Boycott CBS, Paramount and All The Companies and Networks They Own

I Promoted Boycotting CBS and Paramount after CBS Axed Stephen Colbert and The Late Show. As We Saw with Jimmy Kimmel and Learned from the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Loss of Revenue Talks. Boycotts Work.

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CBS News legend Walter Cronkite during better days at the now-tarnished Tiffany network.

What Bari Weiss—the avatar of journalistic hackery—did to 60 Minutes on Sunday is censorship. Yet her action to kill the 60 Minutes segment should not be surprising. It revealed El Salvador’s CECOT prison that abused migrants kidnapped by the Dump MAGA-Nazi Reich. Weiss is complicit with Dump and his evil.

The Guardian’s David Klion wrote about Weiss in September 10 of this year:

In just a few years, Weiss has gone from a punchline in media circles to one of the most influential names in the industry, one with a genuine popular following beyond insiders and donors. Her stunning comeback is a tribute to her hustle, her oft-acknowledged personal charisma, and above all her unapologetic support for Israel and attacks on progressive social justice dogmas, often disparaged as “wokeness” – both of which align her with some of the most powerful people alive even as they alienate her from many of her generational peers in journalism.

But while Weiss is widely understood as a provocateur, what is less well understood is how she has used the Free Press to empower rightwing factions within established elite institutions, and how her efforts have been turbocharged by Trump’s return to the White House. If Weiss does join CBS, it will only formalize the role she has already carved out as the Trump administration’s de facto ally in its effort to silence progressive and pro-Palestinian voices. Weiss will be an ideological commissar situated within the highest levels of the media business, wielding her considerable platform to help the White House enforce compliance in spaces that fostered resistance during Trump’s first term: the media, academia and civil society.

Her decision to pull 60 Minutes’s segment at the last minutes is government censorship at work. Bari Weiss is not just a puppet. She’s a quisling.

Not smart. Once this all ends (and it will) Weiss and her fellow quislings will be held to account. If you are unfamiliar with the term quisling, a good place to start is watching the Swedish film Quisling: The Final Days. People can still watch it for free with ads on YouTube here. I highly recommend it.

Instead of creating the “debate” Weiss insists she craves, her censorship instead created a ratio for 60 Minutes’s social media accounts. This push back and resistance does not go far enough though.

Already independent journalists like Qasim Rashid, Esq. have shared the censored segment that did air on Canadian television. You can view it here through his Substack newsletter Let’s Address This and share it widely.

However, the information provided in 60 Minutes’s long-form segment about CECOT’s human rights abuses isn’t new. Last month Democracy Now, non-profit news independently funded by viewers, shared the report entitled “‘You Have Arrived in Hell’: Torture and Other Abuses Against Venezuelans in El Salvador’s Mega Prison” released by Human Rights Watch and Cristosal that exposed CECOT. According to Cristosal Executive Director Noah Bullock, CECOT’s human rights abuses also include sexual abuse.

A bigger difference though can be achieved not just by the average person sharing the segment 60 Minutes censored. History shows change happens through boycotts.

In my July 19 post after craven CBS axed Stephen Colbert and The Late Show, I called for my fellow Bluestockings to boycott CBS, Paramount and all its entities. If you have not already done so, stop watching CBS and cancel your Paramount+ subscription and do not give eyeballs or money to other companies they own. Also share this post.

Here again is that list of what CBS and Paramount own:

Paramount Pictures

• Paramount films

• Melange Pictures

• Nickelodeon Movies

• Paramount Home Entertainment

• Paramount Music

• Paramount Animation

• Paramount Players

• Republic Pictures

• Miramax

• United International Pictures

Paramount Television Group

• CBS Studios

• CBS Eye Animation Productions

• MTV Entertainment Studios

• Nickelodeon Productions

• Paramount Television International Studios

Paramount Streaming

• Paramount+

• FuboTV

• Pluto TV

Paramount Media Networks

• Nickelodeon Networks

• Awesomeness TV

MTV Entertainment Group

• MTV

• MTV2

• MTV Classic

• MTV Live

• MTVU

• Tr3s

• Comedy Central

• CMT

• Logo

• Paramount Network

• Pop TV

• Smithsonian Channel

• TV Land

• VH1

Showtime Networks

• Paramount+ with Showtime

• The Movie Channel

• Flix

CBS Entertainment Group

• CBS

• CBS News and Stations (CBS News, CBS News 24/7, CBS News Radio, CBS Moneywatch and See It Now Studios)

• Local CBS Stations

• Start TV

• Dabi

• Fave TV

• CBS Local Digital

• BET Media Group (BET, BET Gospel, BET Her, BET Jams, BET Soul, BET Studios, BET Films, BET+ (Tyler Perry Studios operates)

CBS Sports

• CBS Sports Network

• CBS Sports HQ

• CBS Sports Golazo Network

• CBS Sports Digital (247 Sports, MaxPreps, CBSSports.com)

• CBS Local Sports

Paramount Experiences

• Paramount Parks and Resorts

• Paramount Game Studios

Boycotts work. The boycotts of ABC and people cancelling their Disney+ subscriptions made ABC cave and welcome back Jimmy Kimmel after it took him off the air.

We must remember that boycotts require sacrifice and community. The Montgomery Bus Boycott lasted 381 days. Fighting for and maintaining the U.S. Constitutional democratic republic will take more than 381 days. It will also take the resilience and fortitude of what’s now called The Greatest Generation.

The late U.S Senator John Warner (R-VA) who belonged to The Greatest Generation wrote in his essay for Pew Charitable Trusts in 2018:

And we continue to combat evil forces in this world that wish to kill and destroy and can shake us to our very roots. These times are shaping who we are today and the hardships—and lessons—from these events are not all that different than they were nearly a century ago. I can only hope that we all learn from these times, that we learn that sacrifice can be good for us, that discipline is required of us, that humility is necessary for us, and that loyalty must guide us.

Sacrificing entertainment especially through streaming and turning to and funding independent and non-profit news is the least we can do. We must do it. Our first amendment and human rights are on the chopping block.

Though her song “The Lighthouse” focused on loss of abortion care and rights because of Dobbs, her lyrics about human and Constitutional rights resonate:

Don’t let them take your power
Don’t leave it alone in the final hours
They’ll take your soul, they’ll take your power

Unless you stand up
And take it back
Try to see the future
And get mad
It’s slippin’ through your fingers
You don’t have what you had
You don’t have much time
To get it back

We hold power with our purse strings. Money talks just like our votes.

Once we all lose our first amendment rights, it’s game over. Our Constitutional democratic republic then stands a strong chance of never being recovered. And we will have lost it to a bunch of cowards who bent the knee to a flatulent convicted felon, an adjudicated rapist and, in the words of the iconic legend E. Jean Carroll, a “nothing.”