Mort Rosenblum: 2026 needs to be when we start to turn away from autocracy

It's too early to wish readers a Happy New Era, but I suspect 2026 will be the tipping point. We humans might finally snap awake to confront reality as it is it and hang around for eons. If not, we are headed the way of dinosaurs and dodos.

That depends on how many voters can find reliable sources for global news. "Breaking" is too late. A nuclear-tipped superpower needs to avert crises while there is time to act. That is more vital than ever — and it has never been harder.

Rather than defusing conflicts that risk flaring into unstoppable, unwinnable war, Donald Trump is heaping on accelerant. He poisons the media mainstream with blood libel against other-than-white Americans who season a diverse melting pot.

When everyone is talking and few are listening, the loudest voice prevails. He savages truth from a bullshit pulpit as he turns the historic White House entrusted to him into a personal gaudy, gilt Versailles-on-the-Potomac.

Almost each day, he gets louder, crueler and crazier. He is already causing millions to die and countless others to suffer unthinkable pain. The world's worst despots cheer on his serial folly.

Yet at least a third of eligible voters support him, blaming a predecessor for calamities he caused. And even more are too otherwise occupied to bother casting a ballot.

Before Trump, U.S news organizations that were politicized or driven by profit, not principle, began adding up to what Stephen Colbert dubbed truthiness. Americans looked increasingly inward. "Legacy" providers cut back on "foreign" coverage.

Now he weaponizes the media, trampling on the First Amendment, down to a preposterous $10 billion suit against BBC.

My last column recalled the Venezuela I found in 1964 on my first foray as a reporter abroad, a booming bulwark of democracy in the Americas and a nearby oil supplier. That got me digging into my archives for broader parallels between then and now.

There is much to analyze. Just focus on Walter Cronkite and the bedrock Edward R. Murrow network, CBS.

Cronkite began as a wire animal, a correspondent for the now-defunct United Press, which, along with the Associated Press, provided impartial global news. Murrow hired him at CBS in 1950.

In 1962, he began anchoring the evening news. Soon after, a popular poll labeled him "the most trusted man in America." I can imagine his furrowed brow and pursed lips if he were around today.

David Ellison, backed by his father's fortune, folded CBS into his Paramount Skydance behemoth and hired Bari Weiss to run its news operations.

A media-savvy friend in New York told me, "I don’t always agree with her but find that not all in it is right wing opinion. Let’s see what she does with CBS." We soon saw.

Weiss's first act was a staff memo asking for advice. "We can make CBS News the most trusted news organization in America and the world," it said. "I’ll approach it the way any reporter would—with an open mind, a fresh notebook, and an urgent deadline.”

Ellison's defined his mission: "To ensure that this global platform remains a place where people can seek the truth, gain understanding, and engage with the facts.”

But soon after, Jonathan Chait wrote in The Atlantic:

"After the president praised her appointment, then complained that she wasn’t acting quickly enough to impose pliant coverage, and she almost immediately spiked a critical story on what appear to be dubious grounds, it seems clear that it’s not the public’s trust she is concerned about, but Trump’s."

That was a solidly researched "60 Minutes" segment on Venezuelans deported to El Salvador. It was cleared to go and widely publicized. Two hours before airtime, Weiss held it up to include Stephen Miller, who ignored repeated requests.

Any news organization worth the name would simply say that the White House declined comment. That amounts to taking the Fifth, which suggests a reason to mask inconvenient truth.

Weiss justified that by saying the story was too thin, adding nothing substantially new. But an affiliate in Canada broadcast all 13 minutes, and it went viral. Look it up online.

Sharyn Alfonsi, the correspondent, was livid. If an administration's refusal to participate is a reason to spike a story, she wrote, "we have effectively handed them a 'kill switch' for any reporting they find inconvenient."

Her segment includes that Oval Office visit by Nayib Bukele, the self-styled "world's coolest dictator." He laughs with Trump about inhuman torture that equals anything I've encountered in a lifetime of reporting.

Luis Muñoz Pinto, among several hundred Venezuelans sent to El Salvador, recalls the CECOT prison director's greeting: "He told us...we would never see the light of day or night again. He said, welcome to hell. I’ll make sure you never leave."

In a video clip, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt says those Venezuelans are "heinous monsters, rapists, murderers, kidnappers, sexual assaulters, predators, who have no right to be in this country and they must be held accountable."

For one, Muñoz Pinto was a college student fleeing repression without even a traffic ticket on his record. His body art ink reflects no politics. Venezuela's Tren de Aragua gang not doesn't attach meaning to be tattoos. But Trump's enforcers do.

He says he waited in Mexico for a scheduled asylum hearing in California. When he appeared, ICE agents locked him up for six months awaiting a decision, then sent him to El Salvador.

He and others describe dehumanizing torture, with vicious beatings and repeated sexual assaults. They are jammed into cells with stacked-up hard bunks, filthy water and 24-hour glaring light.

Juan Papier of Human Rights Watch told Alfonsi that nearly half of Venezuelans sent to the CECOT prison have no criminal history. Only eight had been convicted of a violent or potentially violent offense. She confirmed that with other sources. But much is secret.

"We don’t know because the Department of Homeland Security has never released a complete list of the names or criminal histories of the men," she said. "Rapid deportations have been a key part of the ... immigration overhaul." Trump's enforcers consider anyone who crosses the border illegally to be a criminal.

This "crisis" is on purpose. Trump ordered Republicans to reject a bipartisan bill to alleviate the border crush. Family separations and a crackdown during COVID in his first term caused a massive backup that he tells ill-informed voters is all Joe Biden's fault.

All countries need clear immigration policies, with strict supervision of its borders. But when a new president abruptly orders such cruel and unusual punishment for what was legal before he takes power, the rest of the world sees America for what is now is.

That is what feeds my hope. Trump's muzzling truth backfired. Rather than just another Sunday night segment on "60 Minutes," the saga shows journalists worth the name are prepared to stand their ground. Americans need only take heed and react at the polls.

CBS is one egregious example. Watch this space for more. In January, the Mort Report (mortreport.org), non-paywalled dispatches from the real world, will begin a series to help readers see what Americans miss by obsessing on diversions like Jeffrey Epstein.

Of course, the Epstein files matter. But Trump himself defined his morality in the Access Hollywood tapes back when there was still time to shunt him aside into history.

What matters is rekindling lights in that shining city on a hill to lead others into a sustainable future.

Of course, that takes time and effort by busy people with much else to think about. But what is the option?