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larry ellison
US Billionaires Compete for 'Most Awful Human Being' Award
If these horrible billionaires control everything we see and hear in the media and on social media, they won’t have to spend a penny on elections to keep their candidates in power.
Oct 23, 2026
Our billionaires seem to be in a competition for most awful human being alive. We have Larry Ellison, along with son, taking over CBS and immediately destroying its prized news show, 60 Minutes. They appointed Bari Weiss, a right-wing apparatchik, to oversee CBS’s entire news operation. She has immediately sought to make the news more Trump-friendly. This has led to many reporters being fired and threats to others to make their reporting toe the Trump line or risk being fired. Many of the network’s longest-serving reporters just quit.
The fun doesn’t stop here. The Ellison clique is also getting control of CNN through Paramount’s takeover of Warner Bros. Presumably we can look forward to more Trump-friendly reporting there also.
To be clear, neither of these networks was a paragon of objective reporting before the Ellison family takeover. Both networks regularly marginalized and belittled progressives in the US and around the world. But they did at least have an ostensible commitment to objectivity, unlike, say, Fox News.
Allowing the rich to dominate the media and social media to the extent they do is at least as much an offense to democracy as their hundred-million-dollar campaign contributions.
Then we have Mark Zuckerberg, who seems to view the huge Meta social media platforms as important mechanisms for pushing his political agenda. Last Saturday, the Instagram site for the No Kings march went down for four hours, exactly when it was being most widely used. Meta claimed there was no political motive; it was just incompetence.
We might be more inclined to accept the incompetence story if there wasn’t a comparable picture in Brazil in the lead-up to its presidential election. Lula, the incumbent president, is locked in a tight race with Flavio Bolsanaro, a right-winger who is openly allied with Donald Trump. It seems that the sites of supporters of Lula and his supporters have repeatedly run into the same sort of technical difficulties with Meta.
Then we go to everyone’s favorite evil billionaire, Elon Musk. Musk bought Twitter with the explicit intention of using it as a vehicle to support his politics. He not only opened the gates to all sorts of racist, sexist, and harassing material; he has throttled the accounts of many progressives so that their comments are less widely viewed.
Musk also has teamed up with Ellison, who was given a controlling stake in TikTok, after Donald Trump wrestled it away from its Chinese owner. TikTok decided to suspend the account for the documentary Musk, just before its initial release. Musk apparently gave the film a bad review, which was enough to get it banned from TikTok for at least a period of time. Musk is also contributing hundreds of millions of dollars to get some of the most awful people on the planet elected as governors or senators.
This crew of centibillionaires sees the purpose of government to make themselves ever richer, and are prepared to use their money to ensure that it does. Their use of campaign contributions for this purpose is widely recognized, but that is only part of the story.
Their control of major media outlets is at least as important. If a television or radio ad can affect people’s votes, then surely what people hear between the ads also can affect their votes.
Allowing the rich to dominate the media and social media to the extent they do is at least as much an offense to democracy as their hundred-million-dollar campaign contributions. It is essential to weaken their control.
One good place to start would be reforming Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which exempts the huge social media platforms from liability for third-party content. This gives social media platforms an advantage over broadcast and print outlets, which are liable for harms (defamation or fraud) caused by third-party content. Fox News famously paid out $787 million for spreading third- party lies about the 2020 election. Section 230 can be amended in a way that levels the playing field and favors smaller non-profit or subscription-supported platforms.
The other route is to increase support for alternative media. There has been serious progress in this area. The Local News Act was recently signed into law by California Governor Gavin Newsom. This measure gives a subsidy of up to $20,000 per reporter for news outlets to cover local news. Several other states are considering similar measures.
It’s a long way from measures giving modest subsidies for local news to the multibillion-dollar media outlets and social media platforms that dominate what people see and hear. But these are an important foot in the door. If these measures succeed and are popular, they can spread to other states and possibly be implemented nationally.
In any case, if we are serious about limiting the ability of the billionaires to buy democracy, we have to go beyond worrying about campaign contributions. If these horrible billionaires control everything we see and hear in the media and on social media, they won’t have to spend a penny on elections to keep their candidates in power. Those concerned about democracy need to recognize this fact.
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Why US Voters of All Political Stripes Loath the Big Tech Billionaires
Let us count the many reasons.
Oct 22, 2026
One of few silver linings of these dark Trump times is that much of what had been hidden has now been exposed.
I’m referring specifically to where the power lies in our system—power to decide how most Americans live and work. This exposure is having a huge effect on American attitudes. It may even lead to a fundamental political realignment along with major reforms.
To summarize: America hates the billionaire barons of Big Tech.
Let me start with some historic context, then discuss how this affects the most pressing issues in the 2026 campaign, and finally suggest some likely outcomes.
I. The First Gilded Age’s Robber Barons and the Second Gilded Age’s Billionaire Barons of Big Tech
The first Gilded Age, which stretched from the late 1870s to around 1900, featured “robber barons” who lived like kings while corrupting the federal and state governments with bribes to get whatever they wanted from pliant legislators.
Today’s second Gilded Age is led by the billionaire barons of Big Tech, who are similarly living like kings while corrupting our democracy.
Just three billionaires have donated more than $600 million to Republican candidates in the 2026 midterms, an all-time record.
One of them—Elon Musk—sank more than a quarter of a billion dollars into getting Trump elected in 2024 and is sinking even more into the 2026 midterms.
In return, Trump has allowed Musk to extend his monopoly on satellite communications, financed largely by taxpayers—even giving him the power to disable Ukraine intelligence. Trump also allowed Musk’s DOGE to rampage through federal databases and gather information on every American.
Larry Ellison and his son, David, defanged CBS News and its flagship “60 Minutes” and kicked Trump critic and satirist Stephen Colbert off the air. In return, Trump has greenlit the Ellisons’ acquisition of a media empire stretching from Paramount to CNN, CBS and CBS News, TBS, TNT, MTV, Comedy Central, BET, Discovery, HBO, and TikTok.
Jeff Bezos gave Melania Trump a $40 million licensing fee for a puff documentary about her (with about $28 million going directly to her) and another $35 million for marketing the movie dud. Bezos also destroyed the integrity of the editorial page of The Washington Post by barring it from endorsing Kamala Harris in 2024 and from writing anything negative about capitalism under Trump.
In return, Trump has given Bezos and his Amazon carte blanche to monopolize online retailing along with federal contracts to provide cloud infrastructure for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the National Security Agency (NSA).
Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, gave $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund and $25 million to Trump’s White House ballroom fundraising campaign, and he gave Trump personally a custom engraved glass and 24-karat gold base plaque. In return, Trump has given Cook and Apple critical exemptions from Trump’s sweeping tariffs, allowing them to import electronic components from China.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, also helped finance Trump’s inauguration and his ballroom, gave Trump $25 million to settle his lawsuit against Meta for suspending him from its platforms after the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, rolled back content moderation and fact-checking on his platforms, and brought Trump loyalists into Meta’s leadership.
In return, Trump went along with Zuckerberg and Meta’s wish not to have a federal AI regulator but to rely on “self-policing” and to pressure European and other countries not to impose taxes on digital services.
II. The Billionaire Barons and AI
The billionaire barons of Big Tech are now investing more than $1 trillion of other people’s money and debt—along with taxpayer-financed subsidies—into AI. (Last year’s giant Trump-Republican tax cut featured major tax breaks for Big Tech, helping drive a big decrease in corporate tax payments even as AI spending soars.)
The billionaire barons are thereby exposing the US economy to the largest gamble since Wall Street’s wanton betting led to the 2008 financial crisis—threatening tens of millions of jobs, putting energy-guzzling data centers all around the nation, and posing a non-negligible threat to the survival of the human species.
The barons are also hastening climate change through the data centers’ exponential energy and water demands, along with the expansion and resurrection of fossil fuel infrastructure to power AI.
Tech giants’ self-reported greenhouse gas emissions have surged. Meta’s emissions jumped over 60 percent, Google’s rose nearly 50 percent, Amazon’s increased by 33 percent, and Microsoft’s by more than 23 percent—almost entirely driven by building and expanding data centers.
The billionaire barons of Big Tech are also among the biggest beneficiaries of Trump’s war in Iran, through their ownership of advanced AI.
Peter Theil’s Palantir is powering the US military's targeting and data operations through its Maven Smart System platform, which processes massive streams of satellite, drone, and intelligence data.
Billionaires Palmer Luckey, Brian Schimpf, and Trae Stephens are behind Anduril, which provides major counter-drone defense systems used to intercept Iran’s low-cost Shahed drones. Billionaires Larry Page’s and Sergey Brin’s Google—along with billionaire Sam Altman’s OpenAI and billionaires Eric Schmidt and Dario Amodei’s Anthropic—are providing advance AI models and technology for military planning, intelligence, and counter-drone operations.
III. Will History Rhyme?
By the first decade of the 20th century, Americans had had enough of the brazen inequalities and corruption that characterized the first Gilded Age. A wave of reforms—antitrust laws, progressive taxation, pure food and drug regulation, bans on corporate political activities—blocked much of what the robber barons had been doing.
Then, after the Great Crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression, the nation ensured that the barons could no longer wreak havoc on America. Labor laws, securities laws, unemployment insurance, the minimum wage, the 40-hour workweek, and additional taxes on high incomes were enacted, laying the basis for the prosperity of the post-World War II era.
Are we on the precipice of another age of reform?
Perhaps. A new Politico poll shows that Americans are fed up with the billionaire robber barons of Big Tech—and Republicans are likely to take most of the political blame on Election Day.
The top tax priorities for voters, according to the poll, are hiking taxes on billionaires and curbing tax breaks for big companies.
Nearly half of respondents—47 percent—called Republicans the party of tech tax breaks, more than double the 21 percent who said the same for Democrats. Voters are also far more likely to want candidates who propose stripping away tax incentives for the data centers needed to fuel the AI boom.
About a fifth of respondents said that ending those tax breaks would be among their most important tax issues in the midterms (only 1 in 10 wanted to offer new preferences for data centers).
A majority of respondents thought that tech chief executives have been secretive about the potential risks of AI, while a plurality of Americans believe both that the risks of artificial intelligence development outweigh the benefits and that the government should strictly regulate AI.
It’s impossible to know whether the upcoming midterms elections will reflect these sentiments or, even if they do, whether these sentiments will find their way into subsequent legislation.
But—given the polls, and also what I’m hearing informally from around the nation—it seems likely to me that high on the nation’s emerging progressive agenda will be busting up Big Tech monopolies, getting big money out of our politics, enacting a wealth tax, putting guardrails around AI, seeking to reverse climate change, and preventing billionaires from creating and owning media empires.
I can’t say precisely when we’ll see these enacted, but I’m confident we will see them. America hates the billionaire barons of Big Tech, with good reason.
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Billionaire Trump Suck-Ups Owning More News Outlets Is an Existential Threat
This is critical stuff: no democracy can survive the assault of what Jefferson referred to as “an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents” when only one family or political perspective dominates the media.
Sep 24, 2026
A CNN insider told Variety magazine yesterday that the mood inside CNN right now is “like a funeral.” Nepo-baby David Ellison, bankrolled by his father who’s one of the richest men in the world and a major Trump suck-up and donor (and is in the Epstein Files), is on the verge of taking over the company that owns the news network.
The day-before-yesterday, California Attorney General Rob Bonta and a group of Democratic state attorneys general rolled over and agreed to stop trying to block the $111 billion takover of Warner Bros. Discovery, now to be almost 50% funded by rightwing dictatorships in the Middle East who’ve given billions in gifts, loans, and investments to Trump and his family.
California Governor and presidential hopeful Gavin Newsom hailed the agreement, saying it would both protect California jobs and preserve CNN’s “editorial independence.”
If you believe that, I’ve got a bridge for you in Brooklyn.
As The Lever reported yesterday, the fine print tells the entire story:
Going forward, CNN and CBS will be overseen by an “editorial independence board” composed of people hand-picked by the Ellisons and their agents. When Rupert Murdoch took over The Wall Street Journal from the Bancroft family back in 2007, he ran the same scam, as CBS News then reported:
“As part of the deal package that cemented Rupert Murdoch's longstanding effort to acquire Wall Street Journal publisher Dow Jones & Co., the two sides agreed to create an editorial board that would act as a buffer between the media mogul and the newspaper…”
That worked out real well, right?
There are also squishy promises for movies and jobs that are not backed up with any meaningful enforcement mechanism, and all of Ellison’s commitments can be set aside via a force majeure clause that lets Paramount off the hook in the event of “strikes, labor disruptions, [or] economic recessions.” So, all Trump has to do is extend the Iran war another few months to crash our economy and the oligarchs are free to do what they want!
And if that doesn’t happen, there’s still the sunset clause that ends all their commitments in five years. Lee Hepner of the American Economic Liberties Project called it “a countdown to a cliff.”
These are the same billionaires who handed Trump a check for $16 million to “settle” a frivolous lawsuit against 60 Minutes, then cancelled Stephen Colbert’s show days after he referenced that as a “big fat bribe,” then reportedly offered the Trump White House up to $20 million in free “public service announcements” and installed a Trump-humping “ombudsman” at CBS News to police “bias” at the network.
The simple reality is that in every country that’s slid from democracy into strongman rule over the past half-century, the first step was capture of the media by friends of the regime.
And the FCC, run by Trump’s favorite brown-noser Brendan Carr, has blessed Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar taking a 49.5 percent equity state in the new entity that will control two of the three most important news networks in America.
Don’t expect any future analysis of Saudi involvement in 9/11, critical exploration of what Trump gave up in exchange for a $400 million 747 jet, or the billions that have gone to Kushner and the Trump boys, Uday and Qusay.
Because of momentous decisions made by presidents Reagan and Clinton, freedom of the press in America is now as much an economic issue as a political one. As I laid out in The Hidden History of Monopolies (with a foreword by Ralph Nader), when Reagan came into office 90 percent of the American media landscape was scattered among over 50 companies; now a mere five conglomerates dominate that 90 percent of the media Americans consume.
Reagan stopped enforcing the Sherman Anti-Trust Act (and others) in 1983, leading to the “M&A Mania” of mergers and acquisitions that characterized the late 1980s and 1990s. As a result, there’s not a single major industry in America that’s not dominated by a handful of companies that generally behave like cartels, and the average American family pays an annual “monopoly tax” — in additional costs for pretty much everything — of around $5,000, according to economist Thomas Philippon.
Cell phone service that costs $15 a month in France or $12 a month in Australia bills out at an average of $61.85 per month in the United States. High-speed broadband that’s a bit over $31 a month in France or $36 in Germany (for higher speeds and better reliability than almost anywhere in the United States) averages nearly $70 per month in the US.
Similar metrics are found with pharmaceuticals, airfares, and medical costs, among dozens of other product and service categories.
But it’s most deadly to democracy when it comes to the media.
Since Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996 — which eliminated most of the rules about how many outlets one family or company could own — oligarchic monopoly of the media has spread its cancerous tentacles into politics, as well, destroying the ability of government to make policy that allows free people to make their own decisions about their own lives.
As Teddy Roosevelt, the great trust buster, said:
“There can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains. To put an end to it will be neither a short nor an easy task...”
And as Adam Smith wrote, in Wealth of Nations,
“...the monopoly which our manufacturers have obtained...like an overgrown standing army, they have become formidable to the government, and upon many occasions intimidate the legislature.”
And this is no small project by billionaires who explicitly distrust democracy and want complete control over America and her people. I’ve seen how this works up-close and personal when a Republican billionaire came after a media business I helped start.
In 2003, Louise and I had sold our last business and were retired in Vermont; that Thanksgiving, we drove to Michigan to visit my family for the holidays and all the way there I kept tuning across the radio dial looking for an intelligent conversation to occupy my mind while driving. In city after city, all I could find was Sean Hannity.
The outcome of that trip was my writing the initial business plan for Air America Radio and starting the radio show I’m still hosting 23 years later as a “proof of concept.” We were leasing stations from Clear Channel and reached over 90 percent of America; many credited Obama’s 2008 victory to our being on the air.
So, of course, billionaire Mitt Romney — with an eye to running for president in 2012 — had his company Bain Capital buy up all of the Clear Channel radio stations and, one at a time, take us off the air until we didn’t have enough of a signal to make money selling advertising. The network died in 2010 (and Romney lost).
The people who own the media pipes, in other words, get to decide what flows through them.
Remember when Uber was offering rides for half the price of taxis, until they’d put so many of the taxi companies out of business? Or Walmart offering goods at little to no margin just to drive local competitors out of business? Monopolists and wannabe monopolists understand exactly how this works.
While Rupert Murdoch reportedly lost an average of $80 to $90 million a year for about five years before Fox News turned a profit, he never viewed that as a loss: it was an investment. Economists Stefano DellaVigna and Ethan Kaplan later did the math and found that Fox News succeeded in shifting 3 to 8 percent of its audience toward the Republican Party, which in Florida alone in the 2000 election was worth more than 10,000 votes for George W. Bush in a state he carried by fewer than 600.
Had there been no Fox “News,” in other words, there would have been no war in Iraq or Afghanistan, and thousands of Americans and millions of Iraqis and Afghans would still be alive. And there would have been no Bush tax cuts, so our national debt would be nowhere near so bad. And Al Gore would have done something about the environment.
This is critical stuff: no democracy can survive the assault of what Jefferson referred to as “an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents” when only one family or political perspective dominates the media.
Franklin D. Roosevelt — the Bernie Sanders of his day — saw all of this coming. On April 29, 1938, in his Message to Congress on the Concentration of Economic Power, he told the country what fascism actually is:
“The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism—ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.”
FDR understood that when a monopolized industry gets big enough, its main rival then becomes the government itself because only the government has enough remaining power to break it up. Adam Smith made the same point in Wealth of Nations in 1776, writing that the East India Company and its allies had, “like an overgrown standing army,” become “formidable to the government” and could “intimidate the legislature.”
The simple reality is that in every country that’s slid from democracy into strongman rule over the past half-century, the first step was capture of the media by friends of the regime.
— Four days after Vladimir Putin was inaugurated in May, 2000, ICE-like masked agents raided the offices of Media-Most, the company that owned Russia’s largest independent national TV network (NTV). They threw its owner, Vladimir Gusinsky, in prison on fraud charges and confiscated his stake in Gazprom, then took over the network with the deal finalized in April of 2001. That same year Boris Berezovsky was forced to sell his share of the ORT network to Roman Abramovich, a fellow oligarch but one who’d pledged his total loyalty to Putin. Within a few years, every national channel in Russia was in the hands of the state or a Putin-friendly billionaire, and still are.
— Viktor Orbán’s people were slightly more sophisticated in 2018, having his oligarch buddies buy up media properties after he sued dissenters into bankruptcy by claiming libel. By the following year, the media monitor Mérték estimated that 77.8 percent of Hungary’s news media was directly or indirectly controlled by Orbán’s party, which is why when Péter Magyar successfully ran against Orbán he had to visit virtually every city and town in the country to get around the media blackout on his candidacy.
— In Egypt, el-Sisi was less elegant in his approach to the media. He had his version of the FBI — the General Intelligence Service — use a front company called Eagle Capital to buy up virtually every TV network, radio station, and newspaper in the country. Reporters Without Borders found that a dozen once-powerful media owners were pushed to sell to intelligence-linked companies, while the handful of businessmen who backed Sisi got to keep theirs. The spy agency’s media group now owns the ON, CBC, Al-Hayah, and DMC networks, and those Egyptian journalists who dared criticize the regime all went to prison.
— Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines used regulatory power the same way Trump lickspittle Brendan Carr’s FCC does. The country’s largest newspaper, the Philippine Daily Inquirer, was forced to sell to a billionaire Duterte ally under threat of imprisonment for breaking “media rules.” Duterte’s rightwing buddies in Congress then refused to renew the broadcast franchise of ABS-CBN, the nation’s biggest network, which had made the mistake of exposing the extrajudicial killings of his so-called drug war. Eleven thousand people lost their jobs, and Nobel laureate Maria Ressa’s little opposition newspaper The Rappler was ordered shut.
Almost without exception, this is the process autocrats use to destroy democracies, as documented brilliantly by people like Timothy Snyder and Ruth Ben-Ghiat.
First the strongman’s friends acquire the newsrooms, then the coverage softens, then the elections start experiencing “anomalies,” and by the time most people notice, there’s nobody left on the air to expose the oligarchs and fascists.
As Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1786:
“Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.”
So, here we are. Bonta and Newsom have caved, and only the attorneys general of New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Minnesota tried to hold out. You may want to call your own state attorney general and ask where they were on this case; you should be able to easily find their number with a quick internet search.
We should also contact our members of Congress (202-224-3121) and demand hearings on the FCC’s corrupt behavior, restoration of our anti-trust laws, and a return to the media ownership limits that Clinton blew up in 1996.
And please share this piece and hartmannreport.com with anyone who still thinks it can’t happen here. It has already happened everywhere else that’s seen their democracy disintegrate, and the first thing to go into oligarchic hands was always the news.
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Jewish Artists Condemn Corporate 'Smear Campaign' Against Mark Ruffalo for Israel Criticism
"The time is over for spurious charges of antisemitism to be trotted out, this time in the defense of war, oligarchy, and AI domination."
Sep 01, 2026
A group of over 170 Jewish figures, including many who work in the entertainment industry, have come to the defense of actor Mark Ruffalo as he faces antisemitism accusations from executives at Paramount for criticizing the Israeli government and its ties to powerful corporations.
In a letter released Tuesday, prominent Jewish figures—including filmmaker Joel Coen, director and author Miranda July, actress Debra Winger, actress and director Ilana Glazer, actress and comedian Hannah Einbinder, and playwright Tony Kushner—accused Paramount of waging a "smear campaign" to shield corporate interests from legitimate criticism.
"Enough with the false and dangerous weaponization of charges of antisemitism," the letter states, "against those who are brave enough to point out the obvious: that the assault on the Palestinian people and the assault on our liberties at home are deeply interconnected, and there is nothing antisemitic about recognizing that fact."
Ruffalo was accused of being an antisemite after he cited the work of Oracle founder Larry Ellison, father of Paramount CEO David Ellison, in helping the Israeli military carry out a years-long assault on Gaza that has left an estimated 73,500 Palestinians dead.
The actor specifically said that Oracle was powering "an apartheid system of oppression" in the Middle East, which he warned could be exported everywhere if "merged into one of the largest media conglomerates in the world," a reference to the proposed $110 billion megamerger between Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery.
However, the Jewish figures' letter points out that there is nothing at all antisemitic about expressing concerns about corporate megamergers that could fuse the power of mass media with the power of a technology giant.
In particular, the letter says that the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger is part of "a larger project of tech-driven domination, a project Larry Ellison and his partners have never been shy about trumpeting—and one they themselves have explicitly linked to their support for the ongoing depredations being visited on the people of Palestine and their silencing of critics of those horrors."
The letter also slams Ellison for trying to create an "Orwellian world" as he "consolidates control over what we watch and how we watch it, knowing that as we watch he and his corrupt cohort will always be watching us."
"The time is over for spurious charges of antisemitism to be trotted out, this time in the defense of war, oligarchy, and [artificial intellignece] domination," the letter concludes. "That tired playbook has run its course. We stand proudly with Mark Ruffalo, and with all decent people who are bravely rising and speaking truth to power."
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'Appalling and Fundamentally Dishonest': Ruffalo Rejects Antisemitism Charges by Paramount Amid Merger Warning
"Now is the time to dive boldly into all these issues," said the Avengers actor and social justice activist, "not step back or concede."
Aug 23, 2026
Mark Ruffalo, the actor known worldwide for both his role as the Incredible Hulk in the Avengers movie franchise as well as his work as a dedicated humanitarian and voice for social justice, did not back down Saturday after his criticism of the pending merger between Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. was cast as antisemitic by executives at Paramount, largely owned by billionaire Larry Ellison and run by his son, David.
While Ruffalo has been outspoken in his opposition to the Paramount-Warner Bros. deal for months—warning like many other critics that further consolidation by such media behemoths will hurt consumers, squeeze workers in the entertainment industry, minimize the range of viewpoints and creativity available, and further entrench right-wing control of the nation's media system—what apparently sparked the accusation against him was the recent sharing of a years-old video clip of Paramount board member Safra Catz discussing “really profoundly scary technologies” that Oracle, which offers software and database services and the company upon which Larry Ellison built his vast wealth, provided to the Israeli military over recent years.
While the Instagram post Ruffalo shared has expired, the clip of Catz has been circulating on time for quite some time, seen as evidence of the close and well-documented ties that Oracle has had with the Israeli military:
“We have some really profoundly scary technology at Oracle, and we wanted to make sure that it was available for the effort.”
A recently resurfaced video of former Oracle CEO Safra Catz has sparked outrage after she boasted about providing advanced technology to the Israeli army pic.twitter.com/r3gJWx9sTu
— Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) August 15, 2026
In Ruffalo's post, in which he reportedly warned that the Ellisons were “powering some of the most destructive and inhuman forces in the world," he also made reference to the genocide in Gaza being carried out by the Israeli military as well as the apartheid under which Palestinians live in the Occupied West Bank.
"This merger has real consequences for real people, and for the entire country. Scrutinizing the Ellisons, including Oracle’s business built on data, surveillance technology and government contracts, and the serious threat to editorial freedom and the loss of a livelihood for thousands of families, is fair and necessary."
Noting Catz's comments in the video about Oracle, Ruffalo said, "This is the company that Larry Ellison is using to fund his son David’s Warner Bros acquisition." And the "really profoundly scary technologies" that Catz mentioned, he continued, "will most likely be merged into one of the largest media conglomerates in the world and one day used on you. Look how she revels in what we now have come to see as a genocide, which was built on an apartheid system of oppression powered by Oracle.”
In apparent reaction to Ruffalo's post, which Variety characterized as the actor going "scorched earth on Paramount-Warner Bros. merger," a spokesperson for Paramount issued a statement on Saturday saying that the company is "troubled when antisemitic tropes are invoked in purported service of a business dispute. Words like ‘genocide’ and ‘apartheid,’ applied to a corporate transaction, aren’t just wrong—they’re a bridge too far, and they cheapen the very real suffering those words are meant to describe. This doesn’t deserve a response in kind—and to be clear, we don’t tolerate prejudice of any kind, against anyone.”
But in response to these accusations of antisemitism on Saturday, Ruffalo issued a new post on social media. It reads in full:
The accusation that I am antisemitic is appalling and fundamentally dishonest. Criticizing the actions of the Israeli prime minister, a military technology contract or the executives who supply it is not the same as criticizing Jewish people. This critical and necessary dialogue is then dishonestly framed as being anti-Israel. To be clear, my views come from my own political convictions and should never be interpreted as hostility toward Jewish people, for whom I have deep love and respect. Everything I know about acting, activism and humanism has been profoundly shaped by the Jewish friends, colleagues and loved ones who have been integral and family throughout every point of my life.
This merger has real consequences for real people, and for the entire country. Scrutinizing the Ellisons, including Oracle’s business built on data, surveillance technology and government contracts, and the serious threat to editorial freedom and the loss of a livelihood for thousands of families, is fair and necessary. The $111 billion deal would hand one family control over CNN, HBO and Warner Bros., backed in part by foreign money whose influence on editorial decisions has never been fully explained to the public.
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have called for serious national security review, and regulators still haven’t given the public a real answer. Until they do, the merger shouldn’t move forward. Now is the time to dive boldly into all these issues, not step back or concede.
Commentators on social media also came to Ruffalo's defense, calling Paramount's accusations nothing more than a smear against well-founded criticisms of Oracle's business model, the crimes of the Israeli government, and warnings about what powerful, right-wing billionaires like the Ellisons could do with what could become one of the largest media corporations on the planet.
"Despicable to call Ruffalo antisemitic," said John Abrams, an entertainment editor. "Hi, I’m Jewish. I will be the one to tell you when something is antisemitic, you dishonest clowns. It is not antisemitic to decry Israel’s crimes. In fact, it is our moral obligation—as Jews, and as human beings."
Journalist Mehdi Hassan called the accusations "truly cynical, shameless, and dangerous."
"The Israel crybully lobby will try, as they always do," wrote author and media critic Adam Johnson, "to make an example out of Ruffalo because he had the temerity and integrity to note the Ellisons’ open advocacy and financial support for a military every major human rights group on earth had determined committed genocide."
"My unsolicited advice," Johnson continued. "Don’t give these cynical assholes an inch. Don’t accept their 'antisemitism' shrieking as good faith."
Noting that "Ellison put out a press release EXPLICITLY BOASTING about how his Paramount purchase would be good for Israel and his financial support for the IDF," Johnson argued that somebody "cannot do this THEN CRY ANTISEMITISM when they are held responsible for the actions of the state and military they support."
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The Paramount-Warner Merger Would Give the Trumpers Even More Control of the Media
The merger would allow Paramount to merge CBS’ newsroom with Warner-owned CNN, which would presumably mean arch-Trumper Bari Weiss would be in charge of CNN.
Jul 15, 2026
Until a couple of months ago, we could get a dose of humor to help us get through the craziness, cruelty, and corruption of the Trump administration. But CBS pulled Stephen Colbert off the air, and not because of bad ratings—he had by far the most widely viewed network show at that hour.
The problem was President Donald Trump is too thin-skinned to put up with a comedian poking fun at him regularly. As a result, he had Brendan Carr, his chair of the Federal Communications Commission, imply that the Ellison family’s effort to take over Paramount, CBS’ parent company, would be blocked if Colbert wasn’t fired. The Elliot family includes prominent Trumper Larry Ellison, one of the richest people in the world, and David Ellison, his equally right-wing son who most immediately controls Paramount.
But taking over one of the country’s major broadcast networks wasn’t enough for the Ellisons. They also control TikTok, the fifth most widely used social media platform, which Trump wrestled away from a Chinese company and put in Larry Ellison’s hands.
And now, Paramount is looking to take over Warner Brothers. In addition to giving them control over two major Hollywood studios, the merger would allow Paramount to merge CBS’ newsroom with Warner-owned CNN. This would presumably mean arch-Trumper Bari Weiss would be in charge of CNN.
Stories about the upward redistribution of income over the last half-century, and anti-worker practices by businesses, tend to get short shrift. But there is no doubt they would get even less attention in a Trumper-controlled media universe.
David Ellison put Weiss, who has long-established right-wing credentials, in charge of CBS News soon after taking over the network. In this role, she has already fired or driven away many serious reporters and repeatedly censored "60 Minutes," its highly regarded and widely watched investigative news show. We can expect more of the same at CNN if Paramount’s takeover of Warner is allowed to go through.
While Trump’s Justice Department’s antitrust division has green-lighted the Paramount-Warner merger, there is still a possibility it can be stopped. California and 11 other states sued to stop the merger on antitrust grounds. In addition to merging two of the major news networks, it would also consolidate two massive Hollywood studios.
An analysis by the Media and Consolidation Research Organization Lab at the University of California San Diego found that the resulting reduction in competition would almost certainly mean fewer new movies are produced and less employment in the industry. It also would likely mean higher streaming prices for consumers. This is in addition to the problem of giving Trumpers even more control of the media.
There is at least some chance that the courts will block this merger on the merits. However, if it goes through the appellate process, the Republican Supreme Court may find the opportunity to provide another gift to Trump supporters irresistible. Still, the prospect of a years-long delay could persuade Paramount to compromise and offer at least partial divestment of some of Warner Brothers holdings to facilitate the merger. In any case, the antitrust lawsuit raises the possibility of blocking the merger in its current form.
While further consolidation of the media and placing ever more of it in the hands of Trumpers is definitely bad news, it would be wrong to imagine that we previously had a golden age of media. News outlets owned and run by rich people tend to present news in a manner that is acceptable to the bosses. Stories about the upward redistribution of income over the last half-century, and anti-worker practices by businesses, tend to get short shrift. But there is no doubt they would get even less attention in a Trumper-controlled media universe.
However, we should be looking for something better. One route is a system of individual tax credits, say $100 per person, to support a person’s favorite news outlet(s). This would be a credit, not a deduction, and fully refundable, so even the poorest person would get a $100 to support the news outlet of their choice.
The model is the tax deduction for charitable contributions, except that everyone would get the same amount. There are many design issues that would have to be ironed out, but such a system could create a large pool of money to support news reporting in various forms that is not controlled by rich people.
This system also has the advantage that it can be done at the state or even local level. That means that cities run by progressives, like New York and Seattle, could pave the way by putting this sort of system in place. (Seattle’s new mayor, Katie Wilson, is a big supporter of this sort of system.)
It is hugely important to do what we can to block further consolidation of the media in the hands of the Trumpers. We also need to do other things, like reforming Section 230 to take away the special protection it gives the huge social media platforms. But the most important longer-term measure to protect a free press is to set up an alternative funding mechanism. An individual tax credit system is a promising route, but we need to get these alternatives on the table and start moving forward with them.
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Fight the Trump Media Takeover With Tax Credits for Independent Reporting
If 150 million people took advantage of a $100 credit, that would make $15 billion available to support independent media.
Jun 05, 2026
It is terrible to see Bari Weiss, under orders from Trumper owner David Ellison, dismantle "60 Minutes" and the rest of CBS News. CBS was never close to being a paragon of unbiased reporting; the rich always had a disproportionate voice, but the network, and especially "60 Minutes," did much excellent investigative reporting.
The Weiss-Ellison team is explicitly saying that this will no longer be the case under their leadership. Any investigative reporting this crew does will most likely be on President Donald Trump’s political opponents. And the material they present will likely be as distorted as the lies that Trump spouts on a daily basis.
The problem goes well beyond CBS. The Ellison family is also planning to take over CNN through its acquisition of Warner Bros., the parent company. The Trumper trio of Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk own TikTok, Facebook and Instagram, and X, respectively. They do not hide their efforts to use their control of these social media platforms to push their political agenda.
And it goes beyond just outright control. Trump and Brendan Carr, his chair of the Federal Communications Commission, have said that they would use the federal government’s regulatory powers to punish outlets that broadcast material they don’t like. Trump used this threat to extract tribute from both ABC News and CBS News (pre-Weiss) over absurd lawsuits.
The media matter hugely for democracy, much more than campaign financing.
All in all, this is a really bad story. But there are things that can be done other than whine. First, the Ellison’s takeover of Warner is not a done deal. People can protest this monopolization of both movie production and news. Even Trumper politicians can be forced to respond to public pressure. Note the seeming retreat from Trump’s $1.8 billion slush fund for his criminal friends. Giving tax dollars to Trump’s chosen criminals was too much for people to stomach, and the Republicans in Congress were forced to nix it.
There are also a large number of independent outlets that continue to do solid reporting. I would put ProPublica at the top of that list, but there are many others. I would also include The New York Times and NPR, despite my many criticisms of both outlets over the years. And there are dozens of smaller publications, way too many for me to list, that people should look to support. Instead of buying something you see advertised on CBS or any other corrupt media outlet, send the money you would have spent to The Nation, In These Times, Payday Report, or any of a number of other independent outlets.
But we really need to go beyond what people cough up out of goodwill. The billionaires have endless money to push their Trumpian nonsense. The nickels and dimes that ordinary people can afford is not a match. We really need to have government support for independent media, and I’m not talking about going back to the old days with the federal government coughing up $500 million a year (0.007% of the budget) for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
We need an individual tax credit or voucher, modeled on the charitable contribution tax deduction. The difference is that this money would be designated for news outlets, and that it would be a credit (say $100), available to everyone, not a deduction from taxes. This way the money would go to the outlets that people find valuable, not the ones the government has chosen. (There is a question of eligibility, but this has generally not been a major problem in qualifying for tax-exempt status with the Internal Revenue Service.)
This route can make a huge amount of money available to support independent reporting. If it was set up nationally and 150 million people took advantage of a $100 credit, that would make $15 billion available to support independent media. That is roughly 300 times ProPublica’s annual budget.
Needless to say, not everyone will use their credit to support media progressives will like. Some may support tabloid-type reporting on Hollywood figures. Some of it will go to support right-wing Fox News- type propaganda. But if even 20% went to support real news, it would be an enormous boon for independent reporting.
And the great thing about this credit is that it can be done at the state and local level, so we don’t have to wait for the forces of good to retake Washington. There have already been some efforts in this direction around the country. In this respect, it’s worth noting that Katie Wilson, Seattle’s new progressive mayor, is a big proponent. If Seattle or some other progressive city or state led the way, it could set an example for others to follow.
To many, this sort of media tax credit will be a new idea. We all know the old line about intellectuals having a hard time with new ideas. But it is really important that people overcome their difficulties. The media matter hugely for democracy, much more than campaign financing. (Sorry, but it’s a bit nuts to think that campaign ads affect voting, but not what people see between the ads.)
I’ve pushed this scheme for a long time, and maybe it’s not the best plan. But if people have better ideas, put them on the table. Whining over the right’s takeover of the media is not a political strategy.
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Forget Citizens United, If We Don't Have Independent Media We're Done For
If progressives are going to have any hope of competing with the billionaires’ candidates, we need to ensure that the Trumpers don’t control the portion of the media not currently in their possession.
May 24, 2026
I was briefly sent into a rage last week, throwing ketchup against the wall, when I saw that one of the Murdoch sons was buying up Vox Media. After seeing Elon Musk take over Twitter, Junior Trumper David Ellison take over Paramount and CBS, and now ready to buy Warner Brothers and CNN, and senior Trumper Larry Ellison taking over TikTok, the thought of yet another serious new outlet falling into Trumper hands was pretty appalling.
Fortunately, the buyer turned out to be James Murdoch, the relatively sane Murdoch son. While that is comparatively good news, no one should feel too relieved over this outcome.
It’s good that Vox isn’t being taken over by a right-wing billionaire, but that’s just luck. It could be. There are any number of right-wing billionaires who have the means to buy up just about any media outlet in sight. And once they do, they could turn their new acquisition into another variant of Fox News.
Part of my reason for the ketchup throwing was that I just saw yet another diatribe against Citizens United, with someone attributing the failures of our political situation to this decision. To be clear, I think the decision was bad in both logic and its outcome.
The government creates corporations; how can it not have the authority to limit their political behavior? Individuals and the organizations they create can do whatever they want politically, but leave corporations out of politics. And we certainly saw more money flooding into politics following the Citizens United ruling, but people need to keep their eye on the ball.
Elon Musk contributed close to $300 million to get Trump and other Republicans elected in 2024. That was Elon Musk, not Tesla or any other company he controls. Other billionaires have also contributed millions or tens of millions to political campaigns.
Reversing Citizens United will require a Constitutional amendment, which is impossible for practical purposes in any foreseeable future. Alternatively, it can be reversed through a court-packing scheme, which is only slightly more feasible.
And then after this great victory, Elon Musk can still contribute $300 million to elect his favorite reactionaries and racists. Would we be celebrating? For the rich, contributing to candidates through the corporations they control is a convenience, not a necessity.
As a practical matter, we are not going to be able to limit the amount the rich spend on campaigns. The only plausible route to preserve democracy is through various forms of public financing, like the super-match in New York City that multiplies small contributions by a factor of 8. Alternatively, Seattle has “democracy vouchers” where each voter gets $100 to contribute to the candidate(s) of their choice. These programs can allow candidates to have enough money to be competitive even without relying on rich people’s money.
We need the same approach to the media. Many progressives seem to have the view that campaign spending has a magical impact on people’s voting, as opposed to everything else that people come across in their lives.
If voters heard nothing but Fox News 24/7, it would take an enormous number of campaign ads to get voters to take arguments from a candidate like Bernie Sanders or AOC seriously. If progressives are going to have any hope of competing with the billionaires’ candidates, we need to ensure that the Trumpers don’t control the portion of the media not currently in their possession.
Part of that story depends on trying to block the right-wing takeovers that are still in the works. That includes the Paramount effort to take over Warner Brothers and the Nexstar-TEGNA merger, which would lead to an unprecedented consolidation of local news outlets in the hands of a right-wing media group.
But it is also necessary to develop an alternative stream of funding, like the super match or democracy vouchers provide for elections. One route is a system of journalism vouchers that people can use to support the news outlets of their choice. This can be done at the state or even local level, since this Republican Congress is not about to pass a measure challenging the power of the rich.
Building up alternative media to challenge the views being pushed by Trumper media is a long and uphill battle, but it is essential if we’re going to preserve democracy. And the first step is recognizing the need for the battle and getting people to stop worrying about Citizens United. If we’re going to undertake a tough fight, we need to be sure we get something important if we win.
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Mega Media, MAGA Lies
Corporate media consolidation amplifies Trump regime propaganda.
Mar 17, 2026
“The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better!”
So said war-addicted Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth at a Pentagon press briefing last week as he complained about news outlets—specifically CNN—not covering the death and destruction of the war on Iran with the elated positivity Hegseth feels it so clearly deserves.
It was the latest example of the Trump regime demanding not merely a pliant news media, but an entirely servile industry that functions as its propaganda arm. While this fascist worldview has been most dramatically displayed in President Donald Trump’s brazen attempts to censor and cancel late-night comedians like Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert for their anti-Trump commentaries, ruling elites in Trump’s orbit have long pursued a dangerous realignment and consolidation of media power to serve their right-wing agenda.
Hegseth’s outburst directed at CNN reflects the Trump regime’s ploy to concentrate more corporate news networks under the command of David Ellison, the CEO of Paramount Skydance and son of right-wing billionaire Larry Ellison.
The growth of the Ellison father-son empire is based on refashioning the American press—or what’s left of it—into the palm of Trump’s hand.
Last year, Trump cleared the way for Paramount’s merger with Ellison’s Skydance Media after Paramount paid a $16 million lawsuit filed by Trump against Paramount’s CBS News. Now Paramount Skydance is on the verge of acquiring an even larger legacy media giant, Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns CNN.
“One family, the right-wing Trump-aligned Ellisons, will soon control: TikTok, CBS, CNN, HBO, Discovery Channel, BET, Cartoon Network, Comedy Central, DC Studios, Fandango, Miramax, MTV, Nickelodeon, Paramount, PlutoTV, Showtime, TBS, The CW, TNT, Warner Bros., and more,” US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) warned. “This is oligarchy.”
David’s father, Larry, is a staunch Zionist and the sixth richest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of more than $198 billion. He is also one of Trump’s closest allies. The growth of the Ellison father-son empire is based on refashioning the American press—or what’s left of it—into the palm of Trump’s hand.
But it isn’t merely one family’s broadcast news juggernaut that rules this age of media monopoly power.
Censorship and MAGA’s Mouthpiece
Over the weekend, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr issued new Orwellian threats against unnamed networks running “fake news” (i.e., reporting that lacks the government’s deliriously upbeat spin) on the Iran war. Carr suggested he would revoke or refuse to renew the broadcasting licenses of networks that don’t “correct course.” While the reactions against Carr’s threats were swift, Trump wholly endorsed the FCC edict on Sunday while deriding media organizations as “Corrupt and Highly Unpatriotic.”
But outside of media mergers and acquisitions, a wider net of news outlets has been pulled closer into the Trump regime’s hold. This includes the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post, with its newly stated commitment to “personal liberties and free markets” along with editorials that reveal its increasing fealty to Trump.
The New York Times, while seemingly less beholden to the Trump regime, continues to churn out a steady stream of poorly disguised Zionist propaganda and breathless coverage of Trump’s imperialist military interventions. The so-called newspaper of record is so steeped in the machinery of empire that screaming prejudice drips from its discriminate use of language, as demonstrated by its passive headlines on Israeli atrocities against Palestinians that obscure Israel’s role versus its matter-of-fact reporting on recent Iranian strikes targeting Israel.
CBS News, however, proves that the Ellison media empire buys more consistent right-wing editorial leadership and allegiance to Trump.
Bari Weiss, spawned from the journalistic cesspool of the Times to later found the hilariously named website The Free Press, has been catapulted to unearned heights of the Ellison empire. While she possesses no experience as a reporter, her hard-line Zionism and anti-woke politics made her a perfect editor in chief to lead CBS News aggressively to the right.
“The mega rich have always been willing to hire, promote, and fund people willing to unquestioningly run interference for their interests while making them feel like their near-pathological selfishness, hoarding of money and power, and total disregard for the public interest is somehow morally justifiable. CBS News editor in chief Bari Weiss is simply another in a long line of feckless water carriers for the one percent,” Elizabeth Spiers wrote in The Nation last December.
“[Weiss] has shown she’s not merely stupendously unqualified—she’s ideologically opposed to the practice of good journalism,” Spiers added.
Since Trump led the US empire into its unprovoked war on Iran last month, Weiss’ CBS has featured an infinite lineup of pro-war commentators, leading CBS’s own staffers to describe the network’s war coverage as a “propaganda-palooza.” Of course, such propagandizing isn’t exclusive to Trump’s newfound love of foreign wars. This was made clear in December when Weiss—who doesn’t hide her cringeworthy fawning over Trump—abruptly pulled a "60 Minutes" story on the notorious El Salvadoran prison camp where the Trump regime has sent many deportees in its ruthless war on immigrants. Since Weiss’ takeover, there’s also been a decline in CBS coverage on climate change.
Breaking the Fascist Echo Chamber
Against this grim backdrop of the decaying “Fourth Estate” of American “democracy,” there remains the ever-exploding and unwieldy landscape of independent media and social platforms. Oligarchs and authoritarians like Trump have struggled to exert control over the endlessly diverse and expanding universe of information and narratives exponentially building itself on these platforms.
Not that they haven’t tried.
Right-wing elites have successfully pushed the Meta platforms of Facebook and Instagram as well as Google’s YouTube to censor pro-Palestinian content. Trump launched his own social platform, Truth Social, in reaction to perceived anti-conservative biases in Twitter’s algorithm—which is now run by Trump’s favorite Big Tech billionaire sociopath, Elon Musk, who renamed it “X” and has proudly moved the platform’s algorithmic biases decidedly to the right. And, of course, we cannot forget TikTok, whose new US owned operation is now controlled by an investor group led by none other than Larry Ellison.
Now, as Trump oversees the final stages of a decades-long merger of corporate power and the state, his regime expects media organizations to serve not just Wall Street but the White House as well.
As is true of most pernicious policies from the Trump regime, right-wing designs on big media did not begin with Trump. Corporate media has long been an industry rife with monopolization and abuse of anti-trust laws to amass market dominance, from the Disney-ABC merger in the mid-90s to the right-wing Sinclair Broadcast Group’s ongoing vast control over local news outlets reaching more than 40% of US households.
But alongside the Trump regime’s growing media machine, which is designed to shield it from public scrutiny, is also the inverse agenda of strengthening the regime’s ability to scrutinize the public through domestic surveillance technology. Led by Hegseth and Trump’s resident villainous creep Stephen Miller, the regime is pushing AI companies to hand over unrestricted use of their technology to spy on Americans and urging Congress to expand government surveillance powers.
If it seems that warnings about Trump’s right-wing media takeover are sensationalist or overstated, Trump himself is quite clear about it. The despot shared an infographic over the weekend illustrating how “President Trump Is Reshaping the Media,” celebrating the defunding of NPR, the departure of prominent news anchors from major networks, and mass layoffs at the Washington Post.
Corporate media consolidation has always been about serving the interests of the elite and their capitalist system of endless personal profit. Now, as Trump oversees the final stages of a decades-long merger of corporate power and the state, his regime expects media organizations to serve not just Wall Street but the White House as well.
The good news is that the public is not powerless against this slide toward state-controlled media. If viewers can pressure a corporation as powerful as Disney with the threat of canceling their subscriptions until it spurns government bullying, as in the case of Kimmel’s show, such collective action can be replicated and broadened to other forms of economic pressure by the masses. In the same way, news worker unions like The NewsGuild CWA, WGAE, and others can work to mobilize newsrooms against the fascist media coup.
The Trump regime’s right-wing media echo chamber can and must be broken through collective people power, both in the form of boycotts and by supporting independent media that answer to no politicians, no government masters, and no corporate overlords.
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'One Family Is About to Control CBS, CNN, HBO, and TikTok': Alarm Grows Over Paramount-Warner Bros. Merger
"When Democrats win back power we are going to break up these anti-democratic information conglomerates," said Sen. Chris Murphy. "All of them."
Feb 27, 2026
Concerns are mounting about the state of the US media landscape now that it looks increasingly likely that Paramount Skydance—a company controlled by the son of billionaire Larry Ellison, a donor to President Donald Trump—will succeed in its bid to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery.
One day after Netflix announced that it was dropping its previously accepted bid to buy Warner, many critics demanded that antitrust laws be invoked to block the Paramount-Warner merger from going through.
Alvaro Bedoya, former commissioner at the Federal Trade Commission, warned that the Ellison family could soon use their control over vast swaths of US media properties to engage in mass censorship, and he pointed to their decisions to cancel Stephen Colbert's program and to refuse to air an interview with Democratic US Senate candidate James Talarico.
"One family is about to control CBS, CNN, HBO, and TikTok," he wrote in a social media post. "They’ll buy [Warner Bros. Discovery] with $24 billion in money from the Saudis, Qatar, and Abu Dhabi. To win over Trump, they canceled Colbert... and blocked Talarico. Much more will follow. Block this rotten deal."
Craig Aaron, co-CEO of Free Press, said the proposed Paramount-Warner merger was "even worse" than the proposed Netflix-Warner merger.
"This deal endangers our democracy by giving a family of pliant billionaires even more control of vast swaths of our news coverage, TV stations, and movie studios," Aaron said. "Allowing more mergers in the already highly concentrated movie business will harm filmmakers and industry workers when Paramount delivers on its promise to make deep cuts to please its Wall Street backers."
Writing in the American Prospect, David Dayen described the Paramount-Warner merger as the "worst-case scenario" that has "echoes of media-political consolidation as we see in dictatorships the world over."
Dayen argued that state governments still had time to block the merger, but warned that they were in a race against time given that Paramount's consultants "are trying to speed run the deal in a matter of weeks."
"The states could challenge the merger even after the feds bless it," Dayen continued, "but by then, Paramount and Warner Bros. would have likely commingled their assets, engaged in layoffs, and made it very difficult to untangle the merger, particularly for judges who are inherently conservative on these matters."
Some Democratic lawmakers are warning that they aren't going to stop fighting the Paramount-Warner merger even if it goes through.
In an interview with Semafor, Sen. Ruben Gallego (R-Ariz.) predicted that the Ellisons would come to regret aggressively buying up US media properties.
"Once we take power, whoever the president is, we’re going to break up your companies," said Gallego. "So all the investment you did to create these mergers are going to be for naught. Your investors are going to be pissed at you, and you’re likely going to end up getting fired as the CEO because you wasted so much money and corrupted yourself in the process."
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) echoed Gallego's argument in a social media post.
"Paramount should enjoy its growing news monopoly while they have it," he wrote, "because when Democrats win back power we are going to break up these anti-democratic information conglomerates. All of them."
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