Arwa Mahdawi
You know how I’m going to be able to tell that I’ve really made it as a writer in America? When our very handsome (much better-looking than Zohran Mamdani!) and very high-IQ leader Donald Trump gives me a personal shoutout to commend me on what a wonderful job I’m doing. As we all know, a good journalist should always make the rich and powerful feel comfortable.
While I wait for that day to come, I’m watching and learning from the head honchos at CBS. Trump appeared on CBS News’s 60 Minutes on Sunday night for his first sit-down with the show in five years and commented on how much better the network has become after its owner, Paramount, was taken over by his billionaire allies, the father-and-son duo Larry and David Ellison.
If you watched the interview on TV, you might have missed that particular bit because (weird!) it didn’t get aired. Nor did the bit where Trump said the network’s new editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, who according to the FT was picked by David Ellison for her pro-Israel views, was a “great new leader”. Nor did a bit where Trump boasted how “60 Minutes paid me a lotta money,” while referencing his $16m settlement from Paramount for what he called a “deceptively” edited interview with Kamala Harris on 60 Minutes in 2024. Also not fully aired on the TV broadcast: a segment in which the president claimed he didn’t know a crypto tycoon who went to prison for breaching money laundering laws, despite the fact that Trump pardoned him. That bit, along with all the others, did appear in the full text transcript published online.
Interviews are edited for length and clarity all the time. But the Trump-friendly editing of an interview conducted by a network now owned by the president’s allies, with a head of news that he thinks is “great”, is part of a broader trend of US media outlets lying down and rolling over for Trump.
Look, for example, at all the corporate donors that have rushed to show their fealty to Trump by donating to his extravagant ballroom project. These include Amazon, Apple and Meta, as well as Comcast, which is the parent company of NBCUniversal. Look at Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post, whose editorial board recently published a defence of Trump’s teardown of the White House’s east wing for his ballroom. “Strong leaders reject calcification,” the editorial board wrote. That’s the same Washington Post, of course, that refused to publish Pulitzer prize winner Ann Telnaes’s cartoon of billionaire Bezos kneeling before Trump.
Authoritarians have always sought to control the media. But what’s so terrifying about the current moment isn’t flattering interview edits, it’s the way that Trump and his friends are seeking to edit our relationship with reality. Take Elon Musk, who helped propel Trump to his second term. First Musk bought Twitter – a very convenient way of controlling online discourse – and now he has launched his own AI-powered version of Wikipedia called Grokipedia. “The goal here is to create an open source, comprehensive collection of all knowledge,” Musk posted on X last week. “Then place copies of that etched in a stable oxide in orbit, the Moon and Mars to preserve it for the future.”
Forget stable oxides – the real goal here, you could argue, is instability; to muddy truth and knowledge so thoroughly that reality itself is up for debate. Grokipedia, I’m sure I don’t need to tell you, is already being found to be riddled with factual errors; largely because it pulls from unreliable sources. “Chatroom contributions are given equal status with serious academic work,” one academic told the Guardian. When you make it difficult to separate opinions from facts, it becomes a lot easier to manipulate people.
AI-generated videos take the muddling of reality to a whole new level. Fox News, owned by the Murdoch family, recently reported on videos circulating on social media in which Black food stamp beneficiaries were threatening to ransack stores if the US government shutdown stopped their benefits. There were various clues that the videos were AI-generated racist rage-bait, but Fox ignored all those and presented them as real. Eventually it corrected its story to note the videos were AI-generated, but the lie had already travelled halfway around the world. And no doubt Musk’s Grokipedia will soon etch that lie in a stable oxide in orbit, to preserve it for the future.
