As Donald Trump ends his first year of his second term back in the White House, the twice impeached convicted felon has made attacks on the media a central focus of his administration. The president has relentlessly launched verbal assaults, lawsuits and threats to revoke broadcast licenses of media outlets that carry commentary or other programming critical of his administration. Regrettably, these intimidation tactics have often succeeded in causing some of the nation’s most powerful media companies to surrender to Trump by paying out millions of dollars in settlements in frivolous lawsuits, or the cancellation of CBS late night TV host Stephen Colbert and the temporary suspension of ABC host Jimmy Kimmel until a major public backlash erupted.
But after the decision by CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss to cancel a Dec. 21 “60 Minutes” story critical of the Trump regime’s deportation of immigrants abducted in the U.S. and flown to El Salvador’s brutal CECOT prison, it’s clear that media mergers now pose a dire threat to U.S. press freedom. In August, CBS News’ parent company Paramount was taken over by David Ellison and his father, tech billionaire Larry Ellison, a Trump ally, who installed Bari Weiss at CBS to pursue an “anti-woke” agenda in the news division.
Media mergers involving broadcast licenses, which require FCC approval, strengthens the ability of Donald Trump to influence and potentially censor the content of media companies vulnerable to political and regulatory pressure. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Craig Aaron, co-CEO of the media democracy group Free Press, who connects the dots between censorship at CBS news and media oligarchs currying favor with Trump to gain federal approval for lucrative mega media mergers.
And so this was a story that had already gone through all the standards and practices, all the lawyers, all the producers, only to be yanked by this newly appointed editor-in-chief who was put in there to essentially police the newsroom for signs of “wokeness,” supposed imbalance that might go against the Trump regime. And the backdrop of all of this is—promises made by the leadership of CBS, now owned by a company called Paramount Skydance in order to complete that merger, the selling of CBS, the selling of Paramount to Skydance, a company controlled by the Ellison family, Larry Ellison, one of the richest men in the world, the owner of Oracle and his son, David Ellison, who’s been put in charge of the media empire. They’ve made a lot of promises to the Trump administration that they’re going to change the way the news is done, by which they appear to mean we’re going to try to make it more favorable to the Trump administration.
So Trump has complained about a lot about the coverage on CBS. Here comes Bari Weiss, here comes David Ellison yanking this incredibly important story and directly interfering in the newsroom, which is the thing that people had really feared the most. We’ve seen a whole series of bad actions, including the firing of Stephen Colbert, the ridiculous settling of a lawsuit over the editing of an interview with the former Vice President Kamala Harris. And now we see this direct interference in independent journalism and in a program that whatever its strengths or flaws had been long left alone by management to do its reporting. And of course, had done a number of very important stories over the years. This one, another very important story that now may never be seen because Bari Weiss decided to spike it to please Donald Trump and JD Vance and Stephen Miller and all the rest.
SCOTT HARRIS: Craig, as you mentioned, there’s been a slew of recent media mergers that have enabled billionaires and oligarchs who are allies of Donald Trump to control key media outlets that have enormous potential to shape public opinion, both political and cultural. We’ve had mergers that have included TikTok, CBS, Paramount—as we’ve been talking about—Warner Brothers Discovery. Netflix, of course, is involved in bidding on that, and CNN could be affected by whatever comes out with the bid for Warner Brothers Discovery.
CRAIG AARON: Well, what you’re seeing is, as you described it, Scott, some of the richest people in the world who are closest to Donald Trump and want the Trump administration to do his bidding, trying to set themselves up to control so much of what you watch, see, hear and read every day. And this is a playbook that goes back to our old friend Elon Musk, who spent a big chunk of his immense fortune by what used to be called Twitter, now X, showed kind of, “Hey, if you’re in charge, you can twist it and bend it to be about what you want it to be about.” And the other billionaires were very much paying attention. And so we listed a ton of deals there, but the name that’s connected to almost all of them is Ellison.
So Larry Ellison—one of the five or six richest men in the world, his son David Ellison, who wants to be the next Rupert Murdoch—they’ve been moving very aggressively in the Trump administration to consolidate, to sweep up more media and really put a lot of pressure on the various newsrooms and companies they work for to get in line to get these deals done.
The takeover of Paramount was the first big one to fall. You saw the company settle an absolutely specious lawsuit to get that deal done. You saw the installation of Bari Weiss, you saw the installation of a bias monitor to watch out for supposed bias against conservatives, all to please the administration and try to grease the wheels so that they can get more media properties.
For more information, visit freepress.net.
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