Latest news with #DefamationLawsuit
Yahoo
21-07-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Portnoy on ‘arrogant' Colbert's cancellation: ‘What did you think was going to happen?'
Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy bashed Stephen Colbert on Saturday, calling the late-night host 'ungrateful' after Colbert's show was axed by CBS in what the network claimed was a 'financial decision.' 'For these people, including like Colbert, to be like, 'This isn't really right and we're blindsided' — buddy, you're losing 40 million dollars a year,' Portnoy said in a video posted to the social platform X, citing one estimate of the show's losses reported by Reuters. The announcement of the cancellation came just weeks after the network said it would pay $16 million to settle a defamation lawsuit brought by President Trump, a decision that Colbert had previously called a 'big fat bribe.' Paramount, CBS's parent company, is currently seeking approval for a merger from Trump's Federal Communications Commission. Lawmakers on the left have speculated that CBS's cancellation of the show might have been politically motivated, an assertion at which Portnoy effectively rolled his eyes. Rather, he asserted, Colbert was losing money and had been 'arrogant' in his criticism of CBS. 'Welcome to the real f—ing world,' the Barstool Sports founder said in the video, which he called a 'rant.' 'And then you have the arrogance to go hammer your own company? What do you think was going to happen?' he asked. Colbert has historically been a fierce critic of the president and previously went after CBS and Paramount for settling Trump's claim, which the host called a 'nuisance lawsuit.' Portnoy said that Colbert should not have criticized his network so strongly, especially if his show was losing money. The New York Times estimated that the show's losses were in the tens of millions of dollars. 'I'd fire you in a f—ing heartbeat. That's not politics. That's just being ungrateful,' Portnoy said. 'This is called capitalism, in the real world. ' Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Solve the daily Crossword
The Guardian
10-05-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Trump's latest Fox News hire looks even worse than Pete Hegseth
The revolving door between the Trump administration and rightwing Fox News took another wild spin this week, as America's TV-obsessed president tapped Jeanine Pirro for a prominent legal post: top federal prosecutor for Washington DC. Pirro is unqualified, perhaps even more so than was her former Fox colleague Pete Hegseth when he was named Trump's defense secretary a few months ago. In that crucial position, Hegseth has been a dangerous embarrassment, as his shockingly inappropriate communications have exposed national security secrets to the world. Pirro, although once a county-level district attorney, hasn't held a government legal position in decades. But she has been opining on Fox for 14 years, mostly recently as a host on The Five, the network's popular afternoon talkshow. But no matter. She 'is in a class by herself', Trump wrote on social media in announcing his intention to make her the interim (and perhaps permanent) prosecutor. His description may be accurate, but surely not in the way he intends. Pirro's record at Fox is startlingly checkered, even for that propaganda outfit. She got in trouble with the network's brass a few years ago for her eager promotion of Trump's lies about supposed voter fraud in the 2020 election. (The voting-fraud lies became part of a defamation lawsuit against the network by a voting-systems company; Fox paid nearly $800m to settle the case and had to acknowledge that statements made on air were false.) Fox once suspended her for her ugly commentary on Congresswoman Ilhan Omar's wearing a hijab, which Pirro suggested was an adherence to 'sharia lawm which in itself is antithetical to the United States constitution'. And she advocated for a 'cleansing' of the FBI and the justice department because their ranks were full of people who 'need to be taken out in handcuffs'. But none of this causes any real concern for the president, apparently, because Pirro has one huge thing going for her. Over the course of a long friendship and many visits to Mar-a-Lago, she has been relentlessly loyal to Trump. In fact, she has gone well beyond loyalty into straight-up sycophancy. On this score, Pirro has what it takes. 'Since Trump returned to office, Pirro has kept busy by showering him with praise and lashing out at anyone who stands in his way,' wrote Matt Gertz, senior fellow at the progressive watchdog group Media Matters, noting that she is the 23rd former Fox employee whom Trump has tapped for his administration. Tom Homan, a former Fox contributor, became Trump's 'border czar', aggressively carrying out the administration's anti-immigrant policy, and Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor and former host of a weekly Fox show, was named ambassador to Israel. Beyond her peerless cheerleading, Pirro would be useful to Trump in practical terms, noted the New York Times in a news story. She supports 'Trump's efforts to exact vengeance on his political enemies, has backed his challenges to federal judges who have questioned the legality of his immigration policies and spent months protesting the legitimacy' of Biden's 2020 election to the presidency. Although Trump often doesn't return the favor of loyalty, he has stepped up for Pirro's family by pardoning her former husband (once Trump's lawyer), who in 2020 was convicted of conspiracy and tax-evasion charges. All told, this is some serious symbiosis. In stepping away from her high-profile – and high-earning – TV job, Pirro may solve a sticky problem for Trump, whose earlier choice for the DC prosecutor's position ran into trouble with Senate Republicans. It's not clear if Pirro's nomination will succeed, especially in the long term. Although Trump is nominating her on an interim basis, there's little doubt he'd like it to be permanent. But even the interim appointment may run into a legal fight over just how many acting US attorneys the president can appoint consecutively. You might think that with Hegseth's rocky and widely criticized start as defense secretary – where he oversees almost three million employees while maintaining a TV star's firm jawline – the president would hesitate to choose another unqualified TV personality for a key role. But Trump clearly doesn't see it that way. There's hardly anything better, it turns out, than Fox News on one's resume. Even better when it's paired with a solid record of fealty to the Audience in Chief. Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture
