something like Trump’s trashy budget bill, becauase I’m sure none of their various entities—by which I mean almost all of them—benefit from it.

And an outfit like that would never fire Colbert for political reasons. Never! But, wait, there’s more! (Nothing for $19.95, I promise).

There was this little gem when CBS bribed…err, settled with Trump and his University-of-Phoenix law team. Because, let’s face it friends, when you’re the proud owners of Nickelodeon Game Studios, 505 Games, Paramount Game Studios, South Park Digital Studios, Sega, Ready Player Me and more, you get that sometimes you have to pay to play.

The $16 million settlement over an interview CBS' 60 Minutes conducted last fall with then-Vice President Kamala Harris smooths the path for Redstone and Paramount to secure the approval of the Federal Communications Commission to sell the company to Skydance Media, a deal bankrolled by Oracle founder Larry Ellison, a Trump ally. The FCC must sign off on the transfer of the broadcast licenses for CBS' local TV stations for the deal to go through.

Round and round the circle jerk goes. And where it stops we all freakin know. See Francisco Franco. Or Augusto Pinochet. Suharto. I know we weren’t alive in the 1900s, but didn’t anyone ever read about this sh*t? Does Teddy Roosevelt ring a bell?

But, alas, Teddy isn’t here, so big corporations and billionaires merge with a group of grifting, authoritarian asshats—the bestest of friends!—or the definition of fascism. Even as we’ve watched their role in the dumbing down of our public to get to a place where a criminal, traitor, adjudicated rapist, mentally-drained swamp, racist, creator of Eric and lifetime failure at everything imaginable could be President. Twice!

And all his little mini-me’s.

And if you thought MTVTBSComedyCentralCBSShowtime was bad, the other five companies who control pretty much all the rest of our information are every bit as pregnant with corporate-fecal matter. There aren’t words that do justice to what a bunch of craven, cynical, greed-and-fame driven Tapper-heads they are.

Here’s a list from just the past six-ish months—journalists who’ve been pushed out b/c they told the truth—or were “mean, nasty, or unfair” as our 3rd-grade-vocabulary’d, pinhead President would say. Whether they were fired or left, all are gone because they could no longer be honest reporters at these intellectually-barren outhouses:

• Jim Acosta and Don Lemon left CNN

• Katie Phang, Mehdi Hasan, Jonathan Capehart and others gone from MSNBC

• WaPo’s $45 million (wedding) man, Bezos, kills a Kamala endorsement, kisses Trump’s arse…Jen Rubin, Ann Telnaes, David Shipley, etc head for the lifeboats

• Terry Moran gone from ABC—an outlet that like CBS bribed Trump when he cried about their coverage—after he told the truth about Stephen Miller

• The New York Times? Their best mind and Trump critic, Paul Krugman, took off. They should rebrand as Hillary’s Emails News or Biden’s Too Old Post. They couldn’t find political context if someone lit it on fire and tossed at ‘em

We can go on. But I think you see a pattern. You don’t have a beautiful mind (or bill). Media monopolies are capitulating and collapsing…and every time they do their viewers cut cords, turn them off and their ratings, ironically, crash.

That is the good news here. They’re dying. They’ve lost the plot, no longer even resembling their purpose for inclusion in the First Amendment. Just another collection of prep-school-educated, haughty twerps hanging onto reputation and sucking up every last dollar they can from buyouts or book deals.

Which I guess is why so many of the folks I mentioned up above decamped…Here, at Substack. More will follow, as this is the future. Corporate press are velociraptors. Sure, they can still turn a door knob, but they hail from a long-gone era.

So, when it comes to corporate media, here is your plan:

Cancel your subscriptions.

Turn. Them. Off.

Let. Them. Die.

Legacy outlets aren’t adversaries of power. They’re enablers of it, they go to cocktail parties with it and protect it. Independent media takes on power.

Our biggest mistake as Democrats? Still clinging to these bygone institutions that have outlived their purpose. We must create ones we need for this moment. FDR didn’t hold onto what had failed us during The Great Depression. He created new structures.

It’s the right thing to do for our democracy. And has the added benefit when running in elections of not making us the protectors of a failing status quo, but on the vanguard of change people are desperately craving right now.

We’ve got Substack. We’ve got YouTube. We’ve got each other. And yeah, we’ve got Blue Amp—with a fighting chance to build real media resistance.

I started the Soundcheck Fund to do exactly that:
👉 Fund independent creators.
👉 Build new platforms.
👉 Create a media ecosystem that serves the people, not the powerful

💥 Want to help fund these creators? Build this ecosystem of independent media? Become a paid subscriber to Blue Amp today. It’s not charity—it’s rebellion. It’s building the future of our democratic republic.

The old guard’s down with fascism. Let them go. Let’s write a new playbook— broadcast it, loud and clear. If our media accomplished anything in promoting, paying and offering paens to Trump—for access, ratings, clicks, fame-whoring, book deals, corporate tax breaks—it was in showing us, sadly, that he was right about one thing:

Monopolistic, corporate media in this country undermines democracy. That makes it, by definition, an enemy of the people.

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