WASHINGTON, D.C. — One year into Donald Trump’s second term, three of the most recognizable faces exiled from American cable news took the stage at Washington’s historic Howard Theater with a blunt verdict: the United States no longer has a genuinely free press, and corporate media is hastening the decline of American democracy.
Mehdi Hasan, formerly of MSNBC; Joy Reid, the longtime progressive host pushed out of the same network; and Jim Acosta, once CNN’s most visible White House correspondent, appeared together at Zeteo’s “One Year of Trump” event to dissect what they described as a media system “captured” by political power and corporate interests.
“We don’t really have a free press right now if the government can put its thumb on the backs of these corporate titans who run these networks,” Acosta told the crowd, describing what he called “state‑compromised media” in the United States. The only real counterweight, he argued, is the rapid growth of independent outlets willing to say what legacy networks will not.
‘Liberated and naked’: Life after cable news
Hasan opened the conversation by jokingly introducing the trio as “independent journalists, all of us ex‑cable news — the castaways,” asking what it felt like to be “free” from their former employers.
“It’s like being liberated and naked all at the same time,” Acosta replied, recalling that people often approach him to commiserate over his departure from CNN. “I’m having the best time of my life,” he said, adding that for the first time he can speak “in an unvarnished, unflinching way” without worrying about an angry phone call from an executive afterward.
Reid echoed that sentiment, contrasting her current work with the constraints of corporate television. On her own platform, she said, there is “no phone call after” she criticizes powerful figures or policies, and no pressure to filter her commentary through the business interests of a media conglomerate.
“The media company is our company — my husband and my company,” she said. “Our interest is just to get the truth to the people in as unvarnished and unfiltered a way as possible. Not some business we want to do in mergers and acquisitions that needs regulatory approval.”
Bribes, bosses and ‘an American version of North Korea’
Over nearly an hour, the panelists painted a picture of a press corps cowed by a vengeful president and controlled by owners who see Trump as good for ratings and access, even at the cost of democratic norms.
They pointed to reported payments by CBS and ABC to Trump’s presidential library as “the equivalent of bribe payments” — a symbol, Reid argued, of news divisions subordinated to corporate strategy. At the same time, they described a “great replacement” inside newsrooms: veteran reporters and beat correspondents pushed out, and their seats handed to partisan influencers and loyalist podcasters who reliably flatter the president.
“What we have are no institutional supports for our journalists,” Reid said. “We have their bosses paying bribes to the president of the United States, and you have the great replacement of real journalists with Trump‑lackey podcasters and influencers. And so I think it couldn’t be any worse.” She went so far as to describe today’s media environment as “an American version of North Korea,” with coverage structured around appeasing the ruling power rather than holding it to account.
Acosta argued that this capture is not theoretical. He cited the recent raid on a Washington Post reporter’s home and the seizure of her devices as “a new frontier in Trump’s war on the press,” and faulted the paper’s billionaire owner Jeff Bezos for failing to mount a full‑throated defense of his own newsroom. That silence, he suggested, is another “epic fail on the part of corporate media.”
Silence in the briefing room
Hasan pressed Acosta on another theme: the apparent lack of solidarity among White House correspondents when Trump publicly abuses or expels reporters.
In recent months, the president has called female reporters “obnoxious,” “stupid” and “shut up, piggy,” and described a New York Times journalist as “ugly on the inside and out.” Yet, Hasan noted, the next reporter often moves on to their own question instead of challenging the president over his treatment of colleagues.
Acosta attributed that silence to a combination of newsroom pressure and personal fear. “Their bosses won’t let them,” he said. “You’ll get called into the office and the boss will say, ‘Why were you so mean to the president? We need to do these deals with him.’” Others, he added, are simply “afraid to lose these cushy gigs,” a dynamic he called “a sad state of affairs” but “the truth.”
The consequences, he warned, are not confined to press rooms. Acosta reminded the audience that when Trump brands journalists “the enemy of the people,” his supporters often follow with harassment and threats. “It’s not just Trump coming after you,” he said. “It’s all of his people coming after you,” citing his own experience receiving death threats, including one tweet that read, “Kill Jim Acosta.”
Those dangers, the panelists argued, have only grown as Trump’s media allies and appointees gain more control over once‑independent institutions.
CBS, Fox envy and the race to the bottom
A significant portion of the discussion focused on CBS, long marketed as the “Tiffany Network” of American journalism. Under new ownership aligned with Trump and conservative causes, Hasan said, the network has lurched rightward — from the elevation of commentator Barry Weiss to the appointment of Tony Dokoupil as anchor of the CBS Evening News.
Acosta said the decline of CBS and its flagship program “60 Minutes” is “a sign the country is in trouble.” He pointed to Dokoupil’s recent segment “both‑sidesing” the January 6 insurrection by presenting Trump’s false accusation that Democrats failed to prevent the attack alongside Democratic leaders’ condemnation of Trump, as if they carried equal weight.
“That is absolutely a lie. And that is not the news,” Acosta said. “We have a situation in this country that is deeply alarming. We have what I call state‑compromised media.”
Reid argued that CBS’s leadership is trying to “Joe Rogan the media” — softening hard news, aggressively “both‑sidesing” clear matters of fact and grievance, and soothing “fragile egos on the right” who “cannot stand to hear the news if the news is bad for their side.”
The strategy is not new, Acosta added, recalling an executive who told him in the mid‑2000s that CBS might do better “if we became more like Fox.” But he called the idea “a fool’s errand,” noting that when Fox briefly acknowledged Trump’s 2020 defeat, its viewers simply migrated to even more extreme channels rather than switching to CBS.
Reid traced the problem back to the Les Moonves era, when the then‑CBS chief said of Trump’s first presidential run that he was “bad for America but good for CBS.” That mindset, she said, is still driving editorial decisions: “When you think that way, you think, ‘We don’t want to insult his supporters too much.’” Coverage, in her telling, is often tailored to make even the most disturbing stories — including the recent killing of a white Minneapolis mother by an ICE agent — “less painful for right‑wingers so that maybe they’ll watch us.”
CNN’s WWE act and the normalization of extremism
The trio also turned their fire on CNN, where Acosta built his career and where pro‑Trump commentator Scott Jennings has become a regular presence. Hasan noted that Jennings recently described his on‑air work as “a mixture of showbiz and WWE,” even as he has used derisive language about Jeffrey Epstein’s victims and made sweeping comments about Palestinians.
“Scott Jennings is not a journalist, but he’s on a network that is supposed to be journalistically inclined,” Reid said, accusing CNN of knowingly platforming a performer who admits “it’s all a game.” To her, the Jennings model is emblematic of a broader shift toward infotainment, in which the appearance of ideological “balance” matters more than factual rigor or the real‑world impact of the rhetoric being normalized.
Acosta, for his part, suggested that CNN and other networks are trapped in a ratings and access logic that leads them to repeatedly reward the very figures helping to degrade public discourse. Attempts to copy Fox’s formula, he warned, only leave mainstream networks “trying to out‑Fox Fox” — and losing both viewers and credibility in the process.
Gaza, genocide and what it will take to change course
The evening’s discussion was not limited to media‑political dynamics in Washington and New York. Hasan pressed his guests on how mainstream outlets have covered the war in Gaza and the mounting international legal findings that Israel’s actions may amount to genocide.
Reid argued that major broadcasters and newspapers have consistently downplayed or sanitized Palestinian suffering while applying very different standards to Russian atrocities in Ukraine. “I do not believe that particularly a Democratic candidate can be elected unless they acknowledge that there is a genocide that happened in Gaza,” she said, contending that younger voters in particular see through what they view as a glaring double standard.
For Hasan, that disconnect underscores why independent platforms have become essential: “Corporate media loves power, access and pretending it’s neutral,” he said, explaining why he launched Zeteo as “journalism that isn’t for sale.”
Acosta agreed, saying independent, subscriber‑funded outlets must “keep growing” and “keep flourishing” not just to give journalists like himself a livelihood, but to force legacy newsrooms to remember their original mission. “They need to know there are folks like us who will call it the way we see it, who will tell it like it is,” he said.
‘If we had smart fascists, this would be over already’
Despite the bleak portrait they painted — of bribe‑like payments to presidents, billionaires unwilling to defend their own reporters, and briefing rooms filled with partisan influencers — the panelists insisted there is still room to fight back.
Reid urged reporters and viewers alike to stop fetishizing “access” and to measure journalism not by proximity to power but by its willingness to challenge it. Acosta, recalling that he was once barred from White House bowling nights as punishment for tough questioning, described that snub as a “badge of honor” and encouraged younger correspondents to embrace similar ostracism if necessary.
Hasan, for his part, offered a darkly comic note of caution — and opportunity. “Thank God our fascists are so dumb,” he quipped. “If we had smart fascists, this would be over already. We wouldn’t be sitting here.”
Whether American democracy survives this period, all three suggested, may depend on whether the country can rebuild a press corps more loyal to truth than to access — and whether audiences are willing to abandon outlets that choose the latter over the former.
