Episode Details

Friends, I hope you’re as well as can be expected in these difficult times.

A few days ago I focused on Elon Musk and his designs on Twitter. (Here’s my post.) This morning, as I predicted, Musk put in a bid to buy the rest of Twitter and take it private. Musk’s bid of $54.20 per share is going to be hard for Twitter to resist, given Twitter’s duty to its shareholders: It’s nearly 40 percent higher than Twitter’s stock price in January, before Musk started buying. Musk says he has lost confidence in Twitter’s management to fulfill the company’s “social imperative” as a platform for “free speech” and he’d “unlock” Twitter’s potential. (He can start with unblocking me from his Twitter feed.) As I said, the problem with social media is lack of mediation. If he owns Twitter, Musk is likely to put Trump back on.

But enough about Musk. Today I want to continue to probe the issue of power over how Americans get their news. I’ve spent enough time in and around politics to see how decisions made by the media — what issues to focus on, how those issues are framed, and who presents them — are central to our democracy. The media isn’t just the “fourth branch” of government, as it’s been called. It’s not a branch at all. It’s the trunk.

Which is why I find it troubling that CBS News has hired Mick Mulvaney as an on-air contributor. You’ll recall that Mulvaney served as acting chief of staff under Trump and led Trump’s Office of Management and Budget. But as I’ll talk about in a moment, Mulvaney wasn’t just a high official in the Trump administration. He was an active enabler of Trump’s deceit and attempted coup.

First, some background: An “on-air contributor” on a major network is quite different from a mere “guest.” I’ve been in both roles. Guests appear from time to time when a particular program’s producer invites them, and are unpaid. “On-air contributors,” on the other hand, appear regularly. They’re paid contractors. And they’re introduced as “contributors” — which gives them the cachet and authority of being part of a network’s news division.

Mulvaney’s first appearance as a paid contributor for CBS News occurred several days ago on a “MoneyWatch” segment in which he was asked to explain Biden’s plan for taxing the super-rich. The anchor, Anne-Marie Green, introduced Mulvaney as “a former OMB director” and “the guy to ask about this.” But she said nothing about whose OMB he directed, suggesting that Mulvaney was simply a budget expert offering an expert analysis rather than a fierce Trump partisan.

Then she asked him whether a “regular working-class American” should care about Biden’s tax proposal. Mulvaney’s answer: “It’s easy to look at it and say, ‘Don’t worry, you’re not going to pay this,’” but regular working Americans would have to “prove that they don’t have to pay it,” and such a burden “could be troublesome: every single year proving that you’re not worth a hundred million dollars.” 

This is as misleading as it gets in broadcast media (with the possible exception of Fox News). Nothing in Biden’s proposal to tax the super-rich requires that people prove they’re not super-rich. Mulvaney’s claim was pure demagoguery.

But that’s what we should expect from Mulvaney. Recall that Mulvaney was complicit in Trump’s attempted extortion of Ukraine President Zelensky in 2019 — threatening to withhold U.S. aid to fight Russian aggression unless Zelensky came up with dirt on Hunter Biden. (This was the call in which Zelensky’s request “we need more Javelins” — anti-tank missiles that have proved c