Back in 2023 we noted how a company named Telly proclaimed it had come up with a new idea for a TV: a free TV, with a second small TV below it, that shows users ads pretty much all of the time. While the bottom TV could also be used for useful things (like weather or a stock tracker), the fact it was constantly bombarding you with ads was supposed to offset any need for a retail price.

But apparently there’s been trouble in innovation paradise.

Shortly after launch, Telly proclaimed that it expected to ship more than half a million of the ad-laden sets. Within a few months it had announced it had already received 250,000 pre-orders. But a recent report by Lowpass indicates that only 35,000 of the sets had made it to peoples’ homes.

What was the problem? Ars Technica, Lowpass and The Verge note that the problems began with a substandard shipping process that resulted in a lot of TVs showing up broken to folks who pre-ordered. Reddit is also full of complaints about general quality control issues, like color issues, ads being played too loudly, odd connectivity issues, remote controls randomly unpairing, and more.

Still, there’s evidence that the idea might still have legs, as the premise itself appears profitable:

“The investor update reportedly said Telly made $22 million in annualized revenue in Q3 2025. This could equate to about $52 in advertising revenue per Telly in use per month ($22 million divided by 35,000 TVs divided by 12 months in a year is $52.38).

That’s notably more than what other TV companies report, as Lowpass pointed out. As a comparison to other budget TV brands that rely heavily on ads and user tracking, Roku reported an average revenue per user (ARPU) of $41.49 for 2024. Vizio, meanwhile, reported an ARPU of $37.17 in 2024.”

The TV industry had already realized that they can make more money tracking your viewing and shopping behavior (and selling that information to dodgy data brokers) long term than they do on the retail value of the set. This just appears to be an extension of that concept, and if companies like Telly can get out of their own way on quality control, it’s likely you’ll see more of it.

In one sense that’s great if you can’t afford the newest and greatest TV set. It’s less great given that the United States is too corrupt to pass functional consumer privacy protections or keep its regulators staffed and functional, meaning there are increasingly fewer mechanisms preventing companies like this from exploiting all the microphone, input, and other data collected from users on a day-to-day basis.

I personally want the opposite experience; I’m willing to pay extra for a dumb television that’s little more than a display panel and some HDMI inputs. A device that has no real “smart” internals or bloated, badly designed GUI made by companies more interested in selling ads than quality control. Some business class TVs can sometimes fit the bill, but by and large it’s a segment the industry clearly isn’t interested in, because there’s much, much more money to be made spying on and monetizing your every decision.

The Trump administration keeps demonstrating that it really hates affordable broadband. It particularly hates it when the government tries to make broadband affordable to poor people or rural school kids.

In just the last year the Trump administration has:

• Rewritten the infrastructure Act at the behest of telecom giants, ensuring that they can take $42.5 billion in taxpayer money without worrying about making sure the resulting broadband is affordable.
• Illegally threatened to withhold broadband grants from states that try to hold telecom monopolies accountable for overbilling or anti-competitive behavior.
• Destroyed a popular program that provided free broadband to poor rural school children.
• Tried relentlessly to destroy an FCC program that provides cheaper broadband to schools and rural communities (many of which voted for Trump).
• Dismantled the FCC’s ability to stop telecom giants from ripping you off with hidden fees and usage caps.
• Illegally destroyed a law passed by Congress mandating the fair deployment of broadband to poor people and minority communities.
• Hijacked a program aimed at providing affordable fiber in order to slather Elon Musk with subsidies.

I’m sure I missed a few.

This week, the administration’s war on affordable broadband shifted back to attacking the FCC Lifeline program, a traditionally uncontroversial, bipartisan effort to try and extend broadband to low income Americans. Brendan Carr (R, AT&T) has been ramping up his attacks on these programs, claiming (falsely) that they’re riddled with state-sanctioned fraud:

“Carr’s office said this week that the FCC will vote next month on rule changes to ensure that Lifeline money goes to “only living and lawful Americans” who meet low-income eligibility guidelines. Lifeline spends nearly $1 billion a year and gives eligible households up to $9.25 per month toward phone and Internet bills, or up to $34.25 per month in tribal areas.”

For one, $9.25 is a pittance. It barely offsets the incredibly high prices U.S. telecom monopolies charge. Monopolies, it should be noted, only exist thanks to the coddling of decades of corrupt lawmakers like Carr, who’ve effectively exempted them from all accountability. That’s resulted in heavy monopolization, limited competition, high prices, and low-quality service.

Two, there’s lots of fraud in telecom. Most of it, unfortunately, is conducted by our biggest companies with the tacit approval of folks like FCC boss Brendan Carr. AT&T, for example, has spent decades ripping off U.S. schools and various subsidy programs, and you’ll never see Carr make a peep about that. Fraud is, in MAGA world, only something involving minorities and poor people.

The irony is that the lion’s share of the fraud in the Lifeline program has involved big telecom giants, like AT&T or Verizon, which, time and time again, take taxpayer money for poor people that the just made up. This sort of fraud, where corporations are involved, isn’t of interest to Brendan Carr.

In this case, Carr is alleging (without evidence) that certain left wing states are intentionally ripping off the federal government, throwing untold millions of dollars at dead people for Lifeline broadband access. Something the California Public Utilities Commission has had to spend the week debunking:

“The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) this week said that “people pass away while enrolled in Lifeline—in California and in red states like Texas. That’s not fraud. That’s the reality of administering a large public program serving millions of Americans over many years. The FCC’s own advisory acknowledges that the vast majority of California subscribers were eligible and enrolled while alive, and that any improper payments largely reflect lag time between a death and account closure, not failures at enrollment.”

Brendan Carr can’t overtly admit this (because he’s a corrupt zealot), but his ideal telecom policy agenda involves throwing billions of dollars at AT&T and Comcast in exchange for doing nothing. That’s it. That’s the grand Republican plan for U.S. telecom. It gets dressed up as something more ideologically rigid, but coddling predatory monopolies has always been the foundational belief structure.

This latest effort by Carr and Trump largely appears to be a political gambit targeting California Governor Gavin Newsom, suggesting they’re worried about his chances in the next presidential election. This isn’t to defend Newsom; I’ve certainly noted how his state has a mixed track record on broadband affordability. But it appears this is mostly about painting a picture of Newsom, as they did with Walz in Minnesota, as a political opponent that just really loves taxpayer fraud.

Again though, actually policing fraud is genuinely the last thing on Brendan Carr’s mind. If it was, he’d actually target the worst culprits on this front: corporate America.

We’ve been talking about how the Trump GOP is launching an all out attack on Netflix’s proposed merger with Warner Brothers. Not because they care about antitrust or corporate power, but because they really want Trump-allied billionaire Larry Ellison to buy Warner Brothers, CNN, and HBO. It’s part of their unsubtle plan to acquire what’s left of U.S. media and turn it it to MAGA state television (see: Hungary).

Of course, if you’re a corrupt, Trump-bootheel-licking, GOP lawmaker looking to turn U.S. media (or what’s left of it) into a Trump-friendly agitprop machine, you can’t just openly admit this. So the GOP have had to dress up their attacks on Netflix as some sort of principled stand against media consolidation, “leftist propaganda,” child indoctrination, and “wokeism.” Real pudding-brained cult shit.

Enter ever-the-opportunist Josh Hawley, who “grilled” Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos this week in Senate hearings, leveraging anti-trans hysteria and fear-mongering to pretend Netflix is somehow radically leftist:

“Why is it that so much of Netflix content for children promotes a transgender ideology?” Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley asked Sarandos on Tuesday. “Almost half of your content for children—I’m talking about minor children now, I’m not talking about teenagers, minor children—promotes a transgender ideology agenda.”

If you’re a grown adult, you probably realize Netflix’s primary interest is in making money by producing whatever gets people’s attention. That has ranged from military dramas featuring (gasp) homosexuals (something you’ll recall made the Trump Pentagon cry), to hack comedians who like to punch down against trans folks. If Netflix has an ideology, it’s opportunism.

Hawley’s (false) claim that half of Netflix’s children’s programming supports a “trans agenda” was simply made up, and originates in a Heritage Foundation “study” making the rounds in DC designed to demonize Netflix. Allowing, as we noted above, Larry Ellison to swoop in, dominate U.S. media, and do all of the ideological bullshit the GOP is pretending to be worried about. Just like we saw with the Trump GOP’s hijacking of TikTok by weird right wing zealots like Larry Ellison and Marc Andreessen.

As I’ve noted previously, ideally you’d block all additional media consolidation, since these megadeals are consistently terrible for labor, consumers, and product quality. But that’s not happening under a Trump administration that has lobotomized all key regulators. So ideally, while not great, Netflix acquiring Warner Brothers is the best of a bunch of bad options, and probably the route Dem lawmakers and activists should be backing.

Such are the strange days we live in.

The GOP and Heritage attack on Netflix serves two functions: it either scuttles the deal so that Larry Ellison can buy Warner Brothers, and/or it forces Netflix to continually debase itself to please Trump if it wants merger approval. Since Netflix isn’t interested in CNN and Warner Brothers’ Discovery channels due to sagging ratings, it’s likely these are spun off and sold to Ellison anyway even if Netflix’s deal succeeds.

Again, look to Orban’s Hungary and Putin’s Russia if you want to see what the Heritage folks and Josh Hawley are keen on building. Our broken, corporate press is already largely incapable of being factually honest (particularly about corporate power or the GOP), and they’re well on the way toward being consolidated into what will ultimately become a 24/7 autocrat ass kissing machine.

You know, to protect the children.

Correction: an earlier version of this article accidentally said it was a Heartland Institute effort, when it’s actually the Heritage Foundation. We regret the error.

Jeff Bezos this week continued to dismantle what’s left of the Washington Post via another massive round of layoffs that left remaining staff stunned. Among the latest cuts is the elimination of the paper’s popular sports desk, scaling back of international and local news, the firing of an untold swath of journalists, and the ending of the paper’s book sections, among other major changes.

This comes on the heels of other decisions by Bezos to fire all of the paper’s black columnists, turn the op-ed section into pro-corporatist agitprop, censor cartoonists that criticize Jeff, and generally shift the paper’s journalistic tone in a more right wing, autocrat-friendly, corporatist direction. You know, like every other major corporate media outlet from CNN to CBS.

Of course, nobody actually wants this. The actual audience for extraction class agitprop is arguably very small and already quite well served. So it’s amusing to see WAPO leadership insist that these additional, brutal cuts are necessary because the paper has been losing subscribers and “wants to be competitive“:

“Murray acknowledged that the Post has struggled to reach “customers” and talked about the competitive media marketplace. “Today, the Washington Post is taking a number of actions across the company to secure our future,” he said, according to an audio recording of the meeting.”

Let’s be clear: billionaires like Jeff Bezos don’t want a functioning press. They want the lazy simulacrum of a functional press that caters to their ideology (more for me, less for you) and protects their interests. As with Larry Ellison’s acquisition of CBS and TikTok, and Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, it’s best to view this as a global project to defang accountability for the planet’s richest, shittiest people and corporations.

Former Washington Post editor Marty Baron didn’t really mince words about what this means for a once-functional newspaper that, at this point, probably can’t be salvaged:

WAPO management insist that they’re going to “narrow their focus on politics.” By this they mean more of the feckless, “both sides,” “view from nowhere” DC gossip reporting you see at other billionaire-owned outlets like Axios, Semafor, and Politico. Glad-handy journalism that’s less concerned with the truth than it is appeasing ownership, protecting access, and keeping the ad money flowing.

The kind of wimpy, soft-knuckled cack that can (and repeatedly is) exploited by authoritarian zealots who know these outlets lack the courage to call them out for what they really are. You see, if you’re honest about the extremist nature of our unpopular autocratic government, you might lose access, upset paper management, alienate Republican ad viewers, or piss off regulators eyeing your latest merger.

Bezos could fund functional journalism at the Washington Post for decades to come without making a dent in his finances, were that something of actual interest to him. This is a guy who just blew $75 million on a propaganda puff piece kissing the ass of the president’s wife. That kind of money could fund most independent newsrooms for the better part of the next decade.

Jeff wants to ensure the administration will pay him to launch his unreliable rockets into space, slather his fledgling LEO satellite network with subsidies, coddle his cloud computing empire, allow him to dominate every last aspect of modern retail, and generally be broadly exploitative in a way that undermines competition, consumers, and labor. He wants, and applauds, Trump’s destruction of the regulatory state.

Bezos still “wins” even if the Post doesn’t survive his “leadership.” At worst (for Jeff) the paper is converted into a sad, pseudo-journalistic simulacrum that exists largely to blow smoke up the ass of wealth and power. At best another major media institution is destroyed, eliminating yet another outlet that used to (admittedly with increasing inconsistency) hold billionaires and corporate power to account.

But it’s really something even worse than just rich people destroying journalism to coddle their delicate egos and protect their financial interests. All of this really is part of a broad, multi-generational effort by the extraction class to eliminate checks and balances and accountability, erode informed consensus, befuddle the electorate, and dismantle not just democratic norms, but democracy itself.

And, if you hadn’t noticed, it’s been a smashing success so far.

If there’s a plus side to this mess, it’s that Jeff and Elon and Larry’s clumsy efforts to dominate and destroy U.S. journalism create vast new opportunities for indie newsletter authors, worker-owned newsrooms, and independent outlets (like BestNetTech), to serve a public that’s desperate for something tangible, courageous, and real in a sea of bullshit and clumsy artifice. Give them, and us, your time and money.

So we’ve been noting how the Trump administration has been helping Larry Ellison wage war on Netflix’s proposed merger with Warner Brothers. Not because they care about antitrust (that’s always been a lie), but because they want Larry Ellison to be able to dominate media and create a safe space for unpopular right wing ideology.

After Warner Brothers balked at Larry’s competing bid and a hostile takeover attempt, Larry tried to sue Warner Brothers. With that not going anywhere, Larry and MAGA have since joined forces to try and attack the Netflix merger across right wing media, falsely claiming that “woke” Netflix is attempting a “cultural takeover” that must be stopped for the good of humanity.

With hearings on the Netflix merger looming, MAGA has ramped up those attacks with the help of some usual allies. That includes the right wing think tank the Heritage Foundation, which has apparently been circulating a bogus study around DC claiming that Netflix and Warner Brothers are “engineering millions of Americans into a predisposition to accept preferred leftwing ideological dogma”:

“Without ever saying Warner Bros or bid rival Paramount by name, the Oversight Project’s analysis, titled Fedflix: Netflix, The Federal Government, and the New Propaganda State, insists that “relevant federal agencies must scrutinize with extreme intensity any potential Netflix acquisitions of other media and entertainment companies to take into account the full ramifications of the impacts on American society and the health of the Constitutional Republic.”

Again, the goal here is to ensure that Larry Ellison can buy Netflix (and HBO and CNN). Larry, as we’ve seen vividly with his acquisitions of CBS and TikTok, is buying up new and old media to create a propaganda safe space for America’s increasingly unhinged and anti-democratic extraction class. Like Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, the goal is propaganda and information control.

And like any good propagandists, MAGA has tried to invert reality, and is increasingly trying to claim it’s Netflix that covertly wants to create a left-wing propaganda empire that spreads gayness and woke:

“With its subtitle of “The Weaponization of Entertainment for Partisan Propaganda,” the report is tailored for the MAGA base. Full of talking points and and mentions of Stranger Things, the Lena Dunham-produced Orgasm Inc: The Story of OneTaste, the controversial Cuties docu from 2020, and the Obamas-produced American Factory, the 47-page report takes repeated swipes at any expansion of the streamer and its library of “leftwing and progressive” content.”

Of course that’s nonsense. Netflix has demonstrated that they’re primarily an opportunist, and will show whatever grabs eyeballs and makes them money (from gay military dramas that upset the pentagon to washed up anti-trans comedian hacks). And they’re certain to debase themselves further to please the Trump administration in order to gain approval of their merger.

That’s not to say that the Netflix Warner Brothers merger will be good for anybody. Most media consolidation is generally terrible for labor and consumers as we’ve seen with the AT&T–>Warner Brothers–>Discovery mergers. They almost always result in massive debt loads, tons of layoffs, higher prices, and lower quality product.

Enter an old MAGA playbook: try to convince a bunch of useful idiots that the authoritarian corporatist MAGA coalition somehow really loves antitrust reform and is looking out for the little guy, despite a long track record of coddling corporate power and monopoly control.

That’s again the game plan here by Heritage and administration mouthpieces like Brendan Carr; pretend you’re obstructing the Netflix deal for ethical and antitrust reasons, when you’re really just trying to help Larry Ellison engage in the exact sort of competitive and ideological domination you’re whining about.

Among the folks helping this project along is former Trump DOJ “antitrust enforcer” Makan Delrahim, who is now Paramount’s Chief Legal Officer. Delrahim played a starring role during the first Trump term in rubber stamping the hugely problematic Sprint T-Mobile merger, and attempting to block the AT&T Time Warner deal (to the benefit of Rupert Murdoch, who opposed the tie up).

And now here we are again, with many of the same folks joining forces to try and scuttle Netflix’s latest merger, simply to ensure their preferred, anti-democratic billionaire wins the prize.

Ideally, again, you’d block all media consolidation.

Since that’s clearly not happening under the corporation-coddling Trump administration, activists — and the two or three Democratic lawmakers who actually care about media reform — are probably better served by aligning themselves with Netflix. It’s most definitely a lesser of two evils scenario, with, as the chaos at CBS shows, greater Larry Ellison control of media being the worst possible outcome.

In any case, expect right wing propagandists and right wing media to start really lighting into Netflix in the weeks and months to come. You know, because they just really love truth and freedom and hate consolidated corporate power.

So for years we pointed out how the trend of news websites killing off their comment section (usually because they were too cheap or lazy to creatively manage them) was counterproductive.

One, it killed off a lot of local community value and engagement created within your own properties. Two, it outsourced anything vaguely resembling functional conversation with your community — and a lot of additional impressions and engagement — to generally shitty and badly run companies like Facebook.

That not only made public discourse worse, it ignored that the public comment section (and the correction and accountability for errors that sometimes appeared there) were helpful for the journalistic process and ultimately, the public interest.

Anyway, more than a decade later and Ben Whitelaw from Everything in Moderation (and Mike’s co-host on the Ctrl-Alt-Speech podcast as well as a former editor at the Times of London in charge of the paper’s user comment section) notes that many websites and editors have had second thoughts.

A growing number of websites, burned from an unhealthy relationship with Facebook (a company too large and incompetent to function), are restoring their online comment sections, looking to automation to help with moderation, and are trying to rekindle functional, online discourse.

He does a nice job pointing out many of the benefits of on-site public comment sections that were ignored by editors a decade ago as they rushed to relieve themselves of the responsibility of trying:

“Most journalists whose articles face criticism below the line may be surprised by the following statement: people who post a comment are more likely to return to the site and be loyal to the brand, even if the comment isn’t glowing praise.“

When editors, circa 2010-2015, announced they were killing their comment sections, it was usually accompanied with some form of gibberish about how the decision was made because they just really “valued conversation” or wanted to “build better relationships.”

Sometimes newsroom managers would be slightly more candid in acknowledging they just didn’t give enough of a shit to try very hard, in part because they felt news comments were just wild, untamable beasts, outside of the laws of physics and man, and irredeemable at best. Often, this assault on the comment section went hand in hand with editors hostile to the public generally (see: the New York Times’ still criticized 2017 decision to eliminate the role of Public Editor.)

The rush to vilify and eliminate the comment section ignored, as Ben notes, that a subscription to news outlets doesn’t just have to provide access to journalism, it can feature participation in journalism. As an online writer for decades, I’ve seen every insult known to man; at the same time I’ve routinely seen comment insight that either taught me something new or helped me correct errors in my reporting that both I and my editors missed.

The obliteration of the comment section threw that baby out with the bath water. Facebook comments are, if you haven’t noticed, a homogenized shit hole full of bots, rage, and bile that undermines connection and any effort at real conversation. These sorts of badly run systems are also more easily gamed by bad actors (like, say, authoritarians using culture war agitprop to confuse the electorate and take power).

More localized on-site comments are, as Ben notes, potentially part of our path out of the modern information dark ages:

“Within the shifting environment that digital publishers have found themselves in, it’s vital to reckon with the needs of news-consuming audiences beyond timely information. People are eager to connect and have real dialogue about topics that inform their lives. Comment sections need to change, but I think they can serve a vital role.”

Of course, it’s hard to repair ye olde comment section when modern journalism itself is suffering from so much institutional rot. But you’ve got to start somewhere. And rekindling a smaller, highly localized relationship with your regular visitors is as good of a place to start as any.

We’ve long noted how the 2021 infrastructure bill included $42.5 billion for broadband grants dubbed the Broadband, Equity, Access And Deployment (BEAD) program. The program wasn’t without its warts, but it had the potential to be truly transformative for U.S. broadband access.

But Republicans illegally rewrote the program to redirect money away from stuff like affordable, gigabit, community fiber, and into the pockets of billionaire Elon Musk. In exchange for congested, expensive, Low-Earth-Orbit (LEO) satellite broadband access the company planned to deploy anyway.

This alone was a pretty big grift. But Trump has also threatened to illegally withhold planed state broadband grants if they dare try to make sure the resulting taxpayer broadband is affordable, or attempt to hold companies accountable for failing to delivered promised service.

When states like Virginia have balked at the idea of prioritizing Elon Musk’s satellite service over more reliable fiber, Starlink has cried and pouted like a petulant child. More recently, Starlink has been attempting to attach a rider to its grant agreements with states, saying they can’t be held responsible if the broadband Starlink provides is slow, expensive, or not installed properly:

“The concessions sought by SpaceX “would limit Starlink’s performance obligations, payment schedules, non-compliance penalties, reporting expectations, and labor and insurance standards,” wrote Drew Garner, director of policy engagement at the Benton Institute. Garner argued that SpaceX’s demands illustrate problems in how the Trump NTIA rewrote program rules to increase reliance on low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite providers.”

So basically Musk — who likes to pretend he hates subsidies despite his entire existence being propped up by them — wants untold billions in new subsidies and no serious way for his company to be held accountable should it fail to deliver the promised, substandard product.

Under a functional broadband grant program, states would push fiber as deeply into rural communities as possible, ideally in the form of “open access” fiber networks that generate local competition and challenge regional monopolies by dramatically lowering the cost of market entry. From there, you’d address the rest of the gaps using fixed wireless and 5G.

Only then would you fill in the remaining holes with Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite broadband options like Starlink, which are ideally suited only for the most remote areas (and even then, Starlink is generally too expensive for most of the lower-income rural Americans who really need it).

Under an ideal program, you’d also confirm that the companies you’re giving taxpayer money to can actually deliver what they’re promising. The Trump FCC didn’t do that with an earlier program (the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, RDOF), resulting in a whole bunch of companies (including Musk’s Starlink) gaming the system to try and get money for projects they didn’t deserve or couldn’t finish.

Republicans have, in an open act of corruption, thrown this entire logic on its head to curry favor with their favorite white supremacist extremist billionaire. They’re prioritizing Elon Musk’s substandard satellite network (which will only become more congested as more people use it), then ensuring nobody can meaningful hold Musk accountable when he inevitably fails to deliver reliable, affordable access.

Who is going to hold Musk accountable if he fails to deliver? Trump’s bootlicker at the FCC, Brendan Carr? The FTC, where Trump illegally fired all the Dem Commissioners? The NTIA, which is now run by a former Ted Cruz staffer who thinks affordable fiber optic broadband is “woke?” States, who risk losing out on a generational influx of subsidies if they challenge Elon Musk’s greed or stand up to telecoms?

Musk’s DOGE was always about destroying the regulatory state so he and other billionaires could sell the country for scrap off the back loading dock under the pretense of innovative efficiencies while being slathered with tax cuts and subsides. It’s grotesque, historic levels of corruption in a fucking hat.

You might recall, folks like Ezra Klein made a big, extended stink about the fact this original BEAD program was taking a long time to deliver (for some obvious reasons). But since Elon Musk hijacked the program creating a lot of headaches, wasted money, and entirely new delays, I curiously haven’t heard the “abundance” folks make a single, solitary peep.

The business and telecom press (and many folks in policy circles) have also already seemingly normalized hijacking a massive subsidy program to the benefit of a white supremacist billionaire. But as somebody that’s been studying the challenges of broadband access for a quarter century, I guarantee that we’re going to be documenting the damage (and lost potential) of this corruption for decades to come.

If you’ve been napping, Trump-allied billionaire Larry Ellison and his nepobaby son David hired an unqualified troll named Bari Weiss to “run” CBS News. And by “run” CBS news, I mean destroy what little journalism was left at the media giant and create an alternate-reality safe space for radical right wing billionaire extremists. While pretending to be “restoring trust in journalism.”

It’s… not going well.

Weiss’ inaugural “town hall” with opportunistic right wing grifter Erika Kirk was a ratings dud, her new nightly news broadcast has been an error-prone hot mess, and her murder of a 60 Minutes story about Trump concentration camps — and the network’s decision to air a story lying about the ICE murder of Nicole Good — has spurred a revolt among the CBS journalists that haven’t quit yet.

Weiss has, as all fail-upward media brunchlords do, repeatedly tried to blame her staffers for both her incompetence and for not doing more to coddle her public image. Things have gotten so heated at the crumbling CBS that Weiss has had to “pause” her “Honestly” podcast to put out fires at CBS:

“Thursday morning on her Free Press platform, Weiss said that taking on CBS News is a “huge responsibility,” before continuing, “So here is the news: ‘Honestly’ is taking a little bit of a pause. I know it is hard to hear that, it’s definitely hard for me to do that because I love doing this show. But I think and I hope that you will understand why.”

“Don’t worry, it’s not forever; we’ll be back in just a few short months,” she added.”

There’s a dash of hubris there for Weiss to think that she can fix the problems at CBS in “just a few short months.” There’s every indication Weiss not only has absolutely no idea what she’s doing, but that she lacks the introspection to be able to realize that she’s the problem and to adjust accordingly. That likely means she continues to flounder until she’s inevitably replaced by somebody even worse.

As we’ve noted previously, the problem for Weiss isn’t that she’s bad at journalism (though that’s certainly true). The problem for Weiss is that she’s bad at ratings-grabbing propaganda, the primary function she was hired for. If you’re going to create noxious state race-baiting propaganda, you have to at least make it entertaining — something Roger Aisles understood well.

Weiss’ incompetence is trouble for a CBS/Paramount parent company that has not only seen ratings in free fall at CBS, they’ve watched their stock drop 40 percent since Larry Ellison’s clumsy hostile takeover attempt of Warner Brothers (and CNN, HBO).

Ellison, fresh off his new co-ownership stake in TikTok, clearly wants to dominate both old and new media and to create a modern version of state television. The sort of thing we’ve seen in countries like Russia and Hungary, where autocrats have hollowed out what was left of media and turned it into an extension of the state (something we’ve already seen across much of U.S. corporate media and Fox News):

If there’s any bright spot to this mess, it’s that absolutely nobody in this chain of dysfunction, from the trust fund nepobaby son of Larry Ellison, to the weird contrarian culture war trolls they’re hiring to spread agitprop, have the slightest idea what they’re doing.

If U.S. media and democracy is saved from these zealots, it won’t be thanks to competent media reforms by the opposition party (which pretty broadly don’t exist in the United States, yet), it will be thanks to the raw, blistering hubris and incompetence of folks like Bari Weiss and David Ellison.

According to new data from the US Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), streaming video subscription prices jumped a whopping 29 percent year over year. That’s compared to the 2.7 percent jump in consumer costs seen more generally across other goods and services.

Of course BLS doesn’t explain why streaming video prices are soaring at such a dramatic rate. It’s something we’ve touched on repeatedly: as giant media companies increasingly consolidate, they’re trying to find new, frequently obnoxious ways to continue to goose quarterly earnings and create the illusion of perpetual growth despite a major slowdown in new subscribers.

That means significantly more ads (even if you pay for no ads). It means higher overall prices despite a decline in quality. It means layoffs, worse customer service, and companies that refuse to even host popular content they paid for because they’re too cheap to pay for residuals. It means new annoying restrictions on what you’re paying for, and companies that harass you for sharing your password with your college kid or elderly relative. It means more lazy, clickbait content catering to the lowest common denominator and less quality, thoughtful art.

It means enshittification.

And it’s going to get worse. The corrupt Trump administration is demolishing whatever is left of U.S. media consolidation limits, ensuring another massive round of harmful “growth for growth’s sake” mergers that temporarily goose earnings, create tax breaks, and badly justify outsized executive compensation, but generally make all of the existing problems in the industry worse (especially for labor and consumers).

According to the BLS, streaming and gaming subscriptions and rentals saw higher “streamflation” (read: price gouging) in 2025 than any of the other industries or services measured. The closest comparison was coffee (28 percent), which is largely soaring due to Trump’s ignorant and pointless tariffs that consumers have to pay for.

If you’re old enough, you’ve already watched this play out with traditional cable (many of the executives screwing up streaming were the same ones that screwed up traditional cable). So you know the pattern: they’ll continue to push their luck on price hikes, driving many people to free alternatives (or piracy), at which point the executives who made out like bandits blame everyone and everything but themselves.

None of this is reflected honestly by any of the media companies that cover this sort of thing, because their tendency toward honest and courageous journalism is being undermined by the same forces. Like check out this Hollywood Reporter breakdown of the issue, which they dub “streamflation.” They amusing hint at the fact there might be causes for this massive surge in pricing, but can’t get around to listing any:

Again, because enshittification doesn’t discriminate, and the same forces making streaming video more expensive and shittier are taking a hatchet to U.S. journalism and truth in service to the almighty dollar. Corporate media is incapable of reporting honesty about corporate media: there’s no money in it.

Last year we reported how Verizon executives happily agreed to be more racist and sexist in exchange for Trump DOJ and FCC approval of their $20 billion merger with telecom giant Frontier Communications. Verizon embarrassingly said they’d cull race and gender equality initiatives, and try harder moving forward to protect downtrodden white people from the scary monster that is diversity.

But California regulators have thrown a few wrinkles into the mix for Verizon. The California CPUC has approved Verizon’s merger request after months of discussions, but required that the company engage in a bunch of stuff the Trump administration has derided as “woke,” such as (gasp) trying to make sure that the heavily taxpayer subsidized company occasionally offers broadband that’s semi-affordable:

“A low-cost Internet plan commitment centers on the Verizon Forward service that offers home Internet for as low as $20 a month. Reynolds said the deal with Verizon “locked in” the $20-per-month plans for low-income consumers for the next 10 years.”

Verizon’s also being required to (double gasp) actually invest in network upgrades to marginalized neighborhoods these companies generally like to neglect:

“At yesterday’s CPUC meeting, Commissioner John Reynolds described Verizon’s commitments. Verizon will deploy fiber to 75,000 new locations within five years, prioritizing census blocks with income at or below 90 percent of the county median, he said. For wireless service, Verizon is required to deploy 250 new cell sites with 5G and fixed wireless capability in areas eligible for state broadband grants and areas with high fire threats, he said.”

Verizon actually doing any of this will, of course, require constant monitoring by the California PUC, something that hasn’t always historically been a strong suit for U.S. regulators. We’ve reported repeatedly how the Trump administration has been waging total war against not just telecom oversight, but literally any effort to make broadband more affordable to the public.

That has even extended to illegally threatening to withhold billions in already awarded infrastructure subsidies to states that attempt to rein in the bad behavior of unpopular telecom giants like Comcast, Verizon, Charter, and AT&T. It’s even involved happily killing popular, bipartisan programs that delivered free Wi-Fi access to schoolchildren, primarily because telecom giants didn’t like it.

You know, real “populist” good faith stuff everybody in long-neglected flyover states were begging for.

Keep in mind this basic attempt to hold Verizon accountable only applies to California. And that’s, again, assuming California regulators hold Verizon accountable for following through.

Most states approved the merger with absolutely no public interest concessions whatsoever, ensuring that Verizon can leverage its even greater scale to dismantle competition, over bill customers in markets with limited broadband options, ignore low-income minority and marginalized communities, and generally behave like a predatory ass.

Because as we all know, doing absolutely anything to inconvenience America’s biggest, shittiest monopolies is woke.