In 1989, Jack Nicholson delivered one of my favorite lines of all time in Batman.
“It’s time for ‘Who do you trust!’ Hubba, hubba, hubba, money, money, money! Who do you trust?”
In the strange place that is my mind, I keep returning to that line.
For some time now, I’ve been watching reports about media companies being bought up. Of note recently was the acquisition of Paramount by Skydance, controlled by the Ellisons, followed quickly by the acquisition of Warner Bros. by the same.
For months, my news feeds were full of stories about The Late Show with Stephen Colbert being canceled and how suspicious the timing seemed. It came mere days after he criticized his parent company for what he described as bribing the President to allow the merger to go through.
Of course, those in corporate leadership emphasized that the decision was purely financial. Maybe it was. Maybe it was simply really bad timing to announce the cancellation—or more specifically, to tell Colbert about it at that point instead of letting things cool down. Since he didn’t hesitate to get the word out once he knew, we’ll never know.
Then we learned Bari Weiss was being brought in to lead the news division at CBS. Concerns abounded in legacy media, social media, and print media that the venerated CBS newsroom was about to leave journalism behind. If one listened to the talking heads and read the social media commentary, democracy itself seemed to be dying in darkness.
Then came a flood of headlines from various news outlets about sudden turnover and discussions of corporate interference in news coverage. A series of high-profile exits followed, culminating with the firing of veteran journalist Scott Pelley from 60 Minutes, all adding to the smoke that seems to be rising from the CBS newsroom.
For as long as I can remember, 60 Minutes has been the gold standard of journalism. I remember watching it as a kid with Andy Rooney telling the world things like the ten stupidest things he didn’t want for Christmas. Number one was a duck phone, which my father had just purchased for my mother for Christmas that year.
Articles such as Marlow Stern’s June 11, 2026 Variety piece discussing Bari Weiss pulling a 60 Minutes story just before it was set to air—while it still aired outside the United States—certainly gave me pause about the credibility of the CBS News division. PBS NewsHour’s reporting on Scott Pelley’s firing (see sources at the end) explored at length how much appears to have changed at that network.
I remember watching Scott Pelley anchor the nightly news for years. He had earned my trust with his reporting. I felt he was good at providing facts and context while allowing viewers to make up their own minds about what the information meant.
Despite my instinctive mistrust from the negative publicity, I clicked on a CBS News story by Andrew Jones titled “They’re Uninsured After Obamacare Became Too Costly. And They’re Far From Alone.”
As I read it, the piece seemed straightforward. The health care subsidies ended this year, driving up health care costs. As a person who has been paying a fair amount of attention to current events, I know those subsidies were ended by Congress, and it was quite a show as lawmakers scrambled to demonstrate support for them while ultimately allowing them to expire.
In the strange world that is my mind, I see “Obamacare” in the title. While that nickname was ultimately embraced even by former President Obama, my instinctive distrust of CBS News makes me wonder whether the title subtly implies that Obamacare itself is to blame.
The article itself seems to stick to the facts, and yet I couldn’t help noticing there was no mention of how the subsidies ended.
To be clear, I’m not criticizing the article. Overall, I felt it was very much on point.
Ultimately, my level of trust in CBS has been severely compromised, and I don’t believe I’m anywhere near alone in that feeling. Once trust has been lost, it may never fully come back.
So where do I turn?
CNN always struck me as trying to walk a balance of being facts first and opinion second. Now that comes into question as the exact same people will own it. What does that mean for CNN? I’m sure the people working there wish they knew (see CNN article in sources).
In a world where things feel more partisan and divided by the day, acquisitions of major news outlets by people perceived as looking to put their thumb on the scale, for any reason, simply make things worse.
For a person like me who actively looks for all sides of a story, it becomes frustrating to have fewer places to fact-check information.
So what is left that can be considered in the middle?
NBC News is one of my few remaining hopes. NBC recently went its separate ways with MSNBC, now renamed MSNOW. While I do enjoy some of the programming on MSNOW, such as The Rachel Maddow Show repeatedly reminding us that patterns tend to repeat themselves, much of the network’s content is openly partisan.
In the plus column, that network hasn’t been forced to pay more than three-quarters of a billion dollars for saying things that were demonstrably untrue.
Trust…
It is becoming harder and harder for me to trust.
So who do I trust?
The older I get, the less my answer becomes “this network” or “that newspaper” and the more it becomes “no single source.”
To me, it doesn’t matter whether you lean right or left politically. What matters is whether you are willing to consider ideas beyond what a single source pushes.
It is hard to admit when we are wrong. Better, perhaps, to remember Plato’s observation:
“I know that I know nothing.”
Read broadly.
Compare perspectives.
Trust, but verify.
Trust takes a lifetime to earn and only seconds to lose.
Sources:
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/06/12/paramount-acquisition-warner-bros-approved-00960300
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/scott-pelley-fired-from-60-minutes-deepening-turmoil-at-cbs-news
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/07/magazine/scott-pelley-interview.html
https://variety.com/2026/tv/features/60-minutes-staffers-bari-weiss-scott-pelley-trump-1236771125
https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/27/media/cnn-paramount-ellison-bari-weiss-wbd-merger