FAIR (9/19/2025)

11/03/2025

The New York Post (9/11/25) reports that Ellison father and son are now looking to buy Warner Brothers Discovery, which carries with it CNN, creating an unprecedented level of media consolidation. While the Post said such a purchase could be difficult, because Warner Brothers “has a market cap of around $38 billion,” that might not matter, as “Larry Ellison’s net worth leaped by $100 billion following Oracle’s latest blowout earnings report.” He is “closing in on being the richest dude in the world, with a net worth…of more than $370 billion.”

CNN reports 1.8 million viewers, and CBS reports an average total audience of 1.4 million viewers, for a combined 3.2 million, which eclipses ABC’s 2.3 million, NBC’s 1.4 million and MSNBC’s 1.2 million viewers (Forbes, 7/24/25).

The CNN/CBS combo would reach far more Americans through online news, with CNN.com‘s 276 million visits per month already making it the nation’s second-biggest news site. Add CBSNews.com‘s 63 million visits and you’ll have an entity that edges closer to the heretofore undisputed leader, NYTimes.com, with its 425 million visits a month.

With the Trump regime shutting down the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds NPR and PBS (FAIR.org, 4/25/25; NPR, 8/1/25), the space for semi-skeptical media is shrinking as the space for regime-friendly broadcasters (Fox News still beats out both CNN and CBS in terms of viewers) is growing.

As for social media, given that Andreessen Horowitz’s co-founders are also Trump supporters, it seems that, along with Ellison, these oligarchs could steer TikTok in the same direction as Facebook and X (TechCrunch, 7/16/24).

Worse, critics of TikTok’s Chinese ownership fretted that data collection of American users eventually led to surveillance by the Chinese government. Data collection is a given with social media generally, but now that power rests partly with Ellison, who has gotten rich off such technology. Fortune (9/17/24) reported, “Oracle founder Larry Ellison…sees a growing opportunity for his company to help authorities analyze real-time data from millions of surveillance cameras.” And funnily enough, an AP investigation (9/9/25) showed that Oracle was among the many Silicon Valley firms whose technologies have supported Chinese surveillance systems.

Just imagine what he could do with a large social media network like TikTok.

Rather and others are right that the Ellison duo taking over both CBS and CNN, as well as controlling a major social media network like TikTok, would be dangerous for democracy. And given their closeness to the Trump regime, that seems to be the point.