Ari Paul discusses his recent coverage for FAIR.org regarding the ongoing MAGA-connected right-wing media takeover in his articles, “As Ellison Buys Out TikTok, U.S. Moves Toward One-Party Media” and “Conde Nast, Paramount Cut Jobs—and Political Dissent.”
Paul has reported for the Nation, the Guardian, In These Times, Jacobin and many other outlets.
SCOTT HARRIS: Right now, I’m very happy to welcome to our program Ari Paul, a New York City-based journalist and lecturer at Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs. Ari’s reported for many publications including the Nation, the Guardian, In These Times, Jacobin and Fair Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. Ari, thank you so much for spending some time with us tonight. Appreciate it.
ARI PAUL: Thanks for having me. Good to be here.
SCOTT HARRIS: So I have to say, we’re going to be discussing two of your articles, and I’ll mention the titles here: “As Ellison Buys Out TikTok, U.S. Moves Toward One-Party Media” and another follow-up article related was “Conde Nast, Paramount Cut Jobs and Political Dissent.” And I have to say, these two articles and other information I’ve been reading in recent weeks, it really sends chills up your spine about this coverage of the right-wing takeover of major U.S. legacy and social media companies.
And what’s really chilling about it is how closely what’s happening in the U.S. follows the authoritarian playbook where autocrat nations, such as Russia and Hungary and others have implemented similar media takeovers to suppress news and information as well as entertainment that’s critical of their regimes. With that said, Ari, I would ask you to tell us about a wealthy Trump supporter, one of the wealthiest men in America, Larry Ellison, founder of the software company, Oracle and the central role he and his family are playing in the takeover of TikTok, the CBS-TV network and the possible takeover of Warner Brothers Discovery, which includes CNN, the Cable News Network.
ARI PAUL: Yeah, so Larry Ellison is the patriarch of the Ellison family and the founder of Oracle, which is a huge Silicon Valley tech firm. He’s one of the richest men in the world, as he pointed out. And even among the group of most of the richest people in the world for many years, he stood out as not having a foot in media. You had Jeff Bezos from Amazon, who has the Washington Post. You’ve got Zuckerberg, you’ve got Musk with Meta and X respectively. The Google team, Michael Bloomberg, who’s up there has Bloomberg Media.
So Ellison was sort of like the odd guy out as someone who didn’t really have control of mass media. So a couple of things have happened. TikTok, because of moves made under the Biden administration to force TikTok’s sale from its parent owner because of McCarthy-ite Cold War fears about its Chinese ownership, saying that this was a national security threat and that this was helping out an enemy state because of its control of a media company in our markets.
He became one of the key new investors since its sale under the Trump administration. And, of course, he has very right-wing, he has a long list of right-wing causes and he’s close to the Trump regime and he’s also a very big friend. He’s a big funder for a charity that gives to the Israeli military. So his record is sort of out there as being close to the regime and we sort of know what he’s all about.
And of course there were fears that TikTok was skewing American opinion to the left under its old Chinese ownership on a variety of issues including coverage of the Gaza War. Then he’s also got a son who owned this group, Skydance, which acquired Paramount, which has CBS attached to it. Of course, there was a whole fight with CBS and the Trump administration over some coverage. He had filed a lawsuit in regards to an interview that they ran with Vice President Harris about how it was edited and that this lawsuit was settled.
And so CBS was already on thin ice with the Trump administration and with Ellison’s son (David) taking it over. There has been legitimate fear that he, too, would bring CBS to the right. He hired Bari Weiss, who’s a right-wing journalist, founder of the Free Press, which he acquired and made her sort of the editorial czarina of CBS. And there’s already been a lot of reporting about how she’s skewing things to the right, particularly on the issue of Israel. And so I think you’re right to say that this is sort of akin to what we’ve seen in Hungary and Russia. It’s not like a place like China where the central party and government just own all the media or most of the media. This is something where media is privately held, but by a small clique of very wealthy oligarchs who are adjacent to the regime.
SCOTT HARRIS: Thank you for that summary, Ari. So I’d like to talk a little bit more about Bari Weiss at CBS News and how that may have already impacted the CBS News division’s coverage of the Trump regime.
ARI PAUL: Yeah, I mean, there’s already been talk of people who were laid off and that this has already manifested in the loss of people of color in the organization and that there was another report elsewhere that someone had lobbied to keep their job because they had pro-Israel views and that someone else from CBS who was already on thin ice because she had been overly questioning of the Israeli military and U.S. support for the Israeli military and all that kind of stuff. And so that was already sort of manifesting itself within CBS and its coverage. I think there is legitimate fear that there’s not going to be real editorial independence. I mean, there’s always been a question about how editorially independent corporate news can truly be. But I think given her background with the Free Press and her sort of joining this kind of right-wing cultural counter-revolution of being obsessed with “wokeness” and so-called “cancel culture,” that these are the type of politics that are going to be brought into the editorial decisions that are made at CBS, which is a big historic television network in the United States. So that does have a lot of sway.
SCOTT HARRIS: Yeah, as you said, CBS News was long viewed as the crown jewel of not only CBS the network, but also of news in general here in this country. In terms of TV news in general. You quoted Dan Rather who was the former CBS Nightly News anchor who basically put it out there in front. Basically, he said that what’s happening in terms of our media system and these takeovers is a dire threat to U.S. democracy.
ARI PAUL: Yeah, I mean, again, I don’t think we’re facing a type of media consolidation that you’d see in some kind of totalitarian government where everything is owned by the state and there’s only media that comes directly from the executive to the people so that the government has complete control over all information. We’re not quite in that model, but we are in a model where we have more and more media owned by fewer and fewer people. They all have an economic outlook because of their class position. But look, let’s face it, most of these people have moved farther to the right since Trump’s inauguration. I mean, if you looked at some of the photographs from Trump’s inauguration, you saw Zuckerberg, the Google people, Musk, all sitting together—Bezos, all of them—sitting together sort of visually telegraphing that they are going to be a very big part of this administration. Not necessarily officially a part of the administration, but how it shapes opinion.
And we’ve done reporting at Fair to show that well, of course X, formerly known as Twitter, had moved to the right since it was acquired by Musk; that Zuckerberg had totally changed his leanings once it looked like the political winds were blowing. So you really do have fewer and fewer people kind of deciding not just what’s in the news, but how what news gets posted where and how it gets disseminated. So it really is never good when the ownership of media is consolidated, whether or not that’s the state or a group of corporations. You have to have it spread around. You have to have multiple points of view, and you have to have multiple avenues through which news is disseminated or else it’s going to be very easy for people to control. And in this case, these are people who again, have an economic outlook and have shown that they have a leaning towards the current regime.
SCOTT HARRIS: Thank you for that. We’re speaking this evening with Ari Paul, New York based-journalist and we are talking about several of his articles that appeared the fair.org website on media takeover, on right-wing corporations taking over legacy media outlets as well as social media outlets. And Ari, I did want to ask you about your article on Conde Nast and Paramount’s major layoffs where the right-wing political twist included the demolition of a once great outlet called Teen Vogue. And I think there’ll probably be listeners who are surprised to hear about Teen Vogue if they hadn’t seen it in recent years. They really did some hard-hitting political journalism. I was always looking forward to articles from them. People might think, oh, Teen Vogue, they’re talking about makeup and dating or something. But no, they were doing some great work. What happened with Conde Nast, Paramount and this once great publication Teen Vogue?
ARI PAUL: Yeah, so with Teen Vogue, like you said, Teen Vogue had sort of historically been fashion makeup, like the title says, but there’s always been a tradition of pop culture magazines filling voids because young people want to know what’s going on. So you have Team Vogue, you have music publications historically have gone, have covered politics. The Rolling Stone has a long history of that. Across the pond over in Italy, you have a place like Fan Page, which is sort of a pop culture magazine that has done incredible hard-hitting reporting on the Italian political scene. So there’s always been a kind of tradition of that. And Teen Vogue had been making a lot of noise doing, like you said, a lot of hard-hitting reporting. I recently announced that Teen Vogue would then just be sort of taken over by its parent magazine Vogue and that there would just sort of be one big publication rather than a junior publication.
And as a result, a number of people, including the political editor, got fired. Since I wrote that article, that thing kind of got even worse. There was a video being circulated of people confronting the human resource department at Conde Nast, which is the big corporation that owns Vogue and a number of other very famous magazines, that he was confronted about this consolidation with Vogue and Teen Vogue and the layoffs that occurred and what that could have done to the publication, to the brand.
And then as a result, a number of those people who had confronted HR were then terminated. There was a rally last week by the journalist union, the News Guild of New York for what they called the Fired Four for these people and demanding that their jobs being reinstated because all they did was stand up for their public—not just their coworkers, but what they saw as their company that had been taking a hit, that these decisions were really doing damage to the work that they were doing. So it was multi-layered, but I think part of the damage is that we’re going to lose or have already lost another publication that was doing sort of good, interesting, hard-hitting journalism when we need it most.
SCOTT HARRIS: Yeah and as you said before, Ari, this is all happening the right-wing takeover of these many media outlets, which includes media companies like Jeff Bezos, Washington Post; Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook; Patrick Soon-Shiong’s LA Times; Elon Musk at X or Twitter and on and on and on. They’re bending the knee to Trump. And at the same time we have the defunding of National Public Radio and PBS Public Television. And I’m wondering, where does progressive independent media stand in terms of their ability to raise enough funds to compete with all these major right-wing influenced media outlets? I know you didn’t write a story specifically on that, but what’s your general sense of it?
ARI PAUL: Yeah, what’s interesting what you mentioned the defunding of PBS and NPR. I mean, obviously both of those entities are still running, although the Parent Corporation of Public Broadcasting is now shuttered. They both operate largely because they get money from other places so that they weren’t just totally public funded. In fact, it was overall, the public funding from the federal government really affected more smaller market stations that couldn’t do their own fundraising. So you have these big city affiliates that have a lot of the ability to do their own fundraising. So you have a lot of these stations that are going to keep doing what they do. There’s also been other foundations and nonprofits that have stepped up to fill the void. And in fact, we’d even pointed out that there was a lot of noise on the political right that was upset that some of these nonprofits were coming in to fill the funding void for public broadcasting and saying, “Oh, well, a lot of them are left-leaning, and so now that’s going to affect their coverage.”
And it’s like, well, if there’s a void for funding and people fill it, you can’t complain. You said that part of the argument from the right about public broadcasting was they could be left-leaning, I just don’t want it on the government dime. But now many of them are upset that they’re left-leaning on the private sector dime. So you can’t—they want it both ways. So that’s kind of happening with public media. The funding for more independent media, I mean, it’s not great. I mean, the amount of money that it takes to really compete with big media is, I mean, look, someone like Ellison, the Ellisons can buy these media companies because they’re billionaires.
You have small publications that can raise a couple of hundred thousand here and there, but that can only sort of take you so far. I think it’s still already caused to raise money for smaller publications, especially in small markets, small independent sites in place, in middle-sized cities, small cities, small towns where you have chain newspapers that are getting thinner and thinner, getting more consolidated. So that’s obviously a very worthy goal and many of those places can do good work, especially when there’s not a lot of other media to compete with. But on the broad national level, I mean the idea of having something that could even counter CBS or the Murdoch Empire, it’s sort of orders of a magnitude that regular people can’t even think about. Even NPR and PBS who are still floating with these other streams of funding, they’re outnumbered by places like CBS, Murdoch empire and all these other places.
SCOTT HARRIS: Yeah, it’s not a pretty picture. In fact, as soon as we say goodnight, I’m going to give out our web address so we can raise some funds for this independent community radio station, which depends on our listener contributions. So listeners get ready for that. But Ari, thank you so much for this depressing set of stories. I do appreciate.
ARI PAUL: I try to be happier, but there’s always so much I can do.
SCOTT HARRIS: I really appreciate the important information you share and people can find these articles @fair.org, FAIR.org. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. Are there any other websites you want to share with the audience?
ARI PAUL: I also am a columnist at The Battleground, which is the battleground.eu, which covers the rise of nationalism across Europe and the United States, and of course, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, FAIR.org, we would love people to follow.
SCOTT HARRIS: Alright, Ari, thank you for being here tonight. Appreciate it and your important work.
ARI PAUL: Thank you.
SCOTT HARRIS: We’ll look forward to staying in touch and have you back.
ARI PAUL: Thank you.
SCOTT HARRIS: Thanks. Goodnight. That’s Ari Paul, New York City-based journalist and lecturer at Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs. This is Counterpoint. My name’s Scott Harris.
