Media. Captured.
The 100-year quest by the right to control what Americans hear and see is one step closer to success with the decision by Netflix to walk away from a deal to purchase Warner Brothers Discovery.
The eventual shift in control will consolidate even larger portions of old and new media in the hands of billionaires who already enabled the rise of an alternative right wing media.
It’s what academics call media capture, which involves three distinct phases: capitalistic, oligarchical, and authoritarian.
Victor Pickard, a professor of media policy and political economy at the University of Pennsylvania, spells out a journey that began with newspaper consolidation, then worked its way into radio and television. Where there used to be strict limits on how many outlets media companies can own, today’s marketplace is dominated by megaplayers.
The oligarchs are now clearly in control and with Donald Trump’s demand that Netflix fire board member Susan Rice — coming on the heels of FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr’s threats to CBS and ABC over Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel — we are seeing the emergence of authoritarian strains.
The Paramount purchase of WBD is backed by a large personal commitment from Paramount Skydance boss David Ellison’s father, Larry Ellison, currently listed as the world’s sixth-richest man. Larry Ellison is also a principal investor in the purchase of TikTok’s U.S. operations.
When the deal passes muster from FCC’s Carr, the Ellisons will control two movie studios, HBO and HBO Max in addition to CBS News. And most ominously for the future of journalism, CNN.
The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, controls Xitter, while Oligarch No. 4 Jeff Bezos has his hands on the Washington Post and MGM. Billionaire No. 5, Mark Zuckerberg, controls Meta, which includes Facebook, Instagram, Whats App, Messenger and Threads.
Farther down the list are Michael Bloomberg and his eponymous news service at No. 17, with Rupert Murdoch and family at No.103 — and still a potent force with Fox News, the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal. Apple’s Tim Cook comes in at No. 1461 while Comcast boss Brian Roberts, who controls NBC and Universal studios, checks in at 2,370.
Missing from this list is the hierarchy at Versant, which was spun off from Comcast because it holds stakes in CNBC, MSNOW, USA Network, Golf Channel and Fandango — properties considered to be dinosaurs as streaming holds an ever-growing lead over linear media.
Nor should we ignore the holdings of relics held by venture capital companies like Alden Global Media and US Today Inc. Or Sinclair Broadcasting and Nexstar, owners of the aforementioned rapidly disappearing radio world.
Many of these titans are increasingly in the business of bending the knee to Trump, who doesn’t seem to have made the Forbes list even though he’s working hard to catch up.
All of this is part of the ongoing Slow-Motion Coup that began in 1926 when Detroit preacher Charles Coughlin took to the radio airwaves and delivered messages that became increasingly partisan, not to mention anti-Semitic.
The growth of right wing voices ebbed and flowed through the remainder of the 20th Century as various conservatives from William F. Buckley Jr., to Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew railed against “liberal media bias.”
That effort picked up steam in the 1980s with the FCC repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, the rise of right wing radio voices like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and the emergence of cable television, which is not subject to FCC oversight.
This “alternative facts” movement grew significantly when Murdoch teamed up with former Nixon and George H.W. Bush campaign adviser Roger Ailes to create the Fox Propaganda Channel.
The dawn of the digital era — whether aggregators like Matt Drudge, bloggers from Andrew Breitbart to Ben Shapiro and Charlie Kirk and podcasters like Joe Rogan and Nick Fuentes — brought still more disinformation or hate that has overwhelmed the increasingly weakened voices of financially challenged print and digital news outlets.
Outlets that continued to insist on now outdated journalistic standards that sought to practice “objectivity” by offering credulous “both sides” coverage even when one side was spouting fiction.
That one side increasingly dominated by a brilliant marketer who espoused “truthful hyperbole” — and what Colbert labeled “truthiness” — who became the 45th and 47th President of the United States.
Which brings us back to today, where Trump works to rig the 2026 midterm elections and where the drift to authoritarianism is being demonstrated by his deployment of a masked and armed paramilitary force in pursuit of a goal of deporting 100 million people — from 5-year-olds to American citizens.
And where a White House press corps didn’t put up much of a struggle when Press Secretary Karolyin’ Leavitt installed members of the right-wing “news” outlets in the briefing room and on Air Force One.
The Ellisons have already delivered on the promise for “kinder, gentler” coverage of Trump, installing Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News where she has delayed or tried to soften stories critical of the regime, dealing a major black eye to the once-proud newsroom of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite.
All of this raising fears at CNN
“The panic at CNN right now is off the charts,” one insider told Oliver Darcy of Status of the larger mood that had arrested the network.
And, as Darcy noted, it’s not just the Ellisons:
“Roughly $24 billion of Paramount’s takeover financing is coming from the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia, a regime that orchestrated the brutal murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi just a few years ago. In normal times, that alone would be disqualifying. Instead, the journalist-killing kingdom is poised to become a part-owner of one of the world’s most influential news organizations.”
In 1938, legendary British statesman Winston Churchill wrote "While England Slept," critiquing the United Kingdom’s lack of military readiness and appeasement policy towards Nazi Germany.
Sadly, much of today’s media “leadership” appears to have fallen in the same trap.