Broken News: CBS going the way of America's newspapers

 

By Meta-Content Generator A.J. Liebling with Financial Editor Samuel Insull

Forty years ago, most American cities were lucky to wake up to a mighty daily newspaper.  In most places it had a monopoly.  The paper landed on your doorstep with a satisfying thunk, thick with classified ads, including help-wanted, and big display ads from department and specialty stores.

The money was so good that publishers used a slice of their haul to build newsrooms, which often produced high-quality journalism that covered their cities, their states, and often their country and the wider world. 

Readers of papers like The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, The Miami Herald, Long Island Newsday, the Louisville Courier-Journal, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and the Atlanta Constitution enjoyed the bounty of news and information.  These papers, in addition to publishing their own work, aggregated content from other first rate news outlets, with the result that even mid-sized papers like the Sarasota Herald-Tribune and the Providence Journal could provide wide-ranging coverage for 50 cents a day, and maybe $2.50 on Sundays.

The glory days of print journalism

Now they're all lifeless husks, mostly owned by a rapacious private equity juggernaut called Alden. Over the decades, they've been sold, bought, resold, leveraged, and stripped of their assets.   In other words, the life has been sucked out of them for the profit of a few relentless raiders.  In many cities, they have ceased publishing paper editions.  As a result, at a lot of big airports (like Austin), when you go to the airport and try to buy a paper, you get nothing but a blank stare and a $7 bag of M&M's.

The results have been devastating.  Most of America lives in a newspaper desert.   Only a few papers make even a pretense of covering the news, either because they are owned by nonprofit institutions, like the Tampa Bay Times or the Philadelphia Inquirer, or by the rare tycoon willing to leave well enough alone, like The Boston Globe.

One newspaper has the power and financial clout to stand above the political pressure, but sadly has chosen to bend to and parrot reactionary disinformation for reasons best known to its owner, King Arthur Sulzberger XVI. 

The story of how predatory private capital destroyed America's great newspapers has been well told elsewhere, including in The Atlantic back in 2021.  It's not that complicated:

And guess what?  Four years later, the vultures are still picking at the carcass of the once-mighty Tribune:

The deadline for Chicago Tribune newsroom journalists to apply for a buyout has come and gone....According to the union, no one applied....

The big picture: Tribune owner Alden Capital had offered buyouts, hoping newsroom union workers would take them to avoid layoffs.

It's unclear how much money Alden is trying to save with this move.

Eventually, the paper will shrivel up and die, leaving another huge void in news coverage. 

With newspapers variously in decline or extinct, the private equity vultures are circling around looking for new prey, similarly wounded by technological change.

It looks like they're landing on legacy (non-streaming) media like broadcast and cable news, which have also suffered from America's insane habit of getting its news through bent social media outlets like X, Facebook, or TikTok.  The advertising dollars follow the eyeballs, aided by the tracking software that prackages social media users neatly by stealing their data and using it to target advertising.

A few ominous examples.  Let's start with the latest outrageous attack on free speech:

CBS has been leaking to favored sources like CNN that the decision was purely financial and not a human sacrifice to Pol Potbelly to grease the wheels for government approval of the sale of the CBS properties to Skydance, an entity controlled by the feckless failson of an insanely rich reactionary mogul, Larry Ellison.

Was Colbert's late night show, number one in late night, really such a money drain?  CBS's parent, Paramount Global, files a legally required SEC disclosure document that's supposed to list all material risks to its businesses on Form 10-K.   There is clear economic decline in the legacy cable businesses, like Nickelodeon.  We didn't find much related to the supposed collapse of advertising revenue in late night or elsewhere in the broadcast day.

Here's one risk factor that we guess didn't turn out to be as risky as Paramount told the world:

We face substantial and increasing competition to attract creative talent, to produce and acquire the rights to high-quality content, to acquire, engage and retain audiences and users, and to distribute our content and services on a variety of third-party platforms. Competition for talent, content, audiences, subscribers, service providers, advertising, production infrastructure and distribution is intense.... 

If Paramount can feel free to cut loose the most talented man in unscripted television, then maybe the competition isn't as bad as it claimed?  Or maybe Paramount threw Colbert overboard to induce the current tyrannical US Government to approve the sale to Skydance?

Sen. Elizabeth Warren is demanding answers:

Several Democratic lawmakers, including Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Adam Schiff, questioned if Colbert’s show was canceled due to his criticism of President Donald Trump.

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— Forbes (@forbes.com) July 18, 2025 at 6:40 AM

We'll let you know when Shari Redstone, who controls Paramount thanks to her now-dead daddy, gets back to her.  When it happens, watch out for the flying swine.

But there's good reason to fear whether broadcast and cable media, especially news, are headed to the same fate as America's newspapers.  Like newspapers, they are pressured by changes in consumer preferences and technology, but still generate a fair amount of cash.

That means they're bait for private equity vultures ready to steal the cash, fire the staff, and run the operations into the ground.

Assuming that throwing Colbert into the volcano appeases Pol Potbelly and the sale to Skydance is approved, the Ellison family will own a grab-bag of assets that can be sold off at leisure, including CBS's 24 local broadcast stations (still pretty profitable from car dealers insanely telling you that the best way to enjoy your summer is to sit and be swindled in their clammy dealerships), the CBS broadcast network, or CBS News.

The plight of CNN is equally dire.  CNN is owned along with lots of other cable, streaming, and studio assets by a money-losing behemoth called Warner Brothers Discovery (WBD). CNN has already been shunted from the former Time Warner to AT&T to its current masters.   

The parent has already shuffled CNN and other cable assets into a new subsidiary separate from the studio and streaming services, the better to sell it off to private equity. WBD reports as a risk factor the decline in what they call “linear programming” which includes CNN,  Another risk factor is WBD's whopping debt.  The classic solution to burdensome debt is to sell assets to raise cash.  Why wouldn't WBD sell CNN and other cable assets to a private equity finagler?  Alden is tanned, rested, and ready.

Good night and good luck to democracy

The economics of cable new channels are deteriorating, and all of them, including CNN, are searching for a new sustainable revenue model.  So far they haven't found one. 

It's already happening at MSNBC.   Its gigantic unwieldy media parent, Comcast, has spun out MSNBC along with a bunch of other cable channels with declining revenue into a separate entity, leaving NBC News and streaming operations behind.  As a separate entity the motley collection of properties could easily be swallowed by a private equity vulture, leveraged up, and stripped for cash and parts.

If cable news and late night comedy go the way of newspapers, we will be in even greater danger.  Already we are dealing with an environment in which most people get what they believe is information from uncurated or rigged garbage outlets.  If the only alternative to social media drivel is the brave work of a band of independent journalists, then reliable information, like health care, decent housing, and college, will become available only to a relatively privileged few.  

If the only mass media left are controlled by the immortal Rupert Murdoch, Ketamine Leon, Larry Ellison, and Vladimir Putin, the chances for a restoration of democracy and decency in America will be that much less. 

It may be impossible to ever determine whether the loss of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert was caused by political pressure or real economic concerns. Either way, we, and what's left of our country, are the losers.  

And that's the way it is.