Trump Eyes Personal lawyer to Run DOJ

21:57That itself is suspicious. Indeed, it's a little different than the debates over another show on CBS that recently ended, Colbert, where there was a political argument against it, to be sure, but there were some valid economic arguments against it, at least reforming it. Here, the new MAGA bosses of CBS don't really have that kind of logical or business defense. And according to some of the most respected, independent, nonpartisan CBS veterans, this is a political hatchet job to curry favor with the government. Also a contrast because Colbert and his classiness didn't even say all that. What you're looking at here is one of those journalists now speaking out.

22:39Steve Croft is highly respected. There he was interviewing a president. He's reported around the world. He's tangled with both parties, and he's weighing in on the crisis we've been covering, saying basically 60 Minutes, as the audience has known it, no longer exists. The firings are too substantial, he said, referring to what these new MAGA owners are doing. It seems almost impossible, he adds, to imagine what kind of show they can put on in September. now Mr. Croft like the other CBS veterans is drawing on a whole multi-decade career of credibility I understand when you look at stories like this people rush to say well what's the angle or disgruntled or political but we're talking about people who in the best sense have retired out of a great strong career their legacy's intact their money's been made however you want to look at it.

23:31You can't really impugn Mr. Croft here. He is clearly, best we understand, saying what he really thinks about what he views as an attack on journalism in the name of trying to win over the government, what we would call a type of soft corruption if you buy his theory, and Croft is not alone. I think it's been

23:50Jason Johnson:disastrous for the show, you know, for the audience. The people from Paramount are coming in, Harry Weiss coming in and saying, you guys suck. You love it. We have to make changes. I don't know where Scott Pelley will land. Frankly, I hope he lands right here. And I hope that everybody in journalism and everybody who values a free press figures out ways to outmaneuver the people who are trying to take the free press from us. I think that pushing a news organization in a certain political ideological direction is anathema to journalists. I think that this is journalistic interference. It makes no business sense whatsoever.

24:26Jason Johnson:However, the show is still doing very well. It's the highest rated news program on television. And it has been that way for more than 50 years.

24:38Facts. You know, it sometimes is a bit of a side point for journalists to come around and talk about who's the most watched or not. And in theory, you could say, well, other television shows are competitors. But we're talking about facts. 60 Minutes is that. I mentioned in our reporting this week, sometimes the top 10 Nielsen ratings are a bunch of NFL games. and 60 minutes. And that matters for the substance of this story because any executive claiming, well, this is a business thing, doesn't have any business ground to stand on. That was, I guess, the best thing they could come up with. And Mr.

25:09Pelly and Mr. Croft and others have some credibility here. So what's next? The Post reports, many expect, insiders expect that it could deteriorate and degrade further. The show has three top remaining correspondents, Leslie Saul, who are considering resigning a kind of a potential Saturday night massacre protest, the media version, against a kind of a MAGA kneecapping. The Post reports that. CBS News, I should mention, denies, as I've said, accusations of bias. And the incoming EP, who's only been on the job for a few days, has emphasized that what he wants to do is make a business case for 60 Minutes to change and reach people digitally.

25:51that he is not, he says, trying to carry out some MAGA agenda. Mr. Pelley was leaving the show in a very different way than one would have expected. CBS was in no way ever signaling that they viewed him as fireable or fireable for cause. He was really one of their longest serving stars, as his record attests.

26:14Jason Johnson:How would you say your mental focus is? Oh, it's focused. I think it's, I haven't, look. When that man stood up and said, we have a problem in this country and it's Muslims, you let that pass. And I wonder what that tells us about you. Well, he said much more than that. Well, you told the Congress they don't do their work as well as your daughters do their homework. What I said was that they procrastinate, and that is absolutely true. The war has not gone the way you had hoped it would, and they wonder whether it's just crushing on your spirit. Quite the contrary. My spirits are strong. Those are just a few moments.

26:54You could go to YouTube and watch a lot more of Peli's work. The point here, when you see all that, is he was operating at a level where every president in both parties during his tenure dealt with him. So this isn't one of those things about red and blue left and right. This is about how things have been when the center holds in our system, however imperfect, and when you have, at least allegedly, according to these critics, and I've quoted them, the allegation of a governmental media type of corruption, what in other countries they call state media. It's a problem if you buy that theory of the case.

27:34Trump wants to use government power and abuse the levers of power he holds to undercut the First Amendment itself. Whatever you think of, say, George Bush, who I showed there, he was not reported to or accused of doing this level of First Amendment violence. And the founders made it the First Amendment for a reason, because without that, our ability to talk to each other without fear or favor from the government actually taking over or turning off this mechanism or the internet or the newspapers. We know Trump's suing the Journal, Times, etc. Without those measures, then you don't have a free flow of ideas and facts, and you don't really have a democracy, even if there's technically voting.

28:17I don't mean to be so severe with it, but that's what it is. Trump openly said that he wanted to abuse governmental power to yank the broadcast license of CBS, a move he's also used, by the way, against ABC. He's targeted, as I mentioned, I'll show you the rest of the journalists, TV networks and newspapers they've gone after. They are taking control, his MAGA allies of CBS already and CNN next, if Trump approves the merger, which all of this public stuff shows how this company wants to show him how it would look. Look.

28:51Jason Johnson:But CNN, in particular, CNN does such false reporting. But now they have new ownership, so maybe it'll straighten it out. I doubt it. But it's hard to straighten garbage out. This is not a drill. We will keep covering this story. Not looking at it as a TV story or a competitor's story, but I promise you looking at it as a democracy story. I'm going to finish the break. When we come back, is there good news? You ever say, all right, well, when do we get to the good news? We have some on the labor fight against AI before it's too late. Next.

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31:05Turning now to one of the most consequential stories really of our time. And before I tell you all the new details, just consider a situation like this. A new groundbreaking tool allows a company to use the creations of millions of people even without payment or credit. Think of the 1990s when new websites were taking movies and music from creators, playing them online for users. Sites like Napster, remember them? They were just borrowing, they said. and they said it was okay because they weren't seizing physical copies of those things I mentioned of say a movie tape but the creators said this was stealing you're taking our work cutting into the livelihoods of all those people it took a few years to resolve that clash over copyrighted material and that was just in a few industries today we have tools that are actually doing that to pretty much all human creations ever from books and articles and videos to the billions of pages of text that humanity has ever produced online.

32:05We are a long ways from the tech companies that were creating new products. If you remember the iPod and iPhone ads that I've got on the screen, that's like a new thing that you could use. This ain't that. And so by now you can probably tell, okay, Ari, I get it. What am I talking about? I'm reporting on these leaps in artificial intelligence where these new tech disruptors aren't selling products. They're taking everything humans have ever created that they can get. Anything they can scrape and pick up. They don't ask, they just do it. And now, having spent some years developing their models, they spit it back out through these AI systems.

32:41You may have heard of some of the examples, like ChatGPT or Claude. If you don't happen to use those, think of that as like when Google launched. You had Google and Yahoo and Ask Jeeves. These are just different modules of that. These companies reaping billions. Some of them are preparing what we are told will be the largest stock offerings ever in the coming months. And they have deregulatory allies in the Trump administration, tech leaders who can operate now largely without much government or legal oversight, even as their core products take, swipe, pilfer at a level that makes Napster look modest.

33:21Now, when you ask these AI models a question, they don't usually create a new answer. I'm simplifying. I'm not a prompt engineer, but if we just think about it simply, even if you've never tried one, and I'm about to show you some video of people talking about them, what they do if you type in a question is, at very, very tiny levels, down to the word or even the letter, what they're basically doing is quoting, sampling, remixing, and plagiarizing from other prior human creations. And they usually do it without credit, let alone payment. Right now, many AI companies train on creative work

34:03Jason Johnson:they haven't paid for or even asked permission to use. The models that make this art don't just do it out of thin air. They've learned to mimic styles, even specific artists. The models ingest millions, sometimes billions of images scraped from websites all around the web. The AI community had taken most of my novels without permission. I truly felt like someone had backed up a truck to my imagination and stolen everything I'd ever created. When we talk about art heists, typically we're talking about one painting being taken from a museum, two, three. They stole billions and billions of images.

34:40How about that? Now, if you want to be technically legal, remember, stealing is about value. It's not about whether you physically broke into a museum. If you manage to use virtual tools to take money out of an account, right, to wire it out, you could still be in trouble for stealing. And I can give you all these tech examples. So, of course, you might say, all right, Ari, I get it. Is this even legal? Well, some of these top news outlets argue no. They've taken these AI companies to court for what they call stealing. Now, that's a court case issue. The judges will review it. Other companies have taken a different approach, trying to broker a kind of profitable truce.

35:24The Associated Press and Disney, for example, striking licensing deals for how AI uses their work and to get some compensation. But those different approaches have something in common. Notice that both examples suggest there's got to be a limit, that the AI shouldn't be able to just take all this material, that either they license it, which means it's not already theirs. That's why they're paying a licensing fee, or as the New York Times says, they might be stopped from doing it. And yet they're already doing it. And remember, 99 % of creators living or, of course, dead don't have a standing company and a bunch of lawyers to go wage these battles over time.

35:59Their material, the online posts, your personal data, past writings, it's all just scraped up. And so it's a problem that impacts billions of people, which means it might need a broader system than just you going to court. This would be a classic example where the government could come in. I mentioned the Napster case. Congress did step up, passing new laws and protections after artists and companies pressed for them, testifying and the rest. Now, that led to systems that actually got creators paid. This one, this problem here with the AI is much more vast. Now one proposal would be to actually value all of the public contributions, that includes you, by having the U.S.

36:40government actually use its power to transfer a stake of any of the companies that have taken from you the people and give that stake, basically credit the people. So you value the past intellectual property through a sort of a one-time tax or a sovereign wealth fund.

36:59Jason Johnson:I will introduce the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act. It will give the American people a direct role in determining the future of this technology. The time has come to reclaim what was stolen from us. Since AI is built on the collective knowledge of humanity, the wealth it generates must benefit humanity. This is really happening. This is a real idea. And if you think about all the stuff Trump's getting away with that is so extreme outside of the norms, well, while this would be a big different approach to tech and money power in this country than we might be used to, is it any more radical than some of what's already passing for daily norms in Washington right now?

37:49Sanders also cites tax experts like Professor Bear Friend who stresses that this original material was of course rightfully the public's property before it was already scraped from the internet Now all this new technology can feel dizzyingly complicated but it does kind of boil down to the discourse we've been having for a few years now about what's real versus fake tricks online To paraphrase a great poet J. Cole question how many faking they streams? Getting they plays from machines? I can see behind the smoke of mirrors. Some ain't really as big as they seem. I never say anything. Everybody got they thing.

38:32Some want to make millions. Others just make memes. Never was one for the bragging and boasting. I guess I was hoping the music or in this case any of your work would speak for itself but the people want everything else. I want to bring in the expert we just cited, Professor Jeremy Barrow-Friend, George Washington University expert on tax, among other policies. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you for having me. It's terrific to be here. Great to have you.

39:03Jason Johnson:Explain why this is fair. So my colleague, Professor Sarah Pultz, and I have this article sharing the algorithm. And there we make the case that systemically important AI firms should pay a tax. That's not a hard case to make. I think everyone thinks AI should pay taxes. But we argue they should pay a tax with stock rather than cash. And the gist of it is that we are all entitled to a share in these companies, quite literally. And that's because their value is built on what we already contributed to them. Yeah, that some taxes you say, well, it's like a big macro thing. You said you've worked with Senator Warren.

39:41She used to say, oh, well, those roads, you benefit. But that's kind of a pretty theoretical version, right? This seems very tangible that they've scraped it all.

39:51Jason Johnson:So they really already took something. Right. This harm has already happened. And it's part of why we need to do something sooner rather than later. Because it's not just about we're going to lose jobs later. We're going to lose revenue later. This harm has already happened. This scraping of all of our data has happened. And really anyone who has left a trace anywhere on the Internet. So a post you left on a sibling's webpage, that's in there. That's now part of it. And you're not really going to be able to follow up and try to file a lawsuit and get repaid. Right. It's just in the machine. So I mentioned the legal history.

40:25When they used to first post movies online, people would say, well, we're just sharing it, right? Sharing economy. And eventually it was established that that was stealing. Do you have a view? because here they argue, the AI companies argue, well, they take such tiny bits of everything. They never took the whole book. They just took every seventh Hemingway word. Do you have a view? Is it fair to say right now that this is stolen or do we not know yet?

40:52Jason Johnson:I'm comfortable saying stolen in my written work with Professor Pultz. We've used the word stolen. Of course, it's a huge trove of material. So there could be specific cases within there. And we have a private law system. We have lawsuits and they are going on. It's not like we don't think there should be lawsuits. It's just there's no possible way that the system that has been built actually anticipated the scale of theft that's happened. And so we need a different tool to address something at this level. What would the average American get or benefit out of this if we actually had the imagination or the leadership in Congress to do this?

41:32Right.

41:32Jason Johnson:So a tax paid with stock rather than cash that was applied to, let's say, just the largest AI firms, even if that tax was only at 10%, it would raise over a trillion dollars within a fiscal quarter. So it would lower people's taxes or they would get a one-time tax? Well, they could, yeah. And then the fund can decide, Congress can decide how they want to distribute that. It could just be a check in the mail if they wanted to. Do you think the J. Cole bar is applied? Good. Well, it's funny. I'm sure he probably has a lawsuit in the mix right now, too. But I think he would support this, you know, this proposal.

42:06Jason Johnson:I hope so. Look, I cannot speak for him. But he voices something that, again, depending on your reference point, we all have felt one way or the other, which is, well, plagiarism is just the softest way to put it. As you say, if it's stolen, if it's fake, then why should these companies be valued at trillions of dollars? Because without this stuff, they would be what? Nothing. And tax is the tool we use to share what we have as a society. And that is principally what tax policy is. It's about sharing. And I think that's the challenge right here. We have some tech billionaires. Do they want to share?

42:40Jason Johnson:And a lot of what they've taken is already ours anyway. And tax is a tool that could, you know, share it with the public. Yeah. Well, you've been really inside this. Of course, Senators citing you because of the work you and your colleagues have done. So we wanted to hear from an expert. Thank you, Jeremy Barrett, friend. Appreciate it. Quick break. They're still counting votes in California, and we have that and a midterms update next.

43:07There's been primaries and midterm news this week. They're still counting ballots in California, and now we have developments in the race for Maine's Senate. The Democratic candidate, Graham Plattner, has now faced this reporting from The New York Times of several women who dated Plattner. Three described him as volatile and unsettling in the context of these relationships. The Times reporting one said he regularly grabbed her by the shoulders, hard enough to leave marks, and on one occasion yanked her out of a cab by her wrist after an argument when she wanted to stay in the cab. The Times notes that she is a conservative activist.

43:47She asserts that her political views have nothing to do with her choice to come forward. During one argument, she tells the paper, he twisted her arm behind her back, shoved her into a bedroom, and held the door closed from the other side so she couldn't get out. She alleges that Plattner knew, when they were dating years ago, that his tattoo was a Nazi symbol. Plattner has denied knowing that the tattoo had that association, and in response to the story, he says he was, quote, self-medicated with alcohol and was far from a perfect boyfriend. not a total denial of the other allegations apart from the tattoo.

44:23He also says that he takes responsibility for any characterization though beyond that is false and I believe politically motivated. Maine's primary election is next Tuesday. And we should know Plattner will be on MSNOW at 8 p.m. Eastern tonight for an interview with our colleague Chris Hayes. We'll be right back.

44:47We end tonight with a question for you Do you think creators, regular people, anyone who's ever posted online Should be credited and compensated for that If other companies are making not only tens of billions But maybe even a trillion dollars You can tell me online, I am at different social media Whatever one you like, we got Blue Sky, which is new school We got the old school ones there At Ari Melber, that's my name, at Ari Melber Tell me your answer. You can also always connect with me by typing in arimelber.com into your browser, arimelber.com. I've heard from some of you in each of these ways, whatever works, but also if you're like, hey, I'd rather stay offline, that's cool too.

45:24I'll meet you back here at 6 p.m. Eastern tomorrow. We can always connect that way. Thanks for watching.

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