This Is Not Coincidence. It Is a Business Model.
In a functioning democracy, the press exists to hold power accountable — including the power of presidents. In 2025, America's major media companies discovered a different model: settle the lawsuit, cancel the host, kill the endorsement, and get your merger approved. Robert Reich, former U.S. Secretary of Labor, described it as a simple exchange: favorable coverage for regulatory favors. The documented record bears him out.
- Billionaire buys or controls a major media outlet — or seeks government approval to do so.
- The president threatens the outlet — via lawsuit, license review, FCC pressure, or public demand for firing specific hosts.
- The outlet capitulates — settles the lawsuit, cancels the show, kills the story, or shifts editorial direction.
- The regulatory approval comes through. The merger proceeds. The billionaire profits.
- The audience gets less truth. The business continues.
This is not how a free press is supposed to work. But it is exactly how a captured press has always worked — in Hungary under Viktor Orbán, in Russia under Putin, and in every other country where concentrated wealth and concentrated political power found each other useful. A Hungarian journalist writing in The Atlantic in early 2025 put it directly: "As I watch from afar what's happening to the free press in the United States... it all looks very familiar. The MAGA authorities have learned Orbán's lessons well."
"At a meeting of the U.S. Conservative Political Action Conference in 2022, the Hungarian prime minister advised that the Republican pathway to power 'required having their own media outlets.'"
A Sequence of Events That Speaks for Itself
Larry Ellison is the founder of Oracle and, depending on the day, the second- or third-richest person on earth. He is a documented Trump donor, participated in a post-2020 election phone call to discuss contesting Trump's loss, and co-sponsored Trump's military parade in Washington in June 2025. His son David runs the media empire. Here is the documented timeline.
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Late 2023
David Ellison's company Skydance begins negotiations to acquire Paramount Global — owner of CBS, BET, Nickelodeon, MTV, Comedy Central, and 28 local TV stations.
Source: NPR, Washington Post -
Oct. 2024
CBS airs a 60 Minutes interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris. Trump files suit alleging deceptive editing, seeking $20 billion in damages. Legal experts across the political spectrum call the case spurious. CBS's own journalists call it "completely without merit."
Source: NPR, PBS NewsHour -
May 2025
CBS News President Wendy McMahon resigns, citing "differences with Paramount leadership." 60 Minutes executive producer Bill Owens also resigns, saying his journalistic independence had been "hamstrung." Seven 60 Minutes correspondents — including Lesley Stahl, Scott Pelley, and Anderson Cooper — sign a letter warning that any settlement would be a "shameful stain" and undermine the First Amendment.
Source: PBS NewsHour / Associated Press -
Jul. 2, 2025
Paramount agrees to pay $16 million to settle Trump's lawsuit — despite its own lawyers having repeatedly called the case meritless. The money goes to Trump's future presidential library. Senator Elizabeth Warren publicly characterizes it as "bribery," noting Paramount needs Trump's approval for its billion-dollar merger. The Skydance merger requires FCC sign-off from Trump's hand-picked FCC chair, Brendan Carr.
Source: NPR, PBS, NBC News — pbs.org -
Aug. 2025
Trump's FCC chair approves the $8 billion Paramount–Skydance merger. David Ellison becomes CEO of the new Paramount Skydance. He cancels Stephen Colbert's Emmy-winning Late Show — the highest-rated late-night program for nine consecutive seasons. Trump had repeatedly demanded Colbert be "put to sleep."
Source: Axios, NPR -
Oct. 2025
David Ellison appoints Bari Weiss — founder of The Free Press, a conservative opinion site — as Editor-in-Chief of CBS News, despite her having no television or newsroom experience. A conservative ombudsman from the right-leaning Hudson Institute is also installed to review CBS coverage.
Source: Newsweek, Axios -
Dec. 21, 2025
Bari Weiss kills a finished, legally cleared, publicly promoted 60 Minutes investigation — hours before air — into Venezuelan deportees describing torture at El Salvador's CECOT prison. CBS correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi sends an internal memo: "The public will correctly identify this as corporate censorship." The segment had been cleared by CBS lawyers and standards executives. Human Rights Watch research cited in the segment had documented torture. Government silence had been the administration's deliberate response, not a gap in reporting.
Source: NPR, PBS NewsHour, CNN — npr.org -
Dec. 22, 2025
The same day the story broke, Paramount Skydance announced Larry Ellison would personally invest further in the company. Reports surfaced that Ellison had already discussed with the White House axing specific CNN anchors — including Erin Burnett and Brianna Keilar — whom Trump "loathes," as part of a deal for the next regulatory approval: the Warner Bros. Discovery acquisition that would give the Ellisons control of CNN.
Source: The Guardian / Democracy Now! / Jacobin -
Early 2026
Freedom of the Press Foundation and Reporters Without Borders — as Paramount shareholders — file legal action demanding records, charging that Larry Ellison promised "favors" to the Trump administration for regulatory approval, constituting "a breach of fiduciary duties" and a "corrupt exchange" that exposes the company to civil and criminal penalties.
Source: Juan Cole / Free Press / Nonprofit Quarterly
Axios, citing multiple sources, reported that David Ellison promised the president "sweeping changes" at CNN as a condition of the Warner Bros. deal — and that Trump had "gushed over the Ellisons," telling people he expects favorable changes to CNN under their ownership. Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense, stated publicly: "The sooner David Ellison takes over that network the better."
The Ellisons Are the Latest. The Pattern Started Earlier.
The Ellison sequence is the most acute documented case, but it sits inside a broader wave of billionaire media capitulation that followed Trump's return to power. Each case has its own paper trail.
Jeff Bezos — owner of The Washington Post and founder of Amazon, which holds tens of billions in federal government contracts — killed the Post's planned endorsement of Kamala Harris in October 2024. In February 2025, he announced the Post's opinion section would henceforth be restricted to defending "personal liberties and free markets," explicitly excluding opposing perspectives. The Post's opinion editor immediately resigned. The Post's former executive editor, Marty Baron, said publicly: "There is no doubt in my mind that he is doing this out of fear of the consequences for his other business interests."
Meta's Mark Zuckerberg announced on January 6, 2025 — the fourth anniversary of the Capitol attack — that Meta was eliminating its fact-checking program across Facebook and Instagram. The program had been independently shown to be effective at reducing belief in falsehoods and reducing how often misinformation was shared. Zuckerberg simultaneously appointed Trump allies to top company positions. Days later, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Musk, and other tech billionaires sat in prominent positions at Trump's inauguration.
This pattern didn't start with Ellison. In 2013, Academy Award-nominated filmmakers Carl Deal and Tia Lessin completed a documentary called Citizen Koch — set to air on PBS stations nationwide — documenting how billionaire money shaped Wisconsin politics and crushed workers' right to organize. David Koch had donated an estimated $23 million to public television and sat on the boards of PBS affiliates in both New York and Boston.
When a separate PBS documentary critical of Koch aired, he threatened to pull his seven-figure donation. PBS executives got the message without being asked twice. Internal emails — obtained by Jane Mayer of The New Yorker — show PBS officials pressuring the filmmakers to change the title and remove the Koch storyline entirely. One PBS executive told the filmmakers directly: "We live in a world where we have to be aware that people with power have power." Funding for Citizen Koch was pulled. The film never aired on PBS.
The filmmakers called it what it was: "This wasn't a failed negotiation or a divergence of visions. It was censorship, pure and simple."
The billionaire takeover of your local airwaves didn't happen overnight. It was unlocked by a single piece of legislation that most Americans have never heard of — passed with almost no public debate while the media companies it would benefit covered it in near silence.
Before 1996, federal law capped how many radio stations a single company could own — 40 nationwide. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 eliminated that cap entirely. It passed the Senate 91–5 and the House 414–16. Both parties handed the public airwaves to corporations in a single afternoon. The promised benefits — lower rates, more competition, 1.5 million new jobs — never materialized. Instead, cable rates rose, the industry lost half a million jobs, and a wave of mergers began that has never stopped.
Within five years, the number of radio station owners nationwide collapsed from 5,100 to 3,800. Clear Channel — now called iHeartMedia — went from owning a handful of stations to over 1,600. Local news disappeared. Local voices disappeared. What replaced them was national outrage programming, repeated across hundreds of markets, designed not to inform but to inflame.
This isn't abstract. It happened in Minnesota. AM950 KTNF was a progressive talk radio station serving the Twin Cities — one of the few local independent voices on the dial. It was sold for $250,000. It is now a sports station. The community voices, the local journalism, the independent perspective — gone. What happened to AM950 is what happened to thousands of stations in thousands of communities across America after 1996. The airwaves are public property. Congress gave them away.
"It is not a sign of a healthy democracy when billionaires are buying up all of the means of cultural consumption."
The News Isn't Broken. It's Working Exactly As Designed.
When a 60 Minutes segment documenting torture gets killed hours before air — after being legally cleared, after 40 consistent testimonies, after independent forensic expert review — the story that never airs is the real story. You didn't see it. You may not know it existed. That invisibility is the point.
Dan Rather, who anchored CBS News for 24 years, warned directly: "We all have to be concerned about the consolidation of huge billionaires getting control of nearly all of the major news outlets." He specifically said the Ellison takeover was "a particularly tough time for anybody working at CBS News" and that if the Ellisons acquired CNN, "it would change CNN forever."
The working-class Americans who watch these networks, who share these posts, who trust these brands — they are not the audience being served. They are the product. The audience being served is the administration that controls the regulatory approvals the billionaires need.
"The public will correctly identify this as corporate censorship." Alfonsi noted the story had been reviewed repeatedly by senior producers, news executives, and CBS legal and standards divisions. She said she and her producer had asked Bari Weiss for a call to discuss the decision. "She did not afford us that courtesy."
Independent journalism still exists. Local journalists, nonprofit newsrooms, and single-reporter outlets broke many of the stories cited on this page. They have no mergers to protect. They have no FCC licenses to lose. They have no president whose favor they need. Supporting them is not a luxury. It is how the truth survives what is happening to the institutions that used to carry it.
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