From My Recent Readings on CNN and CBS
As the US stumbles into another war, it's worth taking stock at just how rapidly the US media ecosystem is falling under Trump's control.
Paramount Skydance are set to spend an eye watering $111 billion to buy Warner Bros. But before I explain why this is alarming so many people, let's take a step back.
Skydance was a company led by David Ellison and financially backed by his tech billionaire father, Larry Ellison, who happens to be a close Trump ally and major Republican donor. In 2025, Skydance was seeking to merge with Paramount Pictures, owners of CBS News.
Before Trump's FTC would sign off on the merger, Paramount agreed to pay Trump a $16 million settlement over a "60 Minutes" interview with former vice president Kamala Harris, with Trump claiming that the network had engaged in election interference in the way the program was edited.
This payment prompted widespread criticism, including from within CBS, with The Late Show's Stephen Colbert attracting Trump's fury when he called the payment a “big fat bribe”. Colbert's show was cancelled almost immediately after, with Trump ominously warning that fellow Trump critic Jimmy Kimmel would be next (...he was).
In October, Ellison spent $150 million to acquire the right-leaning outlet "The Free Press" and made its co-founder, Bari Weiss, the editor-in-chief of CBS News. One of her first moves was to intervene to block a 60 Minutes story on the Trump administration’s deportation policies just hours before broadcast.
Multiple veteran journalists and producers have left CBS News as a result, with a long-serving executive producer among those publicly claiming that staff were instructed to tailor reporting toward a "specific political viewpoint".
According to recent reports, CBS News has now officially replaced its longstanding, detailed 38-page editorial standards handbook with a streamlined set of five principles under Weiss’s leadership. One of which is an explicit “We love America” editorial stance.
It's within this context that the owners of CBS, Paramount Skydance, has just bought Warner Bros... the owners of CNN.
What raises even further concern is the fact this hostile takeover appears to be largely funded by the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Qatar.
If this deal goes through, it will bring Trump one step closer to complete media control. Just as we've witnessed in Russia, Turkey, Hungary, and countless other examples, regimes secure control over their people by ensuring regime aligned oligarchs are in control of the nations media.
Soon, David Ellison will control CBS and CNN.
Larry Elison now controls Tik Tok (after Trump forced the Chinese owners to sell).
Elon Musk controls "X", and has been proven to manipulate the algorithms on the platform to promote Trump and far right narratives.
Mark Zuckerberg controls Facebook and Instagram, and announced they would stop fact-checking on the platforms right before attending Trump's inauguration. He then added Trump loyalists to the Meta Board and to senior policy positions.
Jeff Bezos controls the Washington Post, and personally blocked a draft endorsement of Kamala Harris before the 2024 election, and then announced that The Washington Post’s opinion section would limit viewpoints to those aligned with “personal liberties and free markets”... i.e. no longer publish content critical of Trump.
The Sinclair Family (major Republican donors) controls 185 local TV stations across the country, and mandated that these stations air political commentary segments hosted by former Trump Advisors, reaching about 40% of US households.
Rupert Murdoch controls Fox News, the Wall St Journal and New York Post. A media company that was successfully sued for $787.5 million after court filings revealed that top Fox hosts and executives promoted Trump's false "election fraud" claims despite knowing they were lies.
Trump also signed Executive Orders that slashed funding of public broadcasters PBS and NPR, after he alleged a bias against him. Funding was also cut to the international pro-democracy media outlets, Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Free Asia (although Congress has recently restored some of this funding).
The Associated Press have been barred from covering certain White House and presidential events, such as Oval Office speeches and trips on Air Force One, because they refused to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.
Trump routinely makes public statements demanding journalists and media identities be fired, and recently demanded that Netflix remove board member Susan Rice, a former national security adviser, accusing her of being biased and threatening unspecified “consequences” if she was remained.
More recently, the FCC launched the “Pledge America” campaign, encouraging broadcasters to air patriotic content like the Pledge of Allegiance and the national anthem daily. Part of a concerted effort to target any content critical of Trump by framing it as unpatriotic.
This is all taking place as we continue to witness extraordinary personal attacks on journalists that ask questions he dislikes, including threatening an Australian journalist that his question about his personal business dealings would harm Australia's prospects in upcoming trade and military negotiations.
Meanwhile, the White House has handed press credentials to a comical list of right-wing online influencers, turning some press conferences into a cringe worthy performance of platitudes that would make Putin embarrassed.
None of this is normal, and it's happened in just over 12 months. He has three years to go, this is just the first step. Be concern!
Related Previous Blog: https://chateaudumer.blogspot.com/2026/03/the-price-of-truth-when-journalisms.html
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