Standing Up For The First Amendment
Like Humphrey Bogart, we must fight for freedom of the press
“I’ll be involved,” said the solipsist in chief on Sunday at the Kennedy Center Honors, when asked about the $83 billion merger between Warner Brothers Discovery and Netflix, a merger that was approved by both boards last week.
Trump has made it very clear for some time now that he has favored the Ellisons, friends of his, who run Skydance Paramount.
We might all recall that under Paramount’s previous owner, Shari Redstone, CBS paid $16 million to settle a lawsuit with Trump, who sued over a “60 Minutes” interview of Kamala Harris, then the Democratic nominee for president in 2024.
That $16 million settlement helped smooth the way for Trump’s FCC to approve the sale of Paramount to Skydance.
In the past few months, Skydance Paramount has made several offers to acquire Warner Brothers Discovery, not one of which was satisfactory to the executives at Warner, who opened up the bidding to Comcast and Netflix, which made its successful offer last week.
It is important to keep in mind that Netflix’s merger with Warner Brothers Discovery does not involve CNN, TNT and some of the other cable networks, which will be spun off into a separate company.
By contrast, the offers by Skydance Paramount, including its new one, a hostile takeover bid, have always been for all of Warner Brothers Discovery’s properties, including CNN.
This brings me back to Trump’s proclamation, “I’ll be involved,” which he uttered on Sunday when asked about the merger.
Trump sounded a bit like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator, when he says, “I’ll be back.”
For years now, our nation’s disgraced chief executive has sounded not so much like the Terminator as he has sounded like a crime boss, like Marlon Brando’s Don Corleone in The Godfather.
Trump will likely attempt to strong-arm Warner Brothers Discovery into accepting the hostile bid from Skydance Paramount.
To paraphrase Brando’s title character in The Godfather, a film that was overseen by Robert Evans, a Paramount executive in the 1960s and 1970s, Trump may very well try to make Warner Brothers an offer that it can’t refuse.
Adding to The Godfather analogy, Trump is keeping it within his family, so to speak.
The New York Times reported on its website earlier today that Skydance Paramount, owned by the Ellisons, is making its hostile bid with the support of Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law.
Kushner founded Affinity Partners, an investment fund that has backing from sovereign funds in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi.
Beyond the blatant corruption, the blatant conflict of interest of Trump’s son-in-law contributing to a bid for a major media company, we should all be deeply concerned for the future of our democracy because Trump is once again threatening the freedom of the press, something on which we all depend for the facts and the truth.
According to The Guardian, Trump has told the Ellisons that he wants them to fire Erin Burnett and Brianna Keilar, two CNN anchors.
These two journalists, of course, have done nothing wrong. What they have done is speak truth to power, and Trump does not like that.
Art illuminates the truth. And so does journalism.
We need both right now. We need artists and journalists and all of us to come together, as we have before, when we defeated McCarthyism and Richard Nixon.
In my last post, “Warner Brothers Should Remain True To Its Artistic Roots,” I wrote about Humphrey Bogart and the movie, Casablanca, a Warner Brothers picture from the 1940s.
“I stick my neck out for nobody,” says Bogart’s Rick Blaine early in the movie.
He appears to be a bitter man, wallowing in self-hatred.
But by the end of the film, he becomes what he has always been, a hero.
He indeed sticks his neck out, not just for Ingrid Bergman’s Ilsa Lund, his former lover, and Paul Henreid’s Victor Lazlo, who has been leading the resistance against the Nazis.
Bogey’s character sticks his neck out for everyone, for all of us, who yearn to live in a world of freedom, a world of democracy, not one of tyranny.
For those who are less familiar with Humphrey Bogart, I should point out that he was a patriot, and his heroism was not limited to the silver screen.
He served in World War I and World War II, the latter in the Coast Guard, and he was one of the leaders of the Committee for the First Amendment, a committee that traveled from L.A. to Washington, D.C., to speak up on behalf of the Hollywood Ten, who were being investigated by Congress in the late 1940s on the grounds that they were not loyal to our country.
Bogart was joined by, among others, his wife, Lauren Bacall, as well as John Garfield and the Epstein brothers, all of whom I mentioned in my last post.
While McCarthyism lasted from the late 1940s through the 1950s and even later for some artists, the heroism of those who resisted should never be forgotten.
During the McCarthy period, many writers, actors, directors in Hollywood, as well as teachers and scientists and servicemen in the U.S. military, were blacklisted and lost their jobs, primarily due to hysteria, fear, rumors and lies.
Not all of the victims were Communists. Some, like John Garfield, were targeted simply because they were Jews, who were liberal.
Of course, most of the victims of the blacklist were progressives, as well as patriots, people who believed in, for instance, labor unions and freedom of expression.
They lost their careers and, in some cases, their lives because of the cowardice of those, who failed to stand up to Senator Joseph McCarthy, a demagogue and a bully.
In the end, McCarthy was defeated, and he died in disgrace.
Nixon, too, was brought down by intrepid reporters, like Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who broke the Watergate story for the Washington Post.
Their courage was depicted quite well in the 1976 movie, All the President’s Men, which perhaps not surprisingly was a Warner Brothers film.
One of the reasons why I always loved Warner Brothers movies from the 1930s and 1940s was because Casablanca and so many other WB pictures gave a message of hope.
Those films were invariably infused with the fighting spirit of the underdog.
Yes, those movies inspired me.
Like Humphrey Bogart in real life, and his character, Rick Blaine, in Casablanca, and like Woodward and Bernstein at the time of Watergate, we all must do the right thing.
We must speak truth to power.
And if we can do so through art, then we can sometimes inspire even more people.
Like Bogey’s Rick Blaine, we may have to sacrifice some of our dreams, so that we can fight for a greater good.
Democracy is on the line.
We may not be fighting the Nazis, but we are fighting a white supremacist, who is in bed with Putin, in what I termed years ago a modern-day version of the Hitler-Stalin nonaggression pact.
Operating at the behest of Trump, Jared Kushner, who has been negotiating with Putin on a peace plan, largely drawn up by the Kremlin, is not only trying to sell out Ukraine.
Trump and Kushner and their cronies will be selling out America even more than they already have if Skydance Paramount, backed by Kushner, takes over Warner Brothers and CNN.
It could be lights out for democracy, as Senator Adam Schiff, then a congressman, once said.
We can’t allow this to happen.
We have to do what Bogey would do and think for all of us, show wisdom, and defeat the devil and his lackeys.
Then it can be the beginning of a beautiful friendship for all of us who believe in democracy and the First Amendment.