UK and US Media Voice Political Interference and Self-Censorship Concerns
The Republican attempt to break the media by suing corporations like CBS and forcing editorial decisions on them will backfire, claims Roy Wood Jr., host of "Have I Got News For You."
“God Bless whatever Colbert does next year with no network person to give him notes on what he can and cannot say,” Wood said at the Edinburgh TV Festival on Wednesday. “Letting him run riot on YouTube is going to create a bigger issue for this administration in 2026, especially if he builds an audience, which I think is inevitable.
“What this administration is eventually going to see, is that by running people out of mainstream media--the dissenters, the people talking shit about Trump--you run them out of wherever there are rules. If Trump’s people were smart, they’d leave us alone and let us tell our jokes in places where there are guardrails.
“Look at what [California Governor] Gavin Newsom's doing by just throwing up a couple of videos and talking back to Trump. Millions of views--and he’s not even a trained entertainer!”
Asked if he felt vulnerable to attack, Wood said, “I think 'vulnerable' would suggest that you can't fight back. I’m not self-censoring. So long as I have a microphone, my hope is that every comedian will continue to do that.”
Have I Got News for You host Roy Wood Jr. at Edinburgh Festival 2025
The assault on press freedom on both sides of the Atlantic was a major debate at the Festival which is the premier annual event for the UK TV industry.
Why Major US Media Companies Are Capitulating
Calling Trump's approach to media “vindictive, transactional, and codependent,” Matthew Belloni, former editorial director of the Hollywood Reporter and Host of The Town Podcast, said, “The level of capitulation, kow-towing and chaos that is going on at the top level is pretty extraordinary. Starting with ABC paying to settle the George Stephanopoulos case and then going all the way through the things that Paramount did to get their sale approved.
“After ABC paid him, the floodgates opened. He knew that he had a pressure point with all of these media companies. He is nothing if not transactional and he is going to press every single button he can.”
Wood said he believed CNN would hold the line. “I just do not see this network in any shape or form making decisions based solely on whether or not the President's going to cost us a bunch of money in court.”
However, he admitted, “We have to hold on to the key people we have left, which means for my corporation to survive it cannot afford to go to war with the President.”
Chilling BBC News Coverage
Giving the agenda-setting McTaggart Lecture, James Harding the BBC’s former director of news now director of Tortoise Media warned of “chilling” political interference in BBC news coverage.
“Whatever your view of the hate speech vs freedom of speech issues, an overbearing government minister doesn't help anyone,” he said. “The hiring and firing of [the BBC director general] should not be the job of a politician.”
He also warned that the Corporation needed protecting from right-wing party Reform UK which had vowed to scrap the license fee (which funds the BBC). Reform UK could win power at the next UK general election in 2029.
Late Night Leveled
Alongside Wood and Belloni in the session "Trump vs. The Media," Dorothy Byrne, Former Head of News & Current Affairs, Channel 4 said, “The U.S made a big mistake in 1987 when it got rid of the Fairness Doctrine. In the UK, we should learn from this. We must not get rid of regulation. Regulation helps to bring trust because you have to have balance and in U.S media there has not been balanced. Some of that has been too liberal and they haven't listened enough to the right. Not hearing sufficient right-wing voices is an error that some of our public broadcasters here are guilty of too.”
Belloni has been reporting on the recent decision by Paramount bosses to settle a dispute with Trump over the Kamala Harris interview aired on 60 Minutes, as a condition of sale to Skydance.
“The impact of the settlements that we've seen has been calamitous for the industry,” he said. “But looked at as a business transaction trying to close an U$8bn deal it was a existential moment for the Redstone family.”
Former Paramount controlling shareholder Shari Redstone said this week said the decision for her company to settle the CBS lawsuit brought by Trump was a “no-brainer” and she expressed surprise that the cost of this was only $16 million.
“They could have either stood up to Trump or they could argue for ‘paying him off’ and they chose to pay him off and get the deal done. When you're looking at this from a business perspective, and you are in the chair, you can either fight this, and become a target for the next two years or I can give a very small amount of money for my corporation and have this go away.
“That said, the argument for not settling is a business argument as well because if you are not one of these people who is trying close a deal to get out of the business you have to deal with that precedent going forward. If I am ABC News, I now know that if we get sued over something that we've covered, there's going to be another settlement and another and potentially endless litigation.”
On the cancelling of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Belloni said he concluded that the show was losing tens of millions of dollars. “If the calculus was pure p&l, it’s understandable. CBS have discussed for a long time what the future would be about their late night programming [James Corden’s show was cancelled in 2022] and when you have to sign your talent and your lead producers a year in advance they pulled the plug.
“The optics of the timing [coinciding with Colbert’s blast about Paramount’s ‘bribe’] are terrible,” he added.
South Park seems a different case. Paramount recently renewed a deal with it creators for $1.5 billion then Trey Stone and Matt Parker let both barrels loose on Trump’s ICE agenda.
“We can’t look to Trey and Matt as the new leaders of the resistance but we are always appreciative whenever they join the fight,” said Wood. “They are equal opportunity offenders.”
The satirical show was arguably the frontline of the ‘man-o-sphere’ when it launched three decades ago and that remains key to its appeal including among many Trump supporters. Right-wing pundit Charlie Kirk has even embraced his own lampooning in the show.
Journalists Need to Fight for Journalism
“No one wants to quite dismiss it as fake news,” said Katy Balls, Washington editor of The Times. “In that sense, they take it a bit more seriously.”
The chilling effect of lawsuits and defunding on US journalism could be felt in three years’ time when the presidential election cycle starts.
Byrne said that despite being “mortally wounded” news broadcasters in the US still carried out “fantastic journalism” and called on them to stand up and speak truth to power.
“Do not rely on billionaires and politicians to protect your press freedom. We have to rely on journalists to do that. Every day I read brilliant journalism coming out of the United States but if you tell the truth, you can lose your job. I don't feel that it's terminal but journalists need to rise up together and speak about these issues in the U.S, just as I believe that journalists around the world have to rise up together and speak about the threat to journalists in Gaza. Ultimately, we have to rely on ourselves as a profession.
Wood pushed back on this with a more pessimistic view: “American journalists have no choice but to see and hear conservatives and treat their claims and concerns as valid no matter how ridiculous they are,” he said. “I do not know if there are enough American journalists that care enough about the totality of our society to sacrifice their career for the things that you're talking about, because then the question becomes how many journalists can you fire before you fire the compliant one?”
He added that if American journalists started covering Gaza with the attention it deserved this would limit their “ability to cover all of these other atrocities that are happening domestically. Which fire do you choose to put out? I just don't know if we have enough people that are as selfless as what is needed to fix modern day journalism.”
Having recently interviewed Skydance boss David Ellison, Belloni wondered what would become of 60 Minutes. “I asked him specifically what are you going to do about 60 Minutes. He said, ‘All I want is both sides represented, down the middle.’
“That’s a very easy thing to say. Sometimes the story doesn't have obvious both sides and 60 Minutes is the number one news program in the States because it often takes an angle on a story that gives a voice to somebody or has a perspective and tells a narrative.
“When Ellison is talking about bringing in someone like Bari Weiss, who runs a quasi-reactionary conservative website, to be overseer of balance at CBS then that is asking for trouble.”
Calling the administration’s approach to media “cowardly and manipulative” Wood noted that ‘Have I Got News For You’ has had many guests from the right on the show
“It’s partly because ‘Have I Got News For You’ is a legacy show that comes from a country [the UK] where it was allowed to punch politicians in the face, so you have to honor that ethos of the show in the States.”
Belloni countered that CNN is “tanking” in ratings as a sign that US audiences prefer partisan television news. “They want Fox. They want MSNBC. They want that perspective and CNN has been caught from the moment Trump took office in no-man’s land where they're trying to hold on to that illusion of the impartial news. It's just not working.”
Related Articles
On July 24, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approved the $8 billion-valued merger of Paramount with the Hollywood studio Skydance. But underlying the financial and technological benefits of this merger for Paramount has been an increasingly brewing controversy over what appear to be concessions made by it to the Trump Administration and the FCC to adjust content and business practices strictly to their demands.
30 Jul 2025