From CBS to TikTok, US media are falling to Trump’s allies. This is how democracy crumbles
We’re watching the Orbánisation of the US – and as in Hungary, control of the media is key to consolidating power
Nine months on, and Orbánisation is in full bloom across the Atlantic. Billionaire Larry Ellison, the Oracle co-founder, and his filmmaker son, David, have become blunt instruments in this process. Trump boasts they are “friends of mine – they’re big supporters of mine”. Larry Ellison, second only to Elon Musk as the world’s richest man, has poured tens of millions into Republican coffers. Shortly after the 2020 election, he joined a call that discussed challenging the legitimacy of the vote. His son, David, has a history of backing Democrats – but at one time, so did Trump, his daughter Ivanka and his son-in-law Jared Kushner.
In August, David Ellison’s Skydance Media acquired Paramount Global with financial support from his father, leaving him as chair and CEO of the new entity. Beyond a vast slice of Hollywood, this acquisition brought control of CBS News – one of the US’s “big three” networks. During the last election, Trump demanded CBS lose its broadcasting licence over alleged political bias and even sued the network over what he called a flattering edit of Kamala Harris’s 60 Minutes interview. His mood has since improved. Ellison is “going to do the right thing” with the network, Trump crowed when its ownership shifted. His optimism was swiftly vindicated: a Trump appointee was installed as CBS’s ombudsman to monitor “bias”, and Bari Weiss – a former Democrat turned anti-woke crusader – was made editor-in-chief.
Now, Trump officials are briefing that they are also in favour of Paramount Skydance buying Warner Bros Discovery, the parent company of HBO and CNN. “Who owns Warner Bros Discovery (WBD) is very important to the administration,” a senior Trump official told the conservative New York Post. The pro-Trump newspaper states that rival bidders will face “regulatory hurdles”, with WBD’s CEO forced to consider the Trump administration’s willingness to crack down on what it sees as rampant leftwing bias across the mainstream media.
Larry Ellison, meanwhile, also leads a group of investors set to take over TikTok’s US operations, with other partners reportedly including Rupert Murdoch and Abu Dhabi’s government-owned investment company. Although much of Trump’s own criticism of TikTok has focused on China, key Maga figures such as Josh Hawley and Marco Rubio have called for the app to be banned over “anti-Israel” bias, and for shifting younger Americans’ sympathies towards Palestinians. Ellison is a fervent supporter of Israel, and has previously donated millions to its military through the non-profit Friends of the Israel Defense Forces. They will be pleased to have him in charge.
In 2015, Safra Catz, Oracle’s Israeli-American executive chair, and former CEO, reportedly told former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak in an email that: “We believe that we have to embed the love and respect for Israel in the American culture.” Oracle will have oversight of the TikTok algorithm.
But this goes much further than the Ellisons’ acquisitions. Trump threatened Meta owner Mark Zuckerberg would “spend the rest of his life in prison” if he crossed him. The social media mogul has little to worry about now, having done his best to ingratiate himself with the administration. He abandoned third-party factchecking in the US, dropped restrictions on topics such as immigration and gender, and appointed Trump supporters as head of global affairs and to the executive board. At the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post, columnist Karen Attiah says she was fired for “speaking out against political violence, racial double standards, and America’s apathy toward guns” after Charlie Kirk’s assassination.
Liberal comedian Jimmy Kimmel had his ABC show suspended after the pro-Trump chair of the Federal Communications Commission demanded action. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting – long deemed hostile by Trump – has been defunded and shut down. The administration took control over which media organisations have access to the White House, ejecting the Associated Press. US media outlets were stripped of their Pentagon credentials after refusing to only report officially authorised information issued by the Department of Defense. Trump’s lawsuits against media organisations have further cowed them.
It goes far beyond media control. Witness Trump deploying the national guard to Democratic strongholds and centralising control over elections. Republicans have launched new gerrymandering offensives, while demanding the denaturalisation and deportation of socialist New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, as Trump threatens to defund the city if he wins. In Hungary, too, Orbán slashed funding for opposition mayoralties. Opponents are threatened with arrest: the arch warmonger John Bolton may be politically loathsome, but the charges filed against him are the harbinger of worse to come. Trump’s former strategist Steve Bannon claims there is a plan to circumvent the constitution to allow his former boss to take a third term.
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US democracy has always been heavily flawed. It is so rigged in favour of wealthy elites that a detailed academic study back in 2014 found that the political system is rigged in favour of what the economic elites want. Yet because, unlike Hungary, the US has no history of dictatorship, with a system of supposed checks and balances, some felt it could never succumb to tyranny. Such complacency has collided with brutal reality. In just nine months, the US has been dragged towards an authoritarian abyss. A warning: Trump has 39 months left in office.
