Uh-oh! Looks as if NBC’s Meet the Press host, Kristen Welker, has made it onto the White House’s Media Offenders page on whitehouse.gov after her Sunday interview with President Trump blew up with a walk-off by the president. That is, if she wasn’t already on the government maintained enemies list already — but, surely to be added to the Media Offender of the Week at the bottom of the page which invites visitors to ‘Scroll for the Truth.’ Without doubt, FCC Chair Brendan Carr had a hand in this list of offenders, to ‘encourage‘ broadcasters they need to watch their steps or risk losing their licenses.

After Welker got a bit too insistent with her questioning regarding Trump’s claims on January 6, 2021, election fraud, and the anti-weaponization fund, our thin-skinned president called Welker and NBC “crooked” and “one-sided‘ before pulling the plug to go home and sulk on Truth Social, making it clear that if journalists ask hard questions they need to watch their backs. The CBS Network was hardly a threat to the Trump administration, but news division head Bari Weiss, and the new 60 Minutes executive producer, Nick Bilton, made sure they stay within the good graces of Brendan Carr by firing Scott Pelley and several staffers of the Sunday night news magazine. It has been evident that Weiss and Bilton were brought onto CBS by oligarchs Larry and David Ellison to destroy CBS News, after purchasing the parent company, Paramount Skydance.

Elliot Kirschner wrote on Through the Fog of the firings, “This is a group of seasoned journalists who had just seen their popular leadership wiped out for no reason other than to crush their independence.” So, Pelley was fired for supposedly creating a hostile work environment after standing up to Bilton in an all-hands meeting, accusing Weiss of having no qualifications for her job, and telling Bilton he has slender qualifications for his job. The following day, Bilton “stepped on his first rake,” says Kirschner, by firing Pelley, writing in his letter, “Yesterday’s performative display of hostility enacted in front of the staff instead of in a civil, private conversation demonstrated that you have no interest in contributing to the future success of the show.”

Kirschner’s summation of Pelley’s approach is that “it is not only about the past. It is about calling out and framing the future. By honing in on Weiss’s hatred of 60 Minutes, her lack of experience, her incompetence, and Bilton as an empty suit, he is establishing the narrative for what is likely to come next. He has cast a dark and unmistakable shadow over everything they and their oligarch overlords now do. Any dip in the ratings. Any loss of trust and the audience. Any violation of journalistic ethics. They will own it. And Pelley’s warnings will echo as context.” Kirschner says the story is far from over, but there is a long way to go before that 60 Minutes stopwatch starts ticking again.

Scott Pelley released a statement on June 2, in which he says, “There has never been anything in America like 60 Minutes. The Sunday tradition is the most successful program of any kind in history…Now, the new owner of our network is casting this legend aside, apparently to curry a moment of favor with the Trump administration. The waste is heartbreaking…For my part, new management has instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story. I’ve been told to include assertions that are unverified. To date, in every case, I have managed to ignore these instructions or refuse them…But now the collapse of values at the top has become untenable. The leadership of 60 Minutes is no longer recognizable. The principles I hold dear are gone, and so I must leave as well…I depart after 37 years at CBS with one emotion — a heart brimming with gratitude for the men and women of CBS News who encouraged and enriched my work, very often at the risk of their own lives. I pray for a day when those people and their ideals are honored again — a day when sanity, competence, and courage return.”

As might be expected, satirist Andy Borowitz contributed to news of this fiasco: “Embattled CBS News chief Bari Weiss abruptly left the network on Wednesday to accept a new role as general manager of North Korea’s state-run media. ‘I was a big fan of her work at CBS,’ said the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong Un. I’ve spent years trying to purge all the news from our media and she pulled it off in a matter of months. Plus, her willingness to do David Ellison’s bidding proved she can debase herself to a leader who got his position purely from nepotism,’ he added. But Bari Weiss’s tenure at the North Korean network DLT (Dear Leader Television) got off to a rocky start as staffers quit en masse, complaining about her lack of television experience.”

In Thom Hartmann’s post on Raw America from June 5, he tells of his teenage days as a reporter for WITL-AM/FM in Lansing, Michigan, later being a writer/reader of the morning newscasts. The owner of the station was a hardcore Goldwater Republican, the news director was a Libertarian-curious Democrat and Thom was a long-haired anti-war hippie and SDS member. In his experience at WITL, nobody ever told him how to spin the news or what to insert or delete, all the while knowing that the news was sacred, with no thought of reflecting his own opinions — the broadcast license being subject to the Fairness Doctrine. The Fairness Doctrine was respected as the price of freedom, of democracy in our republic. As Hartmann writes, “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 helped create ours and was its president for 8 years. He was talking about the vital importance of an honest and free press.”

Left up to the Republicans and Reagan, the Fairness Doctrine was ended in 1987, opening the path for Trump and his oligarch enablers to bury the entire concept of honest, straightforward news. Over the past eighteen months or so, Trump hitman at the FCC, Brendan Carr, has bragged about how he’s going to assault stations that say things he and Trump dislike. Success in taking down Stephen Colbert has now shifted to targeting ABC and Jimmy Kimmel, as they also celebrate Scott Pelley’s firing at CBS. Assuredly, Pelley is being watched like a hawk for any utterances of speaking ill of his former employer in violation of the standard contractual non-disparagement clause — the vultures would love to pick over his bones in a lawsuit. Facing us are Trump, the Ellisons, Weiss, and the billionaire owners of Sinclair, the billionaire Murdoch family’s Fox News, and 1000+ billionaire-owned radio stations across the USA, the billionaire podcasters, and billionaire-owned social media sites like Facebook and X that have been algorithmically slanted toward Trump’s neofascist movement.

All of the above are following the ancient scripts of Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo and Franco who seized control of the news in their countries in their first year in power. Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán took a different path by suing the various news outlets and reporters into bankruptcy for “defamation” or “slander,” then having friendly oligarchs take control. Orbán attended CPAC in Dallas encouraging Republicans to follow his example by turning America’s media over to rightwing billionaires. “Have your own media. 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. 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.”

Hartmann raises the alarm that Trump is 18 months into his project and has 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 is now going after CNN as his next prize. Combining these tactics with the capture of the police and prosecutorial agencies within the government, Putin has set a good example for harassment and prosecution of anyone who dares to speak up against the destruction of democracy — a classic formula for turning a democratic republic into an oligarchic dictatorship. Ancient Rome, and emperor Caligula in particular, are classic symbols of authoritarian governments using violence as entertainment as we will soon see with the president’s much-ballyhooed UFC 80th birthday extravaganza on the White House grounds.

Hartmann calls our attention to his 2020 ‘The Hidden History of American Oligarchy,’ when he warned of the destruction of America. Trump has packed the courts and thousands of lawyers have been purged from government; the FBI is weaponized against Americans, with Blacks and women being pushed out of senior military commands by our white supremacist Secretary of War; our history is being whitewashed in national parks, museums, and every federal property; and Trump’s face adorns multiple federal buildings peering from 60 foot tall banners.

According to Bernie Sanders, nepo-baby David Ellison owns, controls, or soon will control: “Tik Tok, 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 on and on.” Always tied together are oligarchy and monopoly — the two sides of the same anti-democratic fascist coin. “Monopolies are destructive, but media monopolies are pure Putin-style poison,” says Hartmann. “Trump is following the Orbán playbook of consolidating media ownership among his right-wing billionaire friends. And what we’re seeing unfold at 60 Minutes is only the latest example, WE ARE ALL SCOTT PELLEY!” Perry Bacon writes in The New Republic: “We can’t take 60 Minutes back from Bari Weiss. All we can do is scream and yell that an unqualified right-wing hack is in charge of 60 Minutes now. That’s what Scott Pelley is doing. The rest of us should heed and then repeat his words.”

Daily Dose of Democracy has summed up the Welker/Trump stand off on Meet The Press, calling Trump’s blow-up a furious, demented rant about how crooked the media is before storming off the set. Prior to his exit, the president yelled at Welker, “They’re crooked! Just like you’re crooked. Your press is crooked. Meet The Press is crooked. You’re crooked or you’re stupid. You play right into their hands with this crap. You know these elections are rigged. Your network knows that they’re rigged. You know I won an election in a landslide and I got 94% bad press. You know why I got that? Because you have no credibility.” DDoD says Trump’s delusional volatility is increasing exponentially with each passing day, and it couldn’t be more obvious that he is entirely unfit to hold office — 25th Amendment now! Podcaster Hemant Mehta pronounced that Trump’s “brain is broken and if you vote for any Republican at any level, this is what you’re supporting — that’s what the party is.”

Heather Cox Richardson wrote on ‘Letters from an American,’ how conspicuous it was that as Trump addressed Welker, he kept referring to “your country,” or “your elections,” as if he was a foreign observer criticizing the US. Was he speaking for Russia, North Korea, or China? Richardson points out that Trump “spat at Welker that ‘a country can never be great with a dishonest press,’ illustrating that he was accusing his opponents of what he is doing, a classic authoritarian technique to muddy the waters, so people stop trying to figure out what is real and cease to believe anything. Despite his administration’s insistence that he doesn’t need congressional approval for his war on Iran because IT’S NOT A WAR, Trump repeatedly referred to it as a WAR.”

On The Warning, Steve Schmidt compares Scott Pelley’s appearance on The New York Times podcast, The Daily, with Donald Trump’s appearance on Meet The Press, “because when viewed together, the two interviews tell a larger story about America in 2026,” as portraits of character. The Pelley interview, conducted by Lulu Garcia-Navarro, was in Schmidt’s opinion thoughtful, allowing the fired CBS newsman to show his courage, decency, and politeness because he understands that strength and dignity are inseparable. Schmidt calls Pelley one of the greatest journalists in history, up there with Murrow, Sevareid, and Cronkite, who understands that responsibility accompanies privilege, that leadership means standing between danger and the people you serve.

“When CBS News entered its period of surrender and humiliation, Scott Pelley refused to participate in the lie. He refused to pretend that what was happening was normal. He refused to look away, while colleagues were sacrificed on the altar of corporate greed and political fear. He stepped forward because duty required it; he stood up because conscience demanded it — that’s what gentlemen do,” writes Schmidt. He goes on to say that the corruption is now so obvious it barely bothers to conceal itself, because the firing of Pelley wasn’t an isolated act, but the inevitable consequence of a chain of corruption that began when Paramount chose accommodation over principle, and surrender over resistance. His conclusion is that in dark periods of history, character becomes easier to see with masks falling away, pretenses disappearing, with people revealing themselves, as did both Pelley and Trump — “history will remember them accordingly.”