The war on truthful reporting is on.

The television news magazine 60 Minutes — the most storied and profitable show in the history of CBS News — currently finds itself as the avatar of President Trump’s onslaught against the media in the courts and the court of public opinion.

Despite brave talk from the news division, CBS’s parent company appears to be inching toward capitulation, as its controlling owner wants to drag CBS out of the headlines and wrap up a corporate sale.

Naturally. News people care about truthful reporting; owners care about profit. Owners, being owners, win conflicts between the two.

Before becoming president, Trump sued CBS over 60 Minutes‘ interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris shortly before the election. Now, Trump’s newly elevated Federal Communications Commission chairman, Brendan Carr, is using the levers of government to put pressure on the network.

Naturally. Trump is 100 times more ruthlessly aggressive than he was the first time around.

Before Carr’s involvement, CBS had refused to release those materials, calling Trump’s demand for them an intrusion on its journalists’ First Amendment rights. Democratic Commissioner Anna M. Gomez called the FCC’s investigation part of “the administration’s focus on partisan culture wars” and urged her fellow commissioners to dismiss it.

Failure to flatter the dictator is a crime. Bend the knee or be squashed; your choice.

The clash at CBS represents just the latest front in a multi-pronged assault on the press waged by the second Trump administration, using litigation, regulatory agencies, budget powers, executive prerogatives and sympathetic lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

The danger is obvious.

More broadly, the president and his allies are seeking to pressure the media writ large, both to inhibit its ability to check the president and to punish it for coverage he views as unfavorable.

ABC News’ parent company, The Walt Disney Co., paid $15 million toward Trump’s future presidential library, plus another $1 million in legal costs, to settle Trump’s defamation suit over inaccurate remarks about him by anchor George Stephanopoulos. The social media giant Meta paid $25 million to settle Trump’s suit over sidelining him from Facebook after the January 2021 siege of the U.S. Capitol.

Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos and Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong stopped their newspapers from endorsing Harris ahead of the 2024 election. They each cited the low esteem in which the media is held by the broader public. Both owners are billionaires with major business concerns before federal agencies; in Amazon founder Bezos’s case, they include contracts worth billions of dollars.

Free enterprise in action.

Beyond CBS, Trump still has lawsuits pending against Gannett’s Des Moines Register for polling ahead of the election that inaccurately found Harris in the lead (Trump won Iowa decisively) and the committee that awards Pulitzer Prizes over awards given to coverage of the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties to the Russian regime.

How does that work? How do you sue a committee that awards prizes for giving awards to people you don’t like? Why doesn’t the attempt get laughed out of court?

Under new Secretary Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News host, the Defense Department tossed Politico, NPR, the New York Times and NBC News from their reserved press spaces at the Pentagon in favor of the conservative New York Post, the right-wing Breitbart and One America News Network and the liberal HuffPost, a site that, according to a spokesperson, hadn’t asked for a workspace. No press credentials were revoked; the dislodged outlets can still visit the Pentagon and report there.

Serious adult news media lose their reserved spaces to trashy childish news media.

It’s only going to get worse.