How Pro-Trump Billionaires Are Taking Over U.S. News Media

BIANNA: GOLODRYGA: Now, for major mergers to the Trump administration’s unprecedented cuts to funding for public broadcasters. The U.S. media landscape has been undergoing some dramatic shifts. Former CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy is now the founder of independent newsletter Status News. And he joins Michelle Martin to break down recent developments in the industry. Just a note, they spoke before reports that Warner Brothers Discovery, CNN’s parent company, had rejected Paramount Skydance’s initial takeover bid.

 

MICHEL MARTIN: Thanks, Bianna, Oliver, Darcy, thanks so much for joining us once again.

 

OLIVER DARCY: It’s a pleasure to be here.

 

MARTIN: Now, we’ve called you because there’s just been a flurry of headlines about the media in the last couple of weeks. I mean, the suspension of Jimmy Kill — Kimmel, the, you know, putting Jimmy Kimmel back on the air, the talk of a merger between the parent companies of both CBS and CNN, new leadership at CBS. Just looking at this kind of whole menu of things that you’ve been covering, what are some of the most important headlines that we should be aware of?

 

DARCY: There is a lot going on right now, and I think the big story right now in media is consolidation, mergers and the political pressure that these companies are under. And that’s kind of the through line that you’re seeing right now. A lot of these media companies, they want to get bigger so they can compete with the big tech titans, and to do that, they have to do deals. And those deals need to be generally approved by the federal government. And that’s given Donald Trump and his administration a lot of leverage to extract demands from these companies. 

 

And so you’re seeing this manifest in different ways. One was Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension. And that’s because the FCC chairman, Brendan Carr, threatened basically the station groups that own — that run the ABC — they own the ABC affiliates, and they have a big deal before the government, a $6.2 billion deal that they want Brendan Carr to approve. And so you saw them fall under pressure and then take Jimmy Kimmel off the air for a little bit. 

 

You mentioned, I believe what’s going on over at Paramount with CBS and CBS News. And that was another deal that required Brennan Carr’s FCC approval. And so you saw a number of concessions made to this administration, whether it was placing an ombudsman who’s now a, a, a MAGA, you know follower. He’s the ombudsman of CBS News. And he’ll review complaints of bias to a number of other changes that were made. And some people would say the cancellation of Stephen Colbert show was related to get this deal done. And so the, the through line here is these companies need to do deals. The government needs to approve these deals, and they’re really then at the mercy of the government, and they, they’re making concessions that are impacting how we, you know, consume information and how the culture is shaped.

 

MARTIN: So there’s new leadership at CBS. Let’s talk about CBS. A person named Bari Weiss has been installed as, the Editor-in-Chief of CBS News. First of all, just tell us a little bit about who she is, and what are her qualifications for this job?

 

DARCY: Yeah, she’s a interesting media figure. It’s very difficult to put her in a political box, but I would say she is someone who is very anti-DEI, right? She’s anti-woke — not really sure how to describe her other than that. She’s staunchly pro-Israel, so she’s taken a number of very you know passionate stances. And I think she typically ends up lining up mostly with or crossing over mostly with those on the right. Now, she does criticize the excesses of Donald Trump, but if you were to read the Free Press, you would believe, I think that — 

 

MARTIN: The Free Press being this outlet that she started when she broke with the New York Times. What was The Free Press supposed to do?

 

DARCY: So The Free Press is supposed to be a place — the way she brands it is a, is it’s a place for like contrarian thought where they ask tough questions, where they talk about things that people are really secretly talking about, but too afraid, I think, to say, you know, in the pages of the New York Times or on cable television. And they were gonna be the home to real debate and wide ideological spectrum of views. And that’s how she’s branded The Free Press. And so, I actually think that’s where she gets where it’s — she likes to, I think, pretend that there are two equal extremes in this country. One on the left and one on the right. And I think that’s not accurate. 

 

MARTIN: I just wanna mention that her new boss, David Ellison, comes from a family with its own clear ideological ties. I mean, David’s dad, Larry, the — you know, of, of a tech mogul — the single largest private donor that the Friends of the IDF, which he has, sort of, the every right to do. But was she brought in to reflect the worldview of these new owners or was she brought in to do something else?

 

DARCY: Yeah, I think that David Ellison, who’s now the chairman, CEO of Paramount I think he very much likes the what she, what he thinks that Bari Weiss stands for. And he, she, he likes her pro-Isreal views, I’m sure. But I also think that there’s this perception of CBS News as being too far on the left amongst the ownership now. And they — I think Bari Weiss has brought in to move the, the company to the right. And they would say they would probably dispute that, but they would say it’s, we wanna move it to the middle. But, you know, they’re moving it in a, in more pro-Trump friendly waters is, I think the best way to say it. 

 

MARTIN: So, I’ll read this for the record, Paramount-Skydance CEO David Ellison issued a statement about her appointment saying Weiss will quote, “shape editorial priorities, champion core values across platforms, and lead innovation in how the organization reports and delivers the news,” unquote. Has she given any indication of how she plans to proceed?

 

DARCY: Well, she has said that she thinks that both political parties need to be scrutinized equally. And so that goes back to what I was saying, and I think you’re going to see some really both sides-ism, and this false equivalence that the left is equally as extreme as the right, and we’re not gonna be afraid to criticize Donald Trump, but we’re also gonna criticize maybe the AOCs of the world for, you know, what they would say — or the Zohran’s of the world — and what they would portray as an equal extreme. And I, I, I don’t think that’s accurate. 

 

And in terms of her expertise on, on building a business, you know, to her credit, she has, she was a writer of the New York Times. She had an entrepreneurial spirit. She did start this company, The Free Press, which sold for an absurd amount of money, $150 million to the Ellisons. And she did build that. So I think that they’re saying, you know, she has the, the business background to also run this company. I think most people though, would say that, you know, the size of CBS News, the legacy of CBS News, she’s way out of her league, you know, running a Substack with a few dozen employees is much different than running CBS News, which is hundreds of employees, if not thousands, and has a storied legacy. And you’re talking about 60 Minutes and some of the most prestigious programs in all of news that she’s now gonna oversee as editorial — the editorial head there. So you know, whether she has the experience, I’m, I’m not really sure anyone thinks she’s actually qualified for this. 

 

MARTIN: The other interesting thing here though, is that David Ellison, benefiting from his father Larry’s fortune from Oracle to acquire Paramount, which owns CBS, the father-son duo are now eyeing Warner Brothers Discovery, which owns CNN — this program airs on CNN — and HBO. So how would that work? 

 

DARCY: I, I think that’s definitely the plan. My understanding from talking to people familiar with the matter is that they’re preparing a bid for the entire Warner Brothers discovery portfolio. So that includes the Warner Brothers Studio that, that makes the films. It includes HBO and HBO Max, the streamer. It includes Turner Sports which is, you know, TBS and TNT . And if you’re watching baseball right now, you’re probably watching on one of those channels. And it also includes CNN. And so the idea would be that they would merge, you know, Paramount Plus with HBO Max, that they would have CBS Sports merge with Turner Sports, and that they would have CNN merge with CBS News. 

 

And so what that would look like? Well, you could see a reality where you no longer need a CBS News foreign bureaus, because you can rely now on CNN’s newsgathering muscle to power CBS News. And so I think what would happen immediately would be layoffs, because there would be synergy so that, you know, you would, you would, you would eliminate the duplications, but ultimately, it seems like Bari Weiss would control the editorial output of not only CBS News, but also CNN. And that would give her an enormous amount of control over how we absorb information, you know, today. And I think Donald Trump would certainly love nothing more than the Ellisons and Bari Weiss to be in control of, of CNN, because as you know, that has been perhaps as, you know, the, the, the one news outlet he has liked to beat up on the most over the last 10 years.

 

MARTIN: And to add a further wrinkle, TikTok, you know, that platform very popular with, you know, lots of people for all kinds of reasons — both news, cooking, dancing, the whole thing, kind of a worldwide kind of super player — was forced to change hands because the U.S. fears that China could use it to shape American public opinion. And now it’s likely that Larry Ellison’s company Oracle, is also likely to have a stake in TikTok as well. So that would be a lot of landscape media, sort of real estate controlled by this family.

 

DARCY: When, when you’re friends with Donald Trump, he gives you gifts. And TikTok is a nice gift for the Ellisons. Now to be fair to them, they have been in business with TikTok for a while. Oracle houses the servers for a number of for the U — for U.S. TikTok. There was this whole thing called Project Texas, we won’t get into it. But remember, they wanted the data out of China and in the U.S. So Oracle, which is the company that Larry Ellison owns, which is how he’s actually so wealthy, has been working with TikTok on that for, for a number of years. 

 

But certainly this is a, a, a, a benefit of being friends with the president. So, Larry Ellison’s, a Donald Trump supporter, he is the ally of the president. You see him at the White House occasionally. And I think that Donald Trump would love nothing more than to hand over the keys to a lot of these media companies to, to an ally, right? I mean, he would like TikTok to be in his court. He, for a long time, felt like the tech companies were against him. And for the first time, now he has Mark Zuckerberg under his thumb. You see Tim Cook over at Apple, hand him the golden plaque. You see Jeff Bezos basically moving in his direction. Elon Musk obviously controls what was Twitter, now it’s called X. And all of a sudden, the tech companies are now in his courts. And I think he very much enjoys that because he understands the power of the tech companies and the power of the media companies. And if they can no longer be antagonists, but allies, that’s a huge win for Donald Trump as he really works to reshape this country.

 

MARTIN: Okay but in fairness, haven’t really rich people, always had kind of an outsized role in what kind of information that we consume.

 

DARCY: I think what’s different here is that Donald Trump has made it very clear he will weaponize government to go after critics and punish critics. And if you are an ally, he will reward you with things like TikTok. And so what does that mean? It means that if Jeff Bezos is competing with government contracts for things like Amazon Web Services or Blue Origin, which is a space company against SpaceX, and he wants those, well, he better be friendly with Donald Trump, because if he’s not, those contracts are going to Elon Musk, or those contracts are going somewhere else to Microsoft, maybe, whoever’s friendly with him. And so you’re seeing these billionaire tech owners for the first time really just overtly bend the knee. And this did not happen during the first administration. There’s a lot more hesitancy.

 

MARTIN: So, so where, where, where’s the news gonna come from? There are a lot of conservatives who believe that national media in particular do have a liberal bent, and they feel that it’s just entirely fair to have alternate outlets that present alternate points of view. Do you give any credence to that argument?

 

DARCY: Well, I, I think certainly everyone is on board, I think, with having different outlets and provide different points of view, I think that the problem is that a lot of these outlets on the right make up things, right? They don’t, they don’t, they’re not, they’re not basing those points of view in fact. They are often pushing conspiracy theories. They are spouting disinformation. They are at the very least engaging a lot of misinformation-pedaling, and it tends to benefit the man in the White House, who is the chief liar, probably, right? You know, he, he lies every time he opens his mouth, basically. And so that’s the problem. And then, and, and so you’re not dealing with a reality-based network that’s just offering a slightly different point of view based on a similar shared set of facts. You — they are reinventing, they’re making up facts, and then misinforming large audiences. And so that’s an issue. 

 

MARTIN: I do feel like I need to mention, I’m sure many people probably know this, that Congress recently approved major cuts to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and rescinded federal funding for PBS and, you know, NPR, obviously places that I’m affiliated with and local stations which are now at risk. 

 

DARCY: Sure. 

 

MARTIN: You recently testified before Congress about some of these issues, and you said, you talked a little bit about your difficulties as a small publisher protecting yourself from defamation lawsuits. And you said that “chilling of speech is one of the first signs a democracy is beginning to decay.” Which are pretty, pretty strong words if, 

 

DARCY: Yeah. 

 

MARTIN: if you think about it. So what, what led you to that conclusion? Why do you say that?

 

DARCY: Well, I, I think it’s obvious that when aspiring authoritarians are seeking to seize power, they do not want dissent. And so they seek to chill speech. And you see this manifesting in a number of ways in this administration, whether it’s Donald Trump and his you know, FCC chairman going after late night comedians who make fun of him, you know, celebrating the cancellation of Stephen Colbert — certainly pressuring them to cancel. I mean, Trump called for Stephen Colbert to be fired. They canceled him. You know, pressuring them to take Jimmy Kimmel off the air, pressuring ’em to take other comedians off the air. Republicans, we should be clear, are the ones that defunded NPR and PBS. 

 

Whether it’s law filing lawsuits like Donald Trump has against outlets like the New York Times, or even the Wall Street Journal, which is owned by his ally, Rupert Murdoch, you know, his tweets that attack and stir up hate against news organizations. You are seeing a, a unprecedented assault on on speech in this country right now. And it’s led by the man in the Oval Office who is seeking to punish critics and to make sure that they do not have the ability to criticize him or to speak their truth about him.

 

MARTIN: Here’s the thing, Oliver, and this is one of the things that critics of the media say. They say, Americans aren’t watching, aren’t listening, and don’t believe us.’ Right? Only 28% of Americans expressed a great deal or fair amount of trust in newspapers, television, and radio, to report the news fully, accurately and fairly. That’s down from 31% in 2024 and 40% in just —  in 2020. This is according to a recent sort of Gallup poll. So what do you think is causing this drop? I mean, conservatives say it’s that because, ‘You know, the media’s too liberal and it doesn’t really paint a fair picture, and it’s not fair.’ What do you say?

 

DARCY: I think what’s caused the, the drop in confidence amongst really Republicans has been the war that Donald Trump and his allies have waged against the truth for the past 10 years. And — it’s actually gone longer than that. It’s been basically since Rush Limbaugh, you know rose to power on radio. And there has been this relentless attack against mainstream outlets saying to, to a large part of the country that ‘Journalists are lying to you. They are misleading you, and you should not trust the quote ‘experts.’’ And I think we really saw that heightened during COVID — where, ‘Do not trust the experts. Do not trust the scientists. They are, they are misleading you. They want, you know, they have nefarious incentives.’ 

 

Now, are there a number of other reasons, like perhaps the fragmentation of media because of social media and algorithms and a bunch of other things? Yes. But that is the elephant in the room. And if you look at the polls, the group of people that do not trust the media the most, according to this Gallup poll are Republicans, I think they have like 8% trust of media. And that does, that is a stark difference compared to Democrats.

 

MARTIN: So before we let you go, Oliver, obviously, big topic. What, what, where does this go next? And what, what are you gonna leave us with? What, what should we do?

 

DARCY: You know, that’s a — I I try not to be so pessimistic, but it’s difficult to look at the environment that we’re operating in and not feel like there is no actual reversal here.

 

I think the one good thing is because, and we touched on this, but because it has never been easier to start independent newsrooms I, I think that’s the one bright light. And my hope is that some of these independent newsrooms can pick up the torch that is being set down by their, you know, much larger legacy news organizations and carry that forward and do some good investigative work and, and really do reporting. But certainly I find it incredibly alarming that at a moment when you want news organizations, I think to be stronger than ever, to hold this administration’s feet to the fire, to spotlight abuses, they are actually at their most vulnerable points, and they are shrinking pretty rapidly at this point. And I think that is a very alarming trend for our country and for our democracy.

 

MARTIN: Oliver Darcy, thanks so much for talking with us once again.

 

DARCY: Thank you so much.