WE'LL NOW HAVE ANOTHER MEDIA OUTLET THAT'S STATE-RUN -- AND RUN BADLY

I keep thinking about a social media post that's making the rounds now:

The richest man owns X. The second and third richest men control Google. The fourth richest man owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. The fifth richest man owns The Washington Post. And now the sixth richest could soon take over both Paramount and Warner Bros. See the problem here?

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— Robert Reich (@rbreich.bsky.social) February 26, 2026 at 6:40 PM

Of course it's bad that the mega-rich have this kind of control over media platforms. But I see something else going on. X is a mess -- a sinkhole of Nazism and AI-generated porn. Google, which once seemed like a technological miracle, now forces users to swim through a cesspool of AI slop and ad-generated misdirection before it reluctantly offers up useful search results. Facebook, which used to be the world's town square, is now strictly for grandparents and slop producers. The Washington Post's owner has destroyed the credibility of its opinion section and has now eviscerated its news side. And Paramount is a struggling second-tier studio.

So while it's obviously bad news that Paramount Skydance -- bankrolled by tech multi-billionaire Larry Ellison and run by his son David, both of whom are Donald Trump allies -- has won the bidding war for Warner Bros. Discovery, I wonder whether it will lead to the Orbanesque nightmare for civil society that the Ellisons and Trump clearly want.

The deal will give David Ellison control of CNN, and Bari Weiss says he's promised to hand over to her. That's bad. Or is it? A couple of months ago, Ellison handed CBS News to Weiss with the understanding that she would fascify it, but she's not doing a very good job. She's earned negative headlines for holding up stories critical of the Trump administration -- stories that eventually aired. She drove Anderson Cooper to quit 60 Minutes -- and hasn't replaced him with a famous name from right-wing media. Her genius programming moves include a poorly received town hall with Charlie Kirk's much-mocked widow and the elevation of the lightweight Tony Dokoupil to the job of CBS Evening News anchor, where he's mired in third place in the ratings, well behind ABC and NBC. Meanwhile, CBS continues to run some decent stories, including stories that don't make Trump and Republicans look good.

I would be very worried if David Ellison were about to hand CNN over to an ideologue who was also a seasoned television pro, the way Rupert Murdoch brought in Roger Ailes to run Fox News thirty years ago. But he's about to hand it to Bari Weiss, who's skilled at buttering up rich people in order to line her own pockets, but not much else.

Obviously, the Trump regime is running a play from the Viktor Orban playbook. But if Bari Weiss is by far the most important figure in this pro-regime media consolidation, it won't go very well.