A frightening consolidation of media power
Key sources of information are coming under MAGA control.
After lingering in legal limbo for months, various news reports have shared that the Trump administration and TikTok are inching closer to a deal to overhaul the app’s ownership structure. The app no longer faces the threat of being banned in the U.S., and instead will be brought under the umbrella ownership of American investors. For many young people who rely on TikTok for news and information every day, that’s welcome news.
The bad news is that those American investors include a who’s who of Trump allies - from billionaire Larry Ellison to FOX News owners Lachlan and Rupert Murdoch. This is a five-alarm fire for left-of-center voices on the platform, who may remember what happened to X after Elon Musk’s purchase of the platform.
The emerging TikTok deal is just one example of a frightening media consolidation in the second Trump era. The Paramount - Skydance deal approved by the Trump administration brought more power to Larry Ellison’s son, David, and we’ve already seen the eagerness of that company’s various brands to capitulate to MAGA. Now, Paramount is proposing a merger with Warner Bros. Discovery, placing even more major media brands under the Ellison family’s control.
To spell it out more clearly: The Ellison family will likely soon have some level of ownership and control over TikTok, CNN, CBS, BET, MTV, Comedy Central, Showtime, and HBO, not to mention smaller television brands and major Hollywood movie studios.
This has enormous implications for the future battles over free speech and censorship. What we saw with the censorship of Jimmy Kimmel last week by corporate leaders at ABC/Disney, I fear, was just the beginning. Under consolidated MAGA control, any personality across these Hollywood brands or legacy newsrooms could be threatened, censored, cancelled with just one presidential tweet.
Conservative billionaires and philanthropists have played the long game, investing in media, tech platforms, and providing philanthropic support to partisan media on the right. On the Left, that level of savvy and support has not existed, and conversations about countering the Right seem to lack imagination and scale - they are too little, too late.
If liberals truly value a vibrant and independent press, now is the moment to step up—to fund, expand, and protect media organizations that offer alternative voices and hold power to account. The larger our own networks like COURIER can become at this consequential inflection point for our democracy, the harder it will become for them to silence the millions of Americans who are turning away from legacy media that is capitulating to this despotic administration, and the more empowered those voices will become in moments of extraordinary consequence. The future of American journalism, and the protection of freedom of speech now depend not just on who owns the platforms, but on who has the courage to make big bets right now to help those of us building and scaling independent media protect those freedoms.
You can donate to support our independent media network at COURIER here, and if you know of a billionaire with the courage to do something truly meaningful in this tipping point moment for freedom of speech, please send them our way.
-Tara
COURIER passes 8 million followers & subscribers
This week, my team at COURIER passed another milestone in our growth journey: 8 million combined social followers and email subscribers across our network. What’s most striking about that number is that half of those followers—around 4 million—have joined us since Election Day 2024, less than a year ago.
This remains a challenging moment for opposition media outlets like ours. As legacy media continues to consolidate and capitulate to Trump, most left-of-center media efforts still lack meaningful philanthropic support. Even so, our team has been publishing relentlessly, reaching new audiences every day, and the results speak for themselves. If you have supported our work in any way or shared some of our content in the past year, I just want to say thank you for helping us reach new heights!
What I’m reading this week
MAGA’s Media Takeover (Axios, 9/18)
“The media landscape of 2016 is unrecognizable. Once dominated by critics of President Trump, today’s fragmented ecosystem is increasingly controlled — or threatened — by forces aligned with the White House.”
1 in 5 Americans now regularly get news on TikTok, up sharply from 2020 (Pew, 9/25)
“A fifth of U.S. adults now regularly get news on TikTok, up from just 3% in 2020. In fact, during that span, no social media platform we’ve studied has experienced faster growth in news consumption, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis…In our new survey, 43% of adults under 30 say they regularly get news there, up from 9% in 2020…Adults ages 30 to 49 have also increasingly been getting news on TikTok: A quarter now say they do so regularly, up from just 2% five years ago.”
Murdoch’s TikTok? Trump offers allies another lever of media control (Guardian, 9/24)
Donald Trump revealed last week the US and China are close to inking a deal to let TikTok continue operating in the US. Details are not final, but should the agreement go through as has been reported, the owners of the US’s most powerful cable TV channels may soon also steer the nation’s most influential social network. The arrangement would gift Trump’s billionaire allies a degree of control over US media that would be vast and unprecedented.
I Thought I Knew Silicon Valley. I Was Wrong (WIRED, 9/22)
“Tech got what it wanted by electing Trump. A year later, it looks more like a suicide pact…”
Larry Ellison, a Media Mogul Like No Other (NYT, 9/23)
“The database billionaire and his son, David, are Trump favorites. The family could soon control an empire that includes CBS, Paramount, Warner, CNN and a piece of TikTok.”