The era of right-wing nepo-media
In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s second presidential victory, his media supporters began asserting that America had entered a new, definitively conservative cultural era. “Woke is dead,” blared a New York Post headline from November 2024. These pronouncements, however, failed to align with the numbers. Instead of a 1984-esque Republican landslide, Trump managed to defeat Kamala Harris by less than two percentage points.
But with Trump now a little more than a year into his current term, the country is nearing a legitimate right-wing cultural transformation — just not from a dramatic swing in popular sentiment. Instead, it is one wealthy family that has used its roughly $200 billion fortune in an unprecedented effort to acquire, consolidate, and control news and entertainment media.
Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison, the son of Silicon Valley centibillionaire Larry Ellison, bested Netflix last week in a drawn-out bidding war for Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD). With a $110 billion offer largely funded by his father, the younger Ellison is now in line to control Warner Bros. Studios, CNN, HBO, and the rights to numerous top media franchises, including Harry Potter, DC Comics, and Game of Thrones. Those pending acquisitions would be in addition to the brands and properties Ellison already controls after his firm, Skydance Media, closed its $8 billion merger with Paramount less than a year ago. That transaction was also financed by his father.
Paramount’s merger with WBD would ultimately leave the Ellisons in control of two of the largest film studios and two leading streaming services, HBO Max and Paramount+. It would also leave two major news networks, CNN and CBS News, under the heel of right-wing ideologues who have already demonstrated their willingness to bend reporting to appease Trump and his administration.
The president seems aware of this. In December, Trump protested WBD’s now-terminated deal to sell its studio and streaming assets to Netflix, which would have resulted in CNN being spun off rather than sold. “[T]he people that are running that company right now and running CNN… is a very dishonest group of people,” he said. “I don’t think that should be allowed to continue.”
After the Ellisons torpedoed the Netflix deal on Thursday, Trump, who has described both men as “good friends” of his, may very well get his wish.
‘No interest’ in politics
Throughout their media acquisition scramble, the Ellisons have worked to exhibit their loyalty to Trump, whose Justice Department will have to sign off on the WBD sale. In December, David Ellison courted Trump by sitting in the president’s box during the annual Kennedy Center Honors event. Last week, he attended Trump’s State of the Union address as a guest of Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, a close ally of the president.
Larry Ellison, the Oracle cofounder, is unabashedly right-wing both in his speech and political spending. His son, however, has sought plausible political ambiguity. In August, shortly after acquiring Paramount, David Ellison vowed to preserve the integrity of CBS News and insisted he had “no interest” in turning it into a politicized project. “Of course, we believe in the independence of journalism,” he said. “We believe in being in the truth business.”
Several weeks later, in October, Ellison made conservative pundit Bari Weiss the editor-in-chief of CBS News. He also had the network shell out $150 million to buy The Free Press, Weiss’s upstart anti-woke news and opinion site. The astronomical valuation lacked any business rationale.
Less than a month after spending heavily to acquire The Free Press, Ellison had CBS News eliminate 100 positions, including numerous reporters. The network is now exploring another round of layoffs to reduce its workforce by at least 15%, according to Variety.
Weiss, meanwhile, has consistently steered the network to the right. In December, she made a last-minute decision to have 60 Minutes shelve a segment on the brutal treatment of Venezuelan migrants who the Trump administration renditioned to an El Salvador prison. CBS News correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, who worked on the segment, described Weiss’s decision as “political.”
Weiss has also encouraged journalists to resign if they do not agree with her agenda. Some have. “We’ve been told to aim our reporting at a particular part of the political spectrum,” Mary Walsh, a veteran CBS News producer, wrote in a Friday memo announcing her departure. “Honestly, I don’t know how to do that.” Another CBS News producer, Alicia Hastey, accepted a buyout last month after stating that journalists have been pressured to “self-censor or avoid challenging narratives.”
Ellison and Weiss have replaced the network’s journalists with a rotation of podcasters, pundits, and influencers, many of them explicitly conservative. Weiss hired 18 paid commentators in January, including HR McMaster, who served as Trump’s national security advisor during his first term; Niall Ferguson, a Free Press columnist who has written glowingly about British and American imperialism; Arthur Brooks and Coleman Hughes, two more Free Press columnists; and Reihan Salam, another conservative columnist. She also brought on health and wellness podcasters Andrew Huberman and Peter Attia. (Attia stepped down last week over his intimate relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.)
Ellison has said his overhaul of CBS News will serve as a model for CNN. “We’ve been really clear” about “what we want to do with news,” he told CNBC in December when asked about his plans for CNN. “We want to build a scaled news service that is basically, fundamentally, in the trust business, that is in the truth business, and that speaks to the 70% of Americans that are in the middle,” he added.
When asked how Trump felt about Paramount acquiring CNN, Ellison replied, “We’ve had great conversations with the president about this.” The Wall Street Journal reported in December that Ellison had assured Trump officials that he would make radical changes to CNN if Paramount acquired WBD.
