The onslaught of attacks on the media shows that executives' attempts to pacify Trump have backfired spectacularly. Their dreams of deregulation and a business boom have quickly faded dinto the reality that Trump remains who he has always been - driven by a desire for retribution and control. [...] [T]heir actions have only emboldened Trump's quest for greater power over those he perceives as his enemies.
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Media executives thought they were getting a deal with Donald Trump.
After years of oversight from Joe Biden, they hoped Trump would usher in a warm new era of deregulation.
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Over the course of [a few pre-election] weeks, Bob Iger's Disney agreed to make a $15 million donation to a future Trump presidential library to end a lawsuit against ABC News, Mark Zuckerberg's Meta paid Trump $25 million after suspending his accounts over the Jan. 6, attack, and Larry Ellison went to the White House to back Trump's "Stargate" project ostensibly in hopes of winning support for his son's Paramount takeover.
But just two months into the new administration, the business friendly environment they dreamed of has turned into a nightmare. Trump's government, stocked with loyalists, has launched a burst of investigations and challenges to the nation's biggest media and technology companies, dealmakers have put their long hoped-for plans on hold, advertisers are pulling back as Trump's economic policies rattle the markets, and foreign tourists are rethinking travel to the U.S., potentially impacting theme parks owned by Disney and NBCUniversal.
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And while media executives have turned down the volume on Trump in hopes of appeasing him, he has continued to assail their outlets with vitriol.
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While Zuckerberg publicly bowed to Trump's wishes by putting an end to "biased" fact checking on his platforms and appointing Trump ally and UFC boss Dana White to his board, Trump's Federal Trade Commission chair Andrew Ferguson said that the agency is "gearing up" for trial next month to break up the social media giant.
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Ferguson also announced the agency was opening a new inquiry into whether online platforms - including Zuckerberg's - "censor" users, embracing the long held (and false) claim by Republicans and right-wing media personalities that Big Tech is silencing their voices, in a possible precursor to a formal investigation.
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[Brendan Carr, Trump's head of the FCC,] launched investigations into Verizon and Comcast, which owns NBCUniversal, over their supposed D.E.I. programs. And he revived a news distortion investigation into CBS over its "60 Minutes" interview with Kamala Harris.
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Then on Friday, the FCC chair took aim at [Disney], sending a letter to Iger announcing the agency was opening an investigation into its ["invidious forms of DEI"] practices.
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As Noah Shachtman, the former Rolling Stone editor in chief, wrote of Carr's Disney probe: "It's almost like giving bullies your lunch money encourages them to shake you down tomorrow."
Status News
Jennifer Piggot and thousands like her who were summarily fired as "probationary" federal employees are shocked.
Why? How?Speaking to CNN Live in a broadcast shown Thursday, [Jennifer] Pigott said she cried after she was axed. “I was a MAGA junkie, a MAGA junkie who thought her government job would be safe with Donald Trump in office. I cried. It’s scary, you know, it’s a really scary thing, and I was embarrassed,” she said.
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Her woes have not stopped. Pigott, who has spoken to the national press about the issue before, has been targeted by vandals and has even received death threats since speaking out.
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She added that she now “regrets” voting for Trump. “To cut the knees out of the working-class Americans just doesn’t make sense to me. I expected more from President Donald Trump,” she said.
The Daily Beast
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