On The Weeknight, Angelo Carusone discusses the conservative takeover of media infrastructure

Written by Media Matters Staff

Published

From the June 1, 2026, edition of MS NOW's The Weeknight

SYMONE SANDERS-TOWNSEND (CO-HOST): Angelo, I don't think the CBS story is just about a little corporate dispute. I don't think the ABC story and the licenses is just about regulatory. I think this is about who controls the information infrastructure and what we perceive to be true, which is why I saw Scott Pelley basically being like, fire me, I have thoughts, was fantastic and refreshing to see in this moment. What do you think about that?

ANGELO CARUSONE (GUEST): Yeah, It sure is. I mean, the so what of why you want to control the infrastructure is because then you get to have extraordinary influence over the narrative. And that doesn't just affect politics. It affects culture. It sort of helps you build, you know, continue to build a platform that you can build on and work with. It's an important part of the story, and that's what they're doing. And this is not just a story about CBS. We can look at it in that context of, you know, the intrigue, and I love it. I watch a lot of reality TV, so I could do this all day, you know? 

But when I heard that and watched that, it's about something so much bigger because we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that in a few months, that same person, the same people who have been doing this to CBS, who Scott Pelley was making a point about that, that you came in here with an agenda to transform this institution, and you did it, and you're doing it, and you're going to make it worse in order to achieve this political objective. They're about to get their hands on a whole bunch of other news media properties, including CNN. And that, to me is the through line here, is that when I look at what this story, what happens as a result of this, it isn't just inside corporate drama. It actually is an illustration of what's going to happen to a much larger part of our media ecosystem in just a few short months.

ALICIA MENENDEZ (CO-HOST): One of the reasons I'm so grateful that you are at the table for this particular conversation is because you spent the early part of your career leading campaigns to de-platform people, so you have studied the pressure points and where you push to get these institutions' attention. And I think what is complicated in this moment is the journalism at CBS has gotten worse under Bari Weiss. Their viewers are walking away, but she has succeeded in greasing the wheels for her corporate overlords and what it is that they actually care about. That leaves organizers on an asymmetric playing field. Who is it that they're even supposed to be appealing to?

CARUSONE: That's right. Because the typical things in a normally functioning market system, you have some leverage. You have audience and audience, that usually is one of the metrics. The other is revenue, is advertising. They don't care about either of those things right now. That is irrelevant to them. What they care about is taking this brand, hollowing it out and then reformulating it, laundering essentially their version of a narrative and hoping that that can get projected out into enough people over time that they'll either accept it or that it'll get filtered into other parts of the media. So, people aren't consuming it directly from CBS News, they will be getting it indirectly from influencers in this online ecosystem, which again, we should note, the Ellisons did take a very large chunk of TikTok. 

SANDERS-TOWNSEND: And it has changed since they bought it.

CARUSONE: And that it'll get filtered in another way. And so that is the real question here, is that those levers of power that existed for a while in order to change the conversation or hold those -- they are gone. And we need to accept that reality. They're gone. That doesn't mean that new ones won't emerge. And this is -- but we are sandwiched between two realities right now. And the most important thing that we can do then to that point is as those new levers start to emerge and they will, part of that requires a government that is able to also have some leverage and some some pressure. You need shame. Shame is obviously gone. We actually need information inoculation. That's the most important thing right now, is that people have to be aware of what's taking place, and not immediately start to become conduits for that misinformation and disinformation, because we are in this sort of transitional period.