Another Big Media Company Caves to Trump’s Extortion
We begin with another big media company caving in to Trump’s extortion with Paramount having settled Trump’s $20 billion nuisance lawsuit against CBS’s 60 Minutes for $16 million so that Shari Redstone’s $8 billion merger with Skydance Media can go through. Joining us to assess how Trump is picking off the media companies one-by-one as he has done with big law firms and major universities is Paul Farhi who was a reporter for the Washington Post for thirty-five years. He covered business, a presidential campaign, and the news media, left at the end of 2023 and has since been a freelance writer, contributing to The Atlantic, Nieman Reports, The Daily Beast, and Columbia Journalism Review.
Four of the Worst Horrors in the Awful Republican Megabill
Then, as the House moves to reconcile its dreadful bill with the Senate’s even more onerous “Big, Beautiful Bill”, rushing to meet the July 4th deadline to please their “dear leader”, we speak with Patrick Sullivan, a postdoctoral associate at the Institution for Social and Policy Studies’ American Political Economy eXchange (APEX) at Yale University and at the University of Konstanz, Germany. He is a researcher at “The Politics of Inequality” Research Cluster at the University of Konstanz and his research interests include tax policy, economic inequality, and redistributive preferences. We discuss his article at The New York Times with Jacob Hacker, “How Awful Is the Republican Megabill? Here Are Four of the Worst Parts.”
As Trump Uses War and the Threat of War, He Ignores the UN and the US Congress
Then finally, as Trump uses war and the threat of war against Canada, Greenland and Panama to gain territory and extract economic gains, we examine his refusal to seek approval from the UN Security Council and the US Congress, as required by law, to attack Iran and speak with Oona Hathaway, a Professor of International Law at Yale Law School and a Nonresident Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She has been a member of the Advisory Committee on International Law for the Legal Adviser at the United States Department of State since 2005, and, from 2014 to 2015, she took leave to serve as Special Counsel to the General Counsel at the U.S. Department of Defense, where she was awarded the Office of the Secretary of Defense Award for Excellence. She the coauthor of The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World and we discuss her articles at Foreign Affairs, “Might Unmakes Right: The Catastrophic Collapse of Norms Against the Use of Force” and at The New York Times, “Trump’s Strikes on Iran Were Unlawful. Here’s Why That Matters.”
Background Briefing offers an educational approach to providing information in an era of “fake news.”