There’s been little to do the past few weeks other than try to look away from the spectacle of Trump’s nominations to the highest offices in the land this past month.

Media outlets are noticing viewer and reader declines, never mind the cancelled subscriptions. Commentators note sadly this Democrat Depression. They’ve stopped watching the news, they say. They can’t bear to lose.

It could be that watching the “legacy media,” erstwhile defenders of truth, justice, and accountability, the cornerstones of democracy, etc., etc., bend and wilt in the face of the loss of corporate profits during Trump Time is what is too much to bear.

You may not know this, but the Donald Trump film, The Apprentice, a chronicle of his early years in New York City under the tutelage of Roy Cohn, and which screened at CAFF in September — one of very, very few world premieres — almost stayed under wraps.

Trump’s supporters and lawyers tried to block its release, even in here, in the County. The film’s distributors cancelled contracts in the face of threats of lawsuits. After CAFF had booked the film, it was told it could not screen it. The order changed just a couple of weeks ahead of the festival.

Blocking and censoring information, analysis, and commentary will be routine across Trump’s America.

Last week, County resident David Frum made a joke about Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s alleged drinking problems on MSNBC’s Morning Joe.

“If you’re too drunk for Fox News, you’re very, very drunk indeed,” he said, referring to an NBC News report of multiple complaints of overdrinking during his tenure at the station.

Morning Joe’s hosts are the normally fearless Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski. They apologized to viewers, suggesting Mr. Frum, an adroit political commentator and regular guest on the show, had made a serious, on-air misstep.

Yet they had invited him to comment on Hegseth’s drinking problems.

The issue was not Mr. Hegseth. It was the joke about Fox, President-elect Trump’s favourite non-news network. At least five recent cabinet picks have close ties to the station, which looms large in the presidential psyche. In addition to Hegseth, there is Thomas Homan, who will oversee the nation’s borders; Rep. Michael Waltz, set to be Trump’s National Security Adviser; Israel Ambassador pick Mike Huckabee; and would-be Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. All are Fox News stalwarts.

During his 2016 presidency, Mr. Trump reportedly spent hours every day watching Fox in the Oval Office. In fact, he just won the Fox News Patriot of the Year award for the most hours watched while eating burgers.

As Mr. Frum recounted in an essay in The Atlantic about his most likely final appearance on Morning Joe, after he had said his piece, “At the next ad break, a producer spoke into my ear. He objected to my comments about Fox and warned me not to repeat them. I said something noncommittal and got another round of warning.”

Then came the public apology from the normally outspoken Morning Joe team. And there went Frum, under the bus.

“A little bit earlier in this block there was a comment made about Fox News, in our coverage about Pete Hegseth and the growing number of allegations about his behavior over the years and possible addiction to alcohol or issues with alcohol. The comment was a little too flippant for this moment that we’re in….We want to make that clear.” 

Yikes. MSNBC’s flagship news show seems to have been brought to heel. Kowtowing to Fox News. And the President-Elect. Its hosts have already faced withering criticism for a visit last month to Mar-a-Lago to dine with the man they have repeatedly described as another Hitler. They said they were “on background.”

It reminds, of course, of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos pulling The Washington Post’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris for President just days before the election. And of the Los Angeles Times’s publisher, Patrick Soon-Shiong, another billionaire with vested corporate interests in Trump’s America.

Don’t get me wrong. The fears, of retribution, investigation, interference, injustice, firing, trolling, jail, concentration camps, deportment, whatever, are justified. During his campaign, Trump said repeatedly he looked forward to becoming President so he could throw all the journalists he happened not to like in jail, along with a lot of politicians.

He also threatened to revoke the broadcast licenses from the three major television networks — ABC, CBS and NBC — in return for their attention to such things as fact checking.

During Trump’s first presidency, MSNBC’s journalists fearlessly documented the corruption of Trump’s first administration. I say fearlessly: what did they have to fear? They could take their right to do their jobs for granted.

MSNBC boasts such stalwarts as Rachel Maddow, who has not yet been spotted anywhere near Mar-a-Lago. It could again rise to the challenge of the kleptocracy that will be Trump’s cabinet.

But that no longer seems to be a thing. The station’s owner, Comcast, is suddenly not interested in public affairs, nor in safeguarding the institutions on which democratic freedoms rest. Profits are just not high enough.

MSNBC has lost half of its audience since the election. It is down to about half a million viewers a day. Who wants to tune in for the televised betrayal of a respected political commentator, not to mention invited guest, before they’ve even had a cup of coffee?

Elon Musk, meanwhile, famous for turning the lively global news platform formerly known as Twitter into his own personal fountain of fake news and propaganda, is now joking about buying the station.

“It is a very ominous thing if our leading forums for discussion of public affairs are already feeling the chill of intimidation and responding with efforts to appease,” writes Mr. Frum with stately grace.

Appeasement, of course, is not going to work. The only way to get through the next months and years of carnage will be to hang on tight to your integrity and find somewhere public to exercise it, vigorously and often.

Go Mr. Frum.