“Freedom of the press,” A.J. Liebling famously said, “belongs to the man who owns one.” And Liebling ought to know. He was an ardent critic of the press of his day. These days, freedom of the press and of the media, and more specifically of mainstream media outlets, belongs to the oligarch who owns it, almost all of whom are, as in Liebling’s day, men.
The mainstream media was never much to shake a stick at. But there was what is considered a golden age, that of, for example, CBS and Walter Cronkite, where a beloved newscaster was the voice of a nation and, instead of distorting, honed the news to at least attempt to give his audience a snapshot of reality. It was Cronkite’s reporting and the images of body bags coming back from Vietnam every evening around the dinner table that, as much as anything, helped turn the population against the war.
Those days are long gone. What we have now on the amalgam of TV news, in particular the four networks, NBC, ABC, CBS, and Fox, and cable news, is an endlessly repeated—depending on who is in power—riotously opposing the regime. Yet, the point is often to draw attention away from the fact that regimes come and go in the U.S., Britain, France, and Germany, but the underlying power and direction of a West led by the U.S. is a hellbent and destructive focus on maintaining its strangle hold over the global economy and its resources even as it watches that hold slip away. And as it becomes more desperate and aggressive in the process.
Still, there are, let’s call them for lack of a better word, “standards,” rules of responsible journalism which the networks still pledge allegiance to, even though, as Shakespeare would say, these rules are more “honored in the breach than in the observance.”
All that is changing. The media has always been concentrated, with five major companies in the U.S., in England and the Commonwealth in the hands of the right-wing fanatic Rupert Murdoch, and in France in the hands of the luxury barons Vincent Belloré and Bernard Arnault, two of the richest men in that country and in the world.
We have witnessed increasing consolidation, as major movie studios, TV, and cable stations are owned by fewer companies in an ever-tightening spiral. Disney buying ABC to go along with sports channel and cable ratings powerhouse ESPN, and then buying parts of FOX and Marvel Studios, the biggest money-maker of the 2000s. Another conservative company, the cable provider Comcast, buying NBC, which had merged with Universal Studios, and on and on.
What is happening now, though, would make even a conservative media baron like Murdoch blush with shame and envy, that is, if the purveyor of right-wing media without a conscience knew how to blush.
We’re watching a new wave of consolidation, an attempt to take over mainstream media and utterly erase what is by now only the specter of “responsible journalism,” in a far-right attempt to control the airwaves, to turn all media into Fox News.
This current onslaught began with the Trump presidency approving the takeover by Larry Ellison’s son, David’s company, Skydance, of Paramount/CBS, as well as an assault on what was the bastion of integrity on CBS, the flagship news feature magazine, 60 Minutes. The program used to boast Mike Wallace’s occasionally hard-hitting muckraking, though there was a famous case of compliance with censorship the year after the Ukraine war, when that show filmed a segment exposing that over 60% of the U.S. taxpayers’ money was being siphoned off and landing in the hands of the country’s oligarchs.
Since that more serious moment of caving to the needs of the security state, led by the newly named Department of War, there was a supplementary agreement by the network and the series to pay Trump $16 million over the deletion of portions of a Kamala Harris interview. The money to go to the Trump Library, which consists of what? Comic books and real estate holdings? 60 Minutes has continued the genuflection, first in its pilot episode for the new television season, by interviewing the CEO of the blood sport, UFC, a match of which Trump is intent on staging on the White House lawn next year to mark the 250th anniversary of the founding of the country. Appropriate, since, for most of its history, the country has been bathed in violence and bloodlust. 60 Minutes then continued the genuflection later in the season with an interview with, hold onto your hat, President Trump, where they tossed softball after softball. Wow, what a coup. He hardly ever makes a public appearance and is nowhere to be found in the media.
It gets worse. Larry Ellison, David’s father, founder of Oracle—who alternates with Elon Musk as the richest man in the world—heavily invested in the coming bubble that is AI, and is footing the bill for the Paramount/CBS takeover. Oracle itself was a spinoff of the security state, its database developed for and by the CIA. The company almost went bust early on and was sued for inflating its market value, but has since made the mogul a hundred billion dollars. Ellison is a rabid Zionist who, at the drop of a hat, professes his admiration for the IDF and is the largest private donor to that august body, the perpetrator of the Gaza genocide. Ellison was accused in a lawsuit, before the genocide, of promoting the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Israel.
The first move of the new regime at CBS was to appoint Bari Weiss editor-in-chief of CBS News. Weiss, once an editor for the New York Times, left to found a right-wing startup erroneously titled The Free Press, described by media critics as “hawkish and anti-Palestinian” and more damningly as a scheme to “empower right-wing factions within established elite institutions.” As news censor at CBS, Weiss claims her goal is to represent the supposed other 80% of Americans, and she wants to promote “charismatic” guests such as Alan Dershowitz, another rabid Zionist, defender of Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein, and reputed visitor to Epstein Island.
The next ploy of the Ellison cabal is a bid to buy Warner Bros., which would give them access to CNN, where they could perform a similar makeover, from center-right lapdog of Democratic administrations to far-right open backer of Trump and Israel. The purchase at the moment looks to be going to Netflix Inc., but could be halted by the government, giving Ellison, who has contributed heavily to the Trump campaign, another shot at owning the company. Terms of the Netflix deal also have Warner Bros. spinning off CNN, which equally could be picked up by Ellison if his Warner Bros. bid does not go through.
Son David’s heavy-handed methods of running Paramount—huge cuts—2,000 jobs lost so far—getting rid of any DEI initiatives and hiring filmmakers and executives accused of sexual harassment, are the talk of the town, for all the wrong reasons.
If the film and television concentration weren’t enough, Larry may soon own a significant share in the new American version of TikTok, the short video network whose audience has been watching clips of the Gaza slaughter, which has partly accounted for a change in attitude towards Israel from victim to bloodthirsty aggressor, which is now more widespread.
Israel banned most journalists and all Al-Jazeera journalists from Gaza as the genocide mounted, killing many journalists in the process. But with do-it-yourself reporting and filming, the Gaza atrocity continues to appear on the screens and is having the same effect as Walter Cronkite’s body bags. In the proposed deal, Ellison’s Oracle would be named the “security provider,” which will grant it control over the algorithms that manage the news, allowing the company to start censoring posted content, i.e., the videos from Gaza. To say nothing of granting Oracle AI access to users’ data to spy on consumers and add to its version of artificial intelligence.
Why this frontal assault? A major reason is that the Western Corporate Media Narrative is collapsing before our eyes. It becomes more transparent every day, what with the pronounced genocide in Gaza as well as the ex-Al Qaida and ISIS takeover of Syria, and the repeated bombing of Lebanon despite Israel signing a ceasefire. Not to mention the coming attempt to plunder Venezuela’s oil and other resources using the thinly veiled excuse that the Trump administration is interested in combating drug smuggling, an attempt which has included the Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Machado urging the bombs to start falling on her country.
Want more? How about the open theft of 300 billion dollars in Russian assets in the world’s banks, to keep the Ukraine war, now lost on the battlefield, going, even as one billion dollars designated to help Ukrainians heat their homes this winter has now disappeared into the coffers, and maybe up the nose, of that country’s oligarchy. The theft of the Russian assets is a signal to the rest of the world that their money is not safe in the Western banking system and can be confiscated at any time.
The naked assertion of this much power, in a no-holds-barred oligarchic and corporate takeover of mainstream media, though, is not a sign of strength, but of weakness. That bourgeois democracy functions best, that is, in the interest of the wealthy, when it keeps its cards close to the vest instead of spewing them across the table so we can all see they aren’t holding anything in their hands.
The other major point is that this new takeover is blowback, that is, Israel and the West are losing the public opinion war in the rest of the world, so it is flexing its muscles where it can. At this moment, the Western corporate media is in a naked grab for power. First came the snuffing out of the student protests on college campuses, and now the attempt to snuff out all kinds of online truth-telling and exposure of the deadly and cruel actions of the West in the Global South.
If you’re escalating tensions throughout the world, tensions that most assuredly lead to war, you must have an increasingly recalcitrant “home front” behind you, or else, as global surveillance agency head Alex Karp of Palantir said, if the West does not win this battle for hearts and minds, “it will lose the ability to wage war.” And that, at least from the perspective of the countries plagued by the 700 years of the West looting their resources, is, to paraphrase Hamlet, an outcome “devoutly to be wished.”
This article is part of a podcast titled Culture & Barbarism.
As with all op-eds and news analytical articles published by People’s World, the views reflected here are those of the author.
We hope you appreciated this article. At People’s World, we believe news and information should be free and accessible to all, but we need your help. Our journalism is free of corporate influence and paywalls because we are totally reader-supported. Only you, our readers and supporters, make this possible. If you enjoy reading People’s World and the stories we bring you, please support our work by donating or becoming a monthly sustainer today.
CONTRIBUTOR
