It’s been a busy month: 60 Minutes lost its most experienced journalists in a wave of firings under new Paramount Skydance ownership; Paramount+ then refuses to air a press-freedom ad; a watchdog group sues the FCC for refusing to hand over Brendan Carr’s texts about Jimmy Kimmel; a federal court orders the Kennedy Center to remove the President’s name from its facade; and on Trump’s 80th birthday, Jane Fonda and a revived McCarthy-era Committee for the First Amendment headline a concert that names the censorship campaign for what it is.
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These two weeks delivered the moment the censorship campaign turned in on itself — and the moment the resistance to it found its voice. The opening days of June saw the most experienced journalists at 60 Minutes — including legendary correspondent Scott Pelley, executive producer Tanya Simon, and correspondents Sharon Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega — pushed out under the new Paramount Skydance ownership, with their parting statements describing a pattern of editorial pressure they refused to absorb. Two weeks later, Paramount, the company seeking FCC approval for a merger that would place CNN under the editorial control of a Trump-aligned billionaire, refused to air a press-freedom advertisement criticizing the merger — an ad fronted by the same Scott Pelley they had just fired. A watchdog group sued the FCC after the agency claimed it had no record of Chairman Brendan Carr’s text messages during the Kimmel controversy — despite Carr having emailed himself screenshots of those very messages. The Southern Poverty Law Center entered a critical briefing window on its motion to dismiss the Trump DOJ’s vindictive prosecution. And on Trump’s 80th birthday, with the President’s name being unscrewed from the front of the Kennedy Center hours earlier under court order, Jane Fonda took the stage at Town Hall to lead a concert organized through the revived Committee for the First Amendment — the same group her father Henry Fonda co-founded in 1947 to defend the Hollywood Ten. The administration is still escalating. So is the answer.
60 Minutes in Freefall: Scott Pelley Fired, Joining a Wave of Departures Under New Paramount Skydance Ownership.
America’s most-watched newsmagazine entered the most turbulent stretch in its 58-year history in the opening days of this period. On June 2, CBS News fired veteran 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley — a day after Pelley confronted the program’s newly installed executive producer Nick Bilton at a staff meeting and accused new CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss of “murdering” the broadcast. According to an audio recording obtained by NBC News, Pelley told Bilton — a former tech columnist with no traditional newsmagazine experience — that he had “slender” qualifications for arguably the most important EP job in television news, and asked why Bilton had accepted a position “knowing that you would never be welcomed here.” Bilton fired Pelley by letter the next day, accusing him of “remarkable incivility and contempt.” In his exit statement, Pelley said: “Incompetence and unprofessionalism in the new management have wreaked havoc. In a case involving one of my stories, the entire program came within 19 minutes of not getting on the air at all.”
Pelley’s firing was the most prominent in a larger wave of departures at 60 Minutes over the past couple of months: executive producer Tanya Simon (the longtime steward of the program and daughter of the show’s original creator), longtime correspondent Sharon Alfonsi, and correspondent Cecilia Vega were all out before Pelley. Vega’s exit statement made the editorial pressure explicit: “I know from many conversations with colleagues that many producing teams and correspondents working on the show today have had to fight to maintain editorial independence with regularity. I am far from the only 60 Minutes correspondent who has asked herself, ‘What is my personal red line? How much can I push back before I pay the price?’” The firings come under the new ownership of Paramount Skydance — the merged entity created when David Ellison’s Skydance acquired Paramount last year, after Paramount paid Trump a $16 million settlement and agreed to install a “bias monitor” at CBS as conditions of FCC approval. Bari Weiss, the editor of the conservative-leaning Free Press, was installed at the top of CBS News as part of the new ownership’s editorial overhaul. Whatever one thinks of the staffing decisions, the pattern is clear: the most experienced journalists at the country’s most prestigious newsmagazine are being removed, and the ones speaking on the way out are saying the same thing about why.
Paramount+ Blocks a Press-Freedom Ad About Paramount. On June 16, Freedom of the Press Foundation revealed that Paramount+ had rejected its 30-second advertisement criticizing the proposed Paramount Skydance–Warner Bros. Discovery merger, which would place CNN under the editorial control of David Ellison — a Trump-aligned investor whose company has already made documented concessions to the administration to secure regulatory approval. The ad had been scheduled to air during the UFC Freedom 250 broadcast on June 14, the President’s 80th-birthday spectacle staged on the White House South Lawn. It featured recently fired 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley delivering his accusation that CBS had demanded his stories include “falsehoods and bias” to appease the president, alongside Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s public statement that “the sooner the Ellisons take over [CNN], the better.” Paramount+ refused to run it, citing a “conflict of interest.” Freedom of the Press Foundation’s Seth Stern: “Ellison has already shown his cards on editorial independence, but in case there was any doubt, his company has now declined to air a straightforward message about what his proposed takeover of CNN, HBO, and other outlets would mean for press freedom.” Stern noted that Paramount evidently “sees no conflict of interest in promising the Trump administration editorial concessions in exchange for merger approvals, in throwing fancy dinner parties honoring Trump while he attacks CBS and CNN journalists, or in airing a UFC event which functioned as an hourslong commercial for Donald Trump and Truth Social.” Read against the 60 Minutes firings two weeks earlier, the ad rejection completes the picture: the corporate parent that paid Trump $16 million to clear its first merger, gutted 60 Minutes under new ownership, and is now seeking approval for an even larger consolidation refuses to broadcast a former CBS News luminary warning the public about what that consolidation means.
Watchdog Sues FCC After Carr’s Kimmel-Era Texts “Disappear” — Except for the One Carr Forwarded to Himself. On June 9, the Citizens for Constitutional Integrity filed a federal lawsuit against the Federal Communications Commission alleging the agency failed to conduct an adequate search for Chairman Brendan Carr’s emails and text messages related to the Jimmy Kimmel controversy. The group had filed a FOIA request in January seeking communications from September 2025, when Carr publicly demanded that ABC affiliates pre-empt Kimmel — comments that within hours produced announcements from Nexstar and Sinclair (both with deals pending before the FCC) that they would pull the show, ultimately forcing ABC to put Jimmy Kimmel Live! on temporary hiatus. In response to the FOIA request, the FCC produced hundreds of records but said it could not locate text messages responsive to the request involving Kimmel, Nexstar, or Sinclair.
There is one major problem with that claim. The FCC’s records did include a text-message exchange between Carr and a reporter at TheDesk.net — but only because Carr had emailed screen captures of the exchange to himself. (In that conversation, Carr had responded to interview requests with animated GIFs, including one of the muppet Elmo on fire.) CNN’s Brian Stelter has separately reported that Carr responded to his own inquiries during the same period with a GIF — and those texts were not disclosed in the FOIA production. The lawsuit alleges that “the lack of text messages demonstrated the FCC undertook no reasonable search,” and is seeking a court order compelling the agency to search Carr’s government-issued cell phone and disclose responsive communications. The case is the latest entry in a growing body of accountability litigation around Carr’s pressure campaign against broadcasters — and it crystallizes a particular oddity of the moment: a federal agency that has aggressively pursued investigations of broadcasters for what they air refuses to produce records of what its own chairman said while doing it.
SPLC Briefing Window Opens on Motion to Dismiss “Vindictive Prosecution.” The Southern Poverty Law Center’s challenge to the Trump DOJ’s fraud indictment entered its most consequential briefing window these two weeks. On June 8, U.S. Magistrate Judge Kelly F. Pate of the Middle District of Alabama issued an order granting in part the SPLC’s motion to show cause regarding the government’s June 2-3 superseding indictment, requiring the government to file its response last week — and the SPLC to file its reply by tomorrow, June 22. The same order moved the arraignment on the superseding indictment from June 16 to July 7. The SPLC has accused the government of leaking the superseding indictment to right-wing outlets before it was filed, and has separately moved to dismiss the underlying case as a vindictive prosecution.
The superseding indictment itself is its own piece of evidence in the SPLC’s argument. As former federal prosecutors noted, the DOJ used the superseding indictment to quietly remove the words “or misleading” from its bank fraud allegations — a tacit acknowledgment that the original indictment had relied on legal language the Supreme Court specifically rejected in Thompson v. USA in 2024. In other words, the DOJ went back to the grand jury to fix a basic legal error that legal observers had flagged within days of the original indictment. The superseding indictment also added inflammatory new allegations — that the SPLC had paid informants who allegedly purchased KKK robes and materials for cross burnings — drawing immediate criticism that the government appeared to be trying its case in the press while the motion to dismiss was pending. Interim SPLC CEO Bryan Fair is scheduled to testify before the House Judiciary Committee next week.
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On June 12, a federal court ordered the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to remove the President’s name from its facade, ruling that the Center could not be renamed without Congressional approval. Hours after the deadline, workers in Washington unscrewed more than a dozen bronze letters from the building, less than six months after they had been installed. A tarp covered the facade as the work was done. The court did not stop the administration from doing many other things to the Kennedy Center over the past several months — but it did stop this one, and the visual of the letters coming down on a Friday night will outlast many of the things the administration has tried to put up.
Two days later, on June 14 — Trump’s 80th birthday, with a UFC cage staged on the White House South Lawn for an event a coalition led by the Public Integrity Project had sued to stop on June 6 — Jane Fonda took the stage at Town Hall in Manhattan to headline “Rise Up, Sing Out: A Concert for the First Amendment.” The event was livestreamed to more than 500 community watch parties across the country, organized through the revived Committee for the First Amendment — the same group her father Henry Fonda co-founded in 1947 to defend the Hollywood Ten against the House Un-American Activities Committee and McCarthyism. She was joined by Bette Midler, Patti Smith, Rufus Wainwright, Julia Roberts, Lily Gladstone, Wilson Cruz, Peppermint, Joy Reid, and the Broadway Inspirational Voices, and others. We’ll leave you today with her statement:
“Right now, the government and its cronies are routinely violating the First Amendment to silence artists. Shuttering institutions like the Kennedy Center, defunding museums and the National Endowment of the Arts, and banning books, canceling TV hosts who speak out…
The Committee [for the First Amendment] was relaunched last October to bring together the entertainment industry at this moment, when our democracy is in peril.
In the face of what’s happening, we need our industry to be unified, activated, and unwilling to engage in anticipatory obedience.
We stand together in defense of our right to free expression. They come for one of us, by God, they come for all of us.”
As always, hang in there, and we’ll see you next time.
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