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Friends,
When the dark history of this sordid era is written, among the shameful culprits will be multi-billionaire Larry Ellison, his son David, Shari Redstone, former owner of Paramount, and David Zaslav, the current CEO of Warner Bros Discovery.
Today, Zaslav is being lauded by the business community as a genius for selling Warner Bros Discovery to the Ellisons’s Paramount for $111 billion, more than double its valuation in September.
Why would the Ellisons spend their billions to buy Warner Bros Discovery?
Wealth and power. Assuming the deal closes, they’ll own CBS News, Comedy Central (home of John Stewart), HBO (John Oliver), and CNN. And with Trump’s help, Larry Ellison is also the lead investor in TikTok.
Pause for a moment and think how huge and sudden is this emergence of a new media giant — and its profound potential for silencing criticism of Trump.
I don’t mean to suggest that John Stewart or John Oliver will be silenced. But their contracts may not be renewed (look what happened to Stephen Colbert). The algorithm on TikTok may be ever-so-slightly adjusted to reduce Trump criticism. And a small army of producers and correspondents on CNN may be more careful about what they report, or stories critical of Trump may be axed, as is now happening on CBS News.
Larry Ellison is the fourth-richest person in America. He also owns Oracle, which runs much of the digital backbone of the nation's commerce and government.
The Ellisons are Trump allies and suck-ups, which is how they’ve so rapidly created a new rightwing media empire.
Even before the Ellisons sweetened their offer for Warner Bros Discovery last week, they proclaimed their “confidence in the speed and certainty of regulatory approval for its transaction.”
Translated: Don’t worry that we’re creating a gigantic media monopoly. Antitrust laws won’t touch us. We’ve got Trump’s Justice Department in the bag.
On Tuesday night, David Ellison attended Trump’s State of the Union address as a guest of Trump ally, South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham. (Graham tweeted out a photo of the two men making Trump’s signature “thumbs-up” gesture ahead of the speech.)
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Trump cares more about TV news than he does about his presidency. In fact, TV news is his presidency.
He’s repeatedly blasted CNN as “fake news” and publicly demanded it be turned over to new owners.
Trump was instrumental in the Ellison’s takeover of CBS (along with Comedy Central), and of TikTok.
Last summer, as Shari Redstone and other of Paramount’s previous owners sought federal approval to sell the company to the Ellisons, they announced the end of late night host Stephen Colbert’s CBS show — which will end its run in May.
They cited economics, but Colbert’s has been the top-rated late night show on network television — and he has been a lacerating satirist of Trump. Colbert called the cancellation a "big fat bribe,” which it surely was.
To win further support from Trump for the sale, David Ellison promised to end diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives at CBS. He has added a rightwing ombudsman, Kenneth Weinstein, the former head of a conservative think tank, and named Bari Weiss, founder of the center-right opinion and news site The Free Press, editor-in-chief of CBS News.
Since Weiss took over, at least six out of 20 “CBS Evening News” producers have left. She named a bunch of new contributors, including the anti-aging influencer Peter Attia (who has subsequently resigned over his ties to Jeffrey Epstein). She declared “We love America” a guiding principle. And replaced “Evening News” anchors John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois with Tony Dokoupil — best known for hassling the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates for his “extremist” belief that apartheid is morally wrong.
In December, Weiss axed a “60 Minutes” report about Venezuelans being deported by the Trump administration to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison hours before it was set to air — a move that Sharyn Alfonsi, long-standing “60 Minutes” correspondent who reported the segment, claimed was for “political” reasons. (The segment later aired on January 18, drawing over 5 million viewers.)
As Trump told Dokoupil recently in a rambling nearly 13-minute interview, had Kamala Harris won the presidential election in 2024, “you probably wouldn’t have a job right now.” Moments after that rambling interview, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt conveyed Trump’s threat that “if it’s not out in full, we’ll sue your ass off.”
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CNN was moving to the right even before the Ellisons got their hands on it, but the move proved disastrous.
In 2022, Zaslav put Chris Licht in charge, who told CNN’s staff he wanted less criticism of Trump and the Republican right — instructing them to stop referring to Trump’s “Big Lie” because he thought the phrase sounded like a Democratic talking point, telling producers to downplay coverage of the first hearing of the congressional committee investigating January 6, and arranging the infamous CNN town hall with Trump, which gave the disgraced ex-president a platform to make his comeback.
CNN’s rightward lurch harmed CNN’s ratings — its primetime show ratings fell 25 percent — causing Zaslav to fire Licht.
Since then, CNN has undergone rounds of cuts under a series of owners seeking to reduce debt. Paramount will be its fourth corporate parent in under a decade.
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It has happened so suddenly most Americans still haven’t noticed: A new pro-Trump media empire — CBS, CNN, HBO, Comedy Central, and TikTok — all under the control of Trump crony Larry Ellison and his son David.
The billionaires are flipping media companies like playing cards. They don’t give a fig for the public interest, or about the lives of the producers, correspondents, journalists, and investigative reporters that are being turned upside-down. To them, it’s all about accumulating even more wealth and power.
The Ellisons’s new mega-media monopoly would never pass muster if we still had antitrust enforcers. But Pam Bondi’s Department of Justice is as likely to stop it as they are to enforce criminal laws against ICE agents.
We have to rely on state attorneys general to enforce the antitrust laws. Thankfully, California’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, has already made clear he will take it on. Good luck to him.