Increasingly our country’s oldest and most influential media outlets are being bought up by the 1%. This is not a good thing for the businesses or us, the consumers. In February, I wrote about how Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the fourth richest man in the world, had decimated the Washington Post, the paper he bought in 2013. And I don’t need to remind people what happened to Twitter, the thriving online public forum, after the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, purchased it in 2022 for $44 billion. He changed the name to X, lifted all controls against hate speech, and the platform turned into a cesspool of online misinformation and animosity. Since Musk’s acquisition, X lost up to 80% of its value due to advertiser exodus, and it hemorrhaged around 7 million users in the U.S. and 11 million in the European Union.
Now the media landscape is facing another threat from a different billionaire — David Ellison, the son of Oracle founder Larry Ellison, the sixth richest man in the world. David, 43, entered into the film business in 2010 when he started Skydance Media, producing hits like Mission: Impossible, Star Trek, and Top Gun: Maverick. Last year, he upped his game by spending $8 billion to buy Paramount, the second-oldest movie studio in the U.S. With this purchase, David now owns CBS News, one of the three major news networks. He hired Bari Weiss, the founder of the right-leaning, anti-woke digital media company The Free Press, to run CBS News, raising alarm bells. Some speculated that her hiring was a way to appease Trump to ensure regulatory approval from the Department of Justice. Since Weiss took over, 60 Minutes star Anderson Cooper has left the show and CBS News has seen a 23% audience decline.
But buying Paramount wasn’t enough for the younger Ellison. He set his sights on Warner Bros. Discovery, a major American entertainment powerhouse that goes back 100 years. In the fall, Paramount and Netflix entered into a bidding war for Warner Bros., with the streaming service claiming victory in December with an $82 billion deal for Warner Bros.’ film and TV studios and HBO Max. (Unlike Paramount, Netflix did not want Warner Bros.’ cable assets.) However, like a petulant child who does not like hearing no, on his ninth attempt to buy the company and in a hostile takeover, David bypassed the Warner Bros. board and went directly to stockholders with an offer of $100 billion ($24 billion of which is from Middle East sovereign wealth funds) with a $40 billion personal guarantee from his father. As a result, Warner Bros. stockholders finally caved, reneging on the company’s deal with Netflix. (Don’t feel too sorry for Netflix; it walked away with a $2.8 billion breakup fee from Paramount.)
In addition to producing movies, Warner Bros. also owns a major news outlet, CNN, among many other channels like the Cartoon Network, HBO, Comedy Central, and the Travel Channel. On top of all that, in January a consortium led by Larry Ellison finalized a $14 billion deal to take over TikTok’s U.S. operations.
CNN is one of the top news networks in the U.S. and has viewers in almost every country in the world; it reaches 2 billion people. As for TikTok, in the U.S. alone the app has between 136 million to 170 million active monthly users. According to the Pew Research Center, just over half of adults in the U.S. who use the platform say they regularly get their news there. That equals 20% of all American adults.
This begs several questions — should one company, should one family, have ownership of so much of America’s media landscape? Should our entire media ecosystem be owned by billionaires? Will the Ellisons do to CNN what they did to CBS News to appease Trump, who has endlessly expressed his contempt for the network?
Media experts say consolidation on this scale harms consumers and democracy. For one, this gives viewers fewer choices.
“If you don’t like the editorial choices those networks make, there’s fewer places to give your attention to,” Virginia Tech Communications Professor Megan Duncan told the school paper.
Duncan also noted that when media corporations are seeking regulatory approval, they often play it safe and avoid making waves.
“Especially with all the national and international events going on, it’s a scary thought that either of these corporations would hedge against telling the audience the truth about a new story because it would invite additional questions from congressional oversight or agency regulators,” she said.
What keeps me up at night is the thought that one family, who is an ally of a president who doesn’t believe in free speech that opposes him (any negative press is always “fake news”), will have so much control of what the world watches on TV, on their phones, and at the movies, and especially of our news. In normal times, the Paramount takeover of Warner Bros. would be considered a monopoly and would face serious anti-trust hurdles in Congress and the Department of Justice. Now, I am not so sure.
As former Labor Secretary and UC Berkeley public policy professor Robert Reich said: “Reminder that when multi-billionaires take control of our most vital platforms for communication, it’s not a win for free speech. It’s a win for oligarchy.”
What can you do? You can voice your concerns about the Paramount takeover of Warner Bros. to your representatives. And you can continue to support independent media, like Moonshine Ink, which will never be for sale to the highest bidder.
