Donald Trump is about to give Larry Ellison and his son David another present. In July, the Trump administration gifted the mogul Paramount, whose properties include Paramount Studios and CBS, allowing it to merge with the Ellisons’ Skydance, despite antitrust concerns. (Skydance, a film, TV, and video game studio, produced Top Gun: Maverick and the last five Mission: Impossible movies; that merger happened after CBS paid Trump $16 million to settle a ridiculous lawsuit he had brought over the editing of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris.) Now the administration has weighed in, saying that it is favorably disposed to let the newly minted Paramount Skydance acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, which announced on Tuesday that it is considering a sale.
The reason? Larry Ellison is one of the president’s strongest backers, from the early days of his presidency. That is the real story of his growing power and wealth. Now he’ll plan to use it to pay the president back.
“Who owns Warner Bros. Discovery is very important to the administration,” a senior Trump administration official told the New York Post’s Charles Gasparino on Thursday. “The Warner board needs to think very seriously not just on the price competition but which player in the suitor pool has been successful getting a deal done.” The message is hardly subtle, especially coming from a mafia presidency like this one. The administration will use its antitrust power to ensure that it gets the owner of Warner Bros. that it wants: the Ellison family.
Who owns Warner Bros. Discovery is indeed very important, given that company’s cultural and political power: It runs the largest movie studio in Hollywood and owns HBO and CNN. For Democrats, it should also be part of a larger rallying cry. As they aim to retake power in Washington, the party needs a plan for how to undo the wreckage of this administration. One way to do that is to promise to break up the crooked mergers that Trump and has cronies have waved through.
What Trump is surely hoping to accomplish is analogous to what Viktor Orbán’s regime has done to remain in power for years. In Hungary, the government has pressured media outlets and conglomerates to sell to regime-aligned oligarchs. According to Reporters Without Borders, Orbán has built “a true media empire subject to his party’s orders,” even if it is not state media as such. That organization estimates that Orbán’s party has control of some 80 percent of Hungary’s media market.
In the United States, the Ellisons are trying to play a similar role, gobbling up as many outlets as they can to build a mass media and entertainment empire that will keep growing larger—as long Ellison keeps placating the president. At CBS News, they have already begun to do that, purchasing the anti-woke outlet The Free Press and installing its founder, Bari Weiss, as the networks editor in chief, despite her lack of any meaningful reporting or newsroom experience. Weiss has already begun making changes, pushing the network in a pro-Trump, pro-Israel direction—one that could be expected at CNN if the Ellisons take control of it.
Given that the political right has warmed to antitrust policy of late, mainly with respect to Silicon Valley, this could be considered a shocking development. But the right’s dalliance with antitrust has always been about power and control: pressuring companies to align with its political goals and punishing those who don’t. In a perceptive review of Missouri Senator Josh Hawley’s The Tyranny of Big Tech, whose argument is founded in part on the belief that social media giants’ content moderation policies restrict free speech, Josh Harris wrote, “One cannot be in favor of unfettered capitalism and simultaneously hold that the government should restrict the speech and activities of those corporations when that speech is out of step with the right-wing positioning in the culture wars.” The Trump administration is trying to resolve this contradiction by basically saying that it is in favor of unfettered capitalism as long as the people doing it are in line with its priorities.
Larry and David Ellison grasped that sooner than most, and they’re making a killing as a result. “They’re friends of mine. They’re big supporters of mine. And they’ll do the right thing,” Trump said earlier this month, praising their acquisition of Paramount. He said CBS News had “great potential” after Weiss was put in charge, and that he expects the outlet to be “fairer.”
There will be more huge moves in the news and entertainment industries during this presidency. Few, if any, of them will be good for consumers, but they will enrich shareholders and advance MAGA’s goals. That will make the broader media and political environment even more challenging to Democrats. But we are not Hungary. Trump and the Ellisons don’t have a monopolistic control over information. At least not yet.
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