Oligarchs Are Building The World's Biggest Propaganda Machine. Their Success Isn't Guaranteed.
America's wealthiest, shittiest people are trying to hoover up the entirety of new and old media companies in a bid to pummel the plebs with propaganda. But what they want, and what they actually get, may not be the same thing.
Early last year I wrote a piece for Dame Magazine about how corporate power and authoritarians had formed an unholy alliance to wage war on U.S. journalism.
Things have gotten decidedly worse since then.
Last week that culminated in right wing Trump-allied billionaire Larry Ellison (with the help of Saudi cash) getting the green light to purchase Warner Brothers, which includes CNN, HBO, and the Discovery family of reality television dreck.
This comes directly on the heels of Ellison's acquisition (and steady demolition) of CBS, as well as a partial acquisition of TikTok. And it's set to a backdrop of formerly respected journalism brands (like the Washington Post) being acquired and hollowed out like a pumpkin by the country's shittiest oligarchs.
Oligarchs like Elon Musk, who has been hard at work turning Twitter into a haven for white supremacists and authoritarian earlobe nibblers. And oligarchs like Mark Zuckerberg, who openly decided to let Facebook drown in racism and right-wing friendly bullshit to goose ad engagement and please the kakistocracy.
As usual, U.S. media coverage of itself has been terrible.
The New York Times, for example, tells readers "Mr. Ellison’s intentions for the channel [CNN] remain unclear," despite his intentions at CBS being brutally obvious to even the most cognitively-challenged toddler. Ellison met with Trump last year to discuss which CNN anchors he should fire to appease our idiot king.
For those unaware, the extraction class is trying to mimic the media model Viktor Orban implemented in Hungary. That involves letting wealthy autocratic allies buy up the entirety of media, then quickly converting it into a propaganda bullhorn while the government strangles independent journalism just out of frame.
The modern U.S. press is so distorted and compromised by corporate power, it's largely incapable of defending the public interest, protecting itself from authoritarian attack, or explaining any of this to the public.
This disease has been in process for a long while; Trump authoritarianism is just a very painful period at the end of a long and very ugly sentence for U.S. media, now further punctuated by yet another avoidable war for what's left of the U.S. press to get patriotically excited about. It's hard to claim any of this is subtle:
This really is a highly-coordinated, extremely well funded attack by the extraction class on informed electoral consensus. If you're reading U.S. journalism about these media deals that don't make this clear to the reader, you're not reading journalism at all.
None of this means they'll automatically succeed.
If there's a bright side, it's that there is absolutely no indication that any of the executives leading this attempted media coup are remotely competent (not that competency is necessary to do lasting harm). The new Paramount executive team is packed with a lot of unremarkable, problematic men with few original ideas.
Larry Ellison's attempted makeover of CBS under the guidance of the contrarian engagement troll Bari Weiss has been a disastrous mess so far. As it turns out, most Americans don't really enjoy oligarch-friendly bloviation shoveled down their gullet at industrial scale.
Ratings at the "new CBS" have been in free fall, talent has been fleeing for the exits, and the overall value of the brand is headed for the toilet. To recoup debt, CBS and Paramount have had to fire many of the remaining journalists, eroding overall product quality even further.
To top Netflix's $82.7 billion bid for Warner, Ellison had to offer $111 billion (or $31 per share), with numerous additional and costly addendums. That's a lot of money for a battered studio on the tail end of two-decades worth of previous terrible mergers that have steadily hollowed out the once-prestigious brand.
Companies like AT&T previously tried to acquire Warner Brothers with similarly grand visions of modern video advertising domination. But wound up taking a monumental loss after executives deftly demonstrated that very few of the media industry's fail-upward brunchlords had any Earthly idea what they're doing.
There's really no indication that Larry (or his nepobaby son David) are any more gifted. The acquisition could be further complicated by potential consumer boycotts of the MAGA-friendly brands, and Larry's precarious financial footing at Oracle related to an ongoing deflation of the AI-hype cycle.
The United States is, it should also be said, decidedly not Hungary. The country is immensely large, diverse, and historically quite hostile to being told what to do. It's also comprised of still semi-autonomous state authorities that may have their own thoughts on the matter (California has already launched an inquiry into the deal).
Americans also still have agency to make informed decisions on their media consumption (though in the age of Fuckboy Island, this is, understandably, a work in progress). It's not 1972; there are no limit of alternatives to homogenized authoritarian corporatism available via the supercomputers in everybody's pocket.
Another key reality in our favor is the fact that autocrats and oligarchs, no matter how much they've deluded themselves to the contrary, cannot simply will or purchase their way to popularity. This hubris is a real weakness. They're drunk on power and sycophancy, and will never be able to see the field clearly.
Unfortunately, the real-world costs of their hubris (and all these pointless media consolidation efforts) aren't carried by them. They're borne by labor and consumers in the form of layoffs, higher prices, steady enshittification, worse service, and the steady erosion of informed electoral consensus.
This Netflix/Paramount/Warner news cycle is yet another opportunity to build public awareness about how the consolidated corporate U.S. press can't be honest about itself, fails constantly at explaining corruption, and is consistently complicit in its own destruction at the hands of unpopular autocrats.
There's simply too many financial conflicts of interests and too much systemically-entrenched normalization of corporatism. The future demands large swaths of U.S. journalism be highly-subsidized nonprofit and publicly owned. Corporate power can't do it. They're simply not genetically capable of being reliable narrators.