March 01, 2026

Trump's Authoritarian Propaganda Machine

17 minutes

Larry Ellison and his son David Ellison have won the bid to acquire Warner Brothers Discovery in a $110 billion deal, edging out Netflix. The Ellisons, close allies of Donald Trump, are financing the purchase with $70 billion in debt, including roughly $25 billion from Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds. The final price of $31 per share was more than four times the recent low of Warner Brothers Discovery stock.

What this means for American media is staggering. The Ellisons already control CBS and CBS News through their earlier $8 billion Paramount merger. This new deal adds CNN, HBO, HBO Max, DC Comics, Harry Potter, Star Trek, Comedy Central, Showtime, TNT, TBS, the Food Network, HGTV, Discovery, Adult Swim, OWN, The Learning Channel, Avatar Studios, and the Lord of the Rings and Mission Impossible franchises. Larry Ellison also holds a significant stake in TikTok through Oracle.

Hawk outlines how Bari Weiss, placed in charge of CBS News and 60 Minutes, has already driven away viewers and credibility, including Anderson Cooper, who walked away from 60 Minutes after 19 years. The same playbook is expected to be applied to CNN.

The deeper concern is the Ellisons' intent to gut creative talent and replace programming with AI-generated content to service the enormous debt load this deal carries. With Trump signaling regulatory approval, antitrust challenges are effectively neutralized. Scott Jennings and CNN's panel-yelling format come up as symbols of a media landscape already in decline. The consolidation of this much media power in the hands of Trump-aligned billionaires represents a fundamental threat to independent journalism and creative expression in America.

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