Speaking of network takeovers, this analysis from Mediaite about the attempt to take over CNN is worth reading.
Imagine if Hunter Biden were helping assemble billions in Saudi and Qatari financing so a progressive media owner could take over Fox News while quietly assuring the White House that he planned to replace hosts and reshape the network’s direction. The national reaction would be immediate. Congressional hearings, emergency ethics panels, a weeklong media frenzy.
Now consider what is actually happening. The developing Paramount–Skydance effort to acquire Warner Bros Discovery involves outreach to sovereign wealth funds in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE. Reuters reported that Jared Kushner helped connect David Ellison’s team with those funds as they explored financing options for a potential hostile bid. These investments are not confirmed or finalized, and Axios has reported that the foreign investors “have agreed to forgo any governance rights – including board representation – associated with their non-voting equity investments.”
Even still, the implications are serious. When foreign state wealth approaches an acquisition that includes a major American news institution, the public deserves visibility. When the president’s son-in-law is involved in those introductions, the stakes are far higher.
The point isn’t that these situations are identical. It’s that our outrage is bizarrely asynchronous and selective when the structural threat is constant. The Wall Street Journal reported that Ellison told President Donald Trump he planned sweeping changes at CNN if his takeover succeeded. This is not rumor. It is sourced reporting and has not been disputed by the principals. If accurate, it reflects something the country is unprepared to confront. A potential buyer of a news organization offered political value to a sitting president in the middle of a high-stakes media consolidation effort. And yet? Crickets from most major news outlets.
This is not a narrow corruption story. It is much worse — evidence of a structural weakness in the American democratic system that has only recently been exposed, and shockingly ignored. The United States has few meaningful guardrails preventing political families, foreign sovereign wealth, and corporate acquirers from converging inside a transaction that reshapes national news. That is media capture in the modern sense. It rarely looks like censorship. It looks like a phone call before a regulatory decision. A meeting that never happens because someone signals it shouldn’t. A tonal shift in coverage that feels organic but reflects the results of pressure nobody documented and nobody needed to. Influence that is subtle, diffuse, and consequential.
Many will argue that the American media has always had politically motivated owners — the Hearsts, the Sulzbergers, the Murdochs. But ideological owners are not the core issue. The qualitative change comes when political families with direct stakes in government decisions, foreign governments with geopolitical interests, and corporate bidders seeking regulatory favor operate inside the same deal structure. That is not media partisanship. It is the integration of political power and global capital into a democracy’s information architecture.
This is emerging as one of the central problems we face with this newly empowered authoritarian oligarchy. I am not sure what anyone can do about it. I would guess there are lots of ideas circulating and I’ll try to keep up with it as well as I can. But this is bad, very bad.
And it’s not like social media is going to come to our rescue. Facebook, X and tik tok are now in right wing hands and I’m not at all confident that the Google platforms aren’t going to fully join that crowd.
Still, the internet isn’t going anywhere and there will continue to be ways to disseminate real information. However, with the government now saying they are going to be monitoring it for dissent against “the American way of life” such as traditional values and Christianity I’m not sure how that’s going to work out either.
Maybe this will all blow over. These oligarchs all believe they should run the world and I don’t get the feeling that their ideology is particularly well-thought out beyond their own sense of superiority and distrust of democracy. If you read someone be like Curtis Yarvin, one of their gurus, it’s just a mishmash of weird ideas that sound interesting to nerd types. So maybe they’re capable of evolving? That’s a pretty slim hope but who knows?
In the short term anyway, this is a big threat. I hope that Warners has the spine to fight off this hostile bid from Ellison and Kushner.
Happy Hollandaise everyone!