It’s a crazy world we’re living in, where the lines between truth and fiction are getting blurrier by the day, especially when it comes to what we see and hear in the news. Imagine this: the former President of the United States, Donald Trump, goes on his social media platform, Truth Social, and claims that American news organizations are actually just spreading propaganda created by artificial intelligence from Iran. He even suggests they should be charged with treason, a really serious crime, all for supposedly sharing false information. He pointed to reports about people in Iran rallying for a new leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, saying it was all fake, a product of AI, and that the event never even happened. This is despite a mountain of evidence showing that it did. It’s a surreal situation, where the most powerful person in the world is making these huge, wild claims, some clearly untrue, others completely unsubstantiated, and yet, it seems like most people just shrug it off. He then casually threatens people with treason, which in America can even lead to the death penalty, and still, nobody really bats an eye. It’s like his pronouncements have become so common, so outrageous, that they’re just another blip on the radar, another example of how some powerful figures seem to live in a world without accountability.
One of the big reasons these kinds of accusations just wash over us is that we’ve heard them so many times before. For ages, Republicans have been vocal about what they call the “liberal” news media, but when Trump came into office, he really cranked up the volume on these attacks. Right from his first year, in 2017, he famously coined the term “fake news” and declared the media to be an “enemy of the American people.” He even boasted about having a “running war” with journalists, going as far as to label them as “among the most dishonest human beings on Earth.” This aggressive stance became his default whenever he wanted to dodge a difficult question, often personally attacking reporters, especially women, or denouncing the entire organization they worked for. Not long ago, when asked a question by a reporter from ABC, his response was that her employer “may be the most corrupt news organisation on the planet. I think they’re terrible.” As tensions mounted with Iran, and the political climate grew more charged, his administration increasingly pointed its rhetorical weapons at the media. Trump even openly supported Brendan Carr, the Federal Communications Commission Chairman, when Carr threatened to revoke broadcast licenses from what he called “the corrupt and highly unpatriotic media.” His post on the matter was quite something: “They get billions of Dollars of FREE American airwaves, and use it to perpetuate LIES, both in news and almost all of their shows, including the Late Night Morons, who get gigantic Salaries for horrible Ratings.” More than any president before him, Trump seemed to obsess over individual journalists and media outlets, even calling for Netflix to fire one of its board members, Susan Rice, for having worked for his Democratic predecessors, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, calling her “racist, Trump deranged.”
But Trump wasn’t content to just shout from the sidelines; he actually started taking legal action, something pretty unheard of for a modern US president. He’s actually sued a bunch of news organizations, including the Pulitzer Prize Board (yes, the people who give out the most prestigious awards in journalism), the Des Moines Register, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Penguin Random House, and even the BBC. The thing is, almost all of these lawsuits have been dead ends, lacking any real legal foundation. He’s already lost cases against the New York Times, Washington Post, and CNN. It seems more like these lawsuits are a way to hassle or intimidate people. Take his lawsuit against CBS in 2024, for example. He sued them over how they edited a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris. CBS initially called it baseless, but then, in a surprising turn of events in July 2025, they agreed to settle for a whopping $16 million. This settlement happened just as Paramount, CBS’s parent company, was in the middle of an $8.4 billion merger with Skydance, a deal that got regulatory approval only weeks later. Stephen Colbert, who hosts a top-rated late-night show on CBS, was blunt about it, calling the settlement “a big fat bribe.” And just three days after that, Colbert’s show was canceled, though the network claimed it was purely a financial decision. Trump, ever the self-congratulator, posted on Truth Social with the headline, “President Trump is reshaping the media.” He even listed a dozen media figures and organizations he claimed were “gone,” like CNN reporter Jim Acosta and Colbert, and then a bunch of “reforms,” like CNN getting new ownership. He ended his post with a triumphant “Winning.”
Beyond the former President himself, another key figure in this media-bashing squad is Pete Hegseth, who used to be a Fox News host and is now the Secretary of War. Last year, he made a pretty alarming announcement: journalists who tried to get unauthorized military information would lose their access and be seen as a security risk. In a move that showed solidarity, 55 out of 56 accredited journalists refused to sign this new agreement. Later, in March, a judge actually ruled that this policy was unconstitutional, but the government has already said they’re going to appeal that decision. Hegseth even once banned photographers from two of his briefings because he thought previous photos of him were “unflattering.” So, it’s really no surprise that he’s been a very vocal critic of how the media covers things. He wrapped up one of his recent rants by saying, “The sooner David Ellison takes over [CNN], the better.” This last comment is particularly chilling because it hints at a deeper, more concerning trend.
That mention of David Ellison is what really grabbed attention, signaling something new and quite alarming unfolding in the media landscape. This happened right after one of the biggest corporate takeovers in history, where Ellison’s company, Paramount Skydance, successfully acquired Warner Bros. Discovery. And guess what? CNN is part of that huge package Ellison now controls. David Ellison is the son of Larry Ellison, who founded Oracle, a software giant, and happens to be the sixth-richest person in the world. After Trump became president, the Ellison family really started making big moves into the media world. They first gained public prominence when they played a central role in Trump’s plan to create a US-based TikTok company. President Biden, with congressional backing, had wanted to ban the popular video platform because of security concerns with its Chinese owner, ByteDance. But Trump, on his very first day of his second term, initiated a process to make it American-owned, supposedly to remove those security risks. In the end, Ellison’s Oracle, along with Silver Lake and MGX, became the three main investors, each owning a 15% stake in the new company, while ByteDance still held 19.9%. Oracle would also handle all the software, a very favorable outcome for Trump. The Ellisons made headlines again in July 2025 when their niche media company, Skydance, merged with Paramount to create Paramount Plus. This made them owners of one of the biggest film studios and the CBS television network, which has already had significant repercussions for CBS News. Ellison immediately vowed to dismantle the company’s “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programs. He brought in a former head of a conservative think tank as ombudsman and appointed Bari Weiss, a prominent center-right commentator, as editor-in-chief of CBS News. An early controversy emerged when an episode of CBS’s “60 Minutes” about a notorious prison in El Salvador, where the US government sends migrant detainees, was blocked at the last minute despite going through all the usual internal approvals. The reporter called it an act of censorship, though it eventually aired four weeks later. Six of the 20 evening news producers have left CBS, with one, Alicia Hastey, saying that the kind of journalism she came to do was becoming impossible, as stories were now judged not just on their journalistic merit but on whether they fit shifting ideological expectations. In a striking memo to the newsroom, Weiss declared that “we love America” should be the guiding principle for the revamped CBS Evening News. Putting this into practice, the new anchor for the evening news, Tony Dokoupil, ended a program by saying, “[Secretary of State] Marco Rubio, we salute you.”
Ellison’s earlier acquisitions, as significant as they were, were completely overshadowed by the massive battle between Paramount Plus and Netflix to take over Warner Bros. Discovery, a fight Paramount ultimately won in February 2026. Paramount’s winning bid valued the company at an eye-watering US$111 billion, paying US$31 per share, dwarfing Netflix’s earlier offer of US$19 per share. Though this deal will saddle Paramount with an estimated US$90 billion in debt, it will also give them a media empire unlike anything seen before. Despite the enormous scale of this takeover, which hints at less competition down the line, experts are confident it will get regulatory approval. This is largely because, in the Trump era, there’s a strong, shall we say, “transactional” feel to how regulations are enforced, or not enforced. Trump himself has praised the Ellisons, calling them “two great people,” “friends of mine,” and “big supporters of mine,” adding, “And they’ll do the right thing.” Back in the 1950s, when Australian newspaper companies started buying up radio and TV stations, journalist Colin Bednall called them “media monsters.” Later, around 1990, British media commentator Anthony Smith wrote a book, “The Age of Behemoths,” looking at how huge corporations like Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp went global. But those “monsters” and “behemoths” are mere pygmies compared to the new empire the Ellisons have built. Alongside their software business and vast real estate holdings, they now own a central piece of social media with TikTok. They control two of the five biggest US movie studios, two of the top five streaming services, massive entertainment production companies like Discovery, Warner Bros., and CBS, and two of the most influential TV news networks—CBS and CNN. This gives them a huge commercial leg up over any smaller newcomers trying to break into the industry. It also means that crucial news services are now owned by a conglomerate with many other interests, some of which require delicate negotiations with the government. In trying to make sense of the wild times we’re living in, it’s often tough to tell what’s just temporary noise and what’s truly, lastingly important. Are Trump’s ego-driven outbursts merely fleeting histrionics that will fade with him into history? Or do they signal deeper, ongoing threats to the very foundations of our democratic institutions? One thing is clear: the unprecedented media empire built by the Ellisons isn’t going anywhere, no matter who wins the next election. This new reality demands our attention.