When the sphinx-like David Ellison broke his silence today — in the op-ed pages of the New York Times of all places (maybe the fake-news Liberal Media Industrial Complex still has swat!) — I had to laugh. Not at David Ellison himself, necessarily. We’ve never met, though I’m sure he’s a perfectly nice billionaire scion. Or as nice as you can be whenever your daddy buys you whatever toy you want, including the Liberal Media Industrial Complex. (My dad bought me some Kansas City Steaks once from QVC, so we have a lot in common.)
And mind you, I have laughed at the Ellisons plenty — at least in my dark heart and private emails, the latter of which are often a direct reflection of the former. Sometimes, in unproud moments, I laugh at David’s octogenarian dad, Oracle founder Larry, whose sixth wife is nearly one-third his age, even though he’s started to look like a melting Mickey Rourke after Rourke’s post-reconstructive facial surgery. (Sorry, I’m trying to be less mean in print. Starting next week.)
I have to laugh, though, when the Ellisons pretend they can’t understand why everyone thinks they’re in the tank for Trump.
When as the Wall Street Journal tells it, Larry “gave roughly $45 million to a political nonprofit group supporting Trump’s election efforts in 2024,” and “has given millions more to groups that support Trump since the election…..with some of the funds going to Trump’s legacy initiatives in Washington.” Also: “Trump’s investment accounts were actively trading Oracle shares earlier this year, including a sale worth at least $1 million in January and a purchase worth at least $1 million in March, federal disclosure filings show.” Also, David was a VIP at Trump’s recent UFC bread’n’circuses spectacular on the White House lawn, “days after a decision by the Justice Department to clear the $81 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery by his company, Paramount Skydance. The spectacle was streamed by Paramount, which under David Ellison’s leadership, paid billions for the rights to UFC events.” And also, as the WSJ recounts, when Trump spotted David from the stage in a Miami crowd, he said, “You’re going to be a great success. You’re going to blow away your father, and he’ll be very happy about that because he loves you. Say hello to him. OK?”
And still also, pay no mind that “the day after Trump’s second inauguration, Larry Ellison was in the West Wing when Oracle was selected as the architectural backbone for the administration’s $500 billion plan to build artificial-intelligence data centers in the U.S. Later in 2025, Oracle was part of an investor group that gained control of TikTok’s U.S. operations in a deal brokered by the U.S. government.”
All this, without considering all the other putting-in-of-fixes. Such as when Pro Publica reported that “FCC officials took pricey gifts from Paramount as the company needed approval for billion-dollar deals.” Like when FCC chairman/Trump shineboy Brendan Carr – a man I have referred to, not even a little unfairly, as an “Un-American Weasel,” for trying to chase Trump-thumping late-night talk show hosts off the air — and his wife shared a skybox at the Kennedy Center with David Ellison and other CBS and Paramount execs (just months after the administration approved Paramount’s $8 billion merger with the Ellisons’ Skydance Media). Seats which commonly sell for around $125 grand apiece. And that, after former Paramount chair Shari Redstone cleared the way for the Ellison merger by paying Donald Trump $16 million for complaining about a 60 Minutes interview edit that 11 out of 10 legal experts say would have gotten laughed out of court if she’d chosen to defend her company against the lawsuit. (Or as Stephen Colbert called it — before also getting run off CBS’s airwaves, to Trump’s/Carr’s delight — “a big fat bribe.” )
And yet, when Ellison popped off today in the Gray Lady, he complained of being misunderstood. Asserting that when 12 state attorneys general and the Writers Guild of America sued to stop Paramount’s pending acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery — now delayed until at least June of next year — that motives are being ascribed to him that he doesn’t necessarily possess.
He claims this is less about their concern about one company having monopolistic control over theatrical releases and cable operators, and that their combined market power will hurt writers (“a Hollywood that no longer exists,” as he not unconvincingly puts it). Even as Paramount-Warner’s resources would still be dwarfed by the resources of the likes of Netflix, Amazon, and Apple. But that the “plainer worry sits beneath the briefs and the news releases: the news. The issue is whether I can be trusted as a steward of Warner’s CNN. There has been speculation about my politics, my loyalties, my intentions.”
Which, he caught me! That’s precisely my biggest worry. And why would I and others worry about such a thing? Well, put to the side for a second what’s already transpired: Ellison’s merger likely being responsible for chasing Colbert off the air, and his lieutenants gutting 60 Minutes, which has been the most successful news program on television for a half century, even amidst cries of Trump-flavored censorship from its recently-fired correspondents. (Full disclosure: I’ve written for Ellison’s handpicked CBS-news honcho Bari Weiss before at her Free Press, and she was perfectly nice without asking me to pull punches, even sending me a pricey bottle of bourbon when I was raked by her site’s Trumpster commenters, but I’m not a 60 Minutes correspondent.) It has likewise been reported that the Ellisons promised the Trump administration sweeping changes to CNN if they approved his acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery’s assets. (Which Paramount Skydance has denied.)
So wherever would we get the idea that he was up to no good? Especially after Pete Hegseth, Trump’s Secretary of Disinformation/War, recently said that “the sooner David Ellison takes over the network, the better.”
An even 50 percent less skeptical person than me might call this a lot of things. But an “encouraging sign” would not be one of them. Unless you want CNN to more closely parrot the President’s fictions, who, during his first term, when it’s generally assumed he lied a little less often, the Washington Post’s Trump lies tracker still clocked him at 30,573 false or misleading claims over four years. (That averages out to 21 untruths PER DAY.) At that rate, Trump might as well not even be president anymore. He’d easily qualify as a Fox News anchor, who draw much higher salaries, if you don’t include Trump’s crypto-scams and other nest-feathering presidential profiteering operations. Which do add additional billions.
And yet, Ellison, in his Times piece, represents himself not as a MAGA axe-grinder or regulatory-approval opportunist, but as a straight G, transparent and humble, just trying to do the right thing by The News: “Unfortunately, I can’t give anyone a view into my heart and mind, but I can share this: I have regularly voted for candidates of both parties; I hold some views that would be called conservative and others that would be called liberal, just like most Americans; and when it comes to our news operations, I do not aspire to lead these companies to bend their newsrooms to my views. I believe that news should be based on facts and truth.”
Hell, that sounds pretty great! He could almost be describing my worldview! Give his ghostwriter a bonus! Or maybe a complimentary Paramount+ subscription, so he/she can watch a Taylor Sheridan show before he decamps to NBCUniversal, as Sheridan is in the midst of doing. (I have one of those subscriptions myself, as I’m a particular fan of Sheridan’s Landman, Lioness, and Mayor of Kingstown). Except a few paragraphs later, Ellison lets loose with the tell that everything he said prior to it is BS. When discussing the news, he says:
There is much ground to recover. By Gallup’s latest measure, just 28 percent of Americans said they trust the news — the lowest share ever recorded. The temptation is to say the problem lies elsewhere. Our obligation is to look inward and say: We can do better. We are in a moment when Americans trust few institutions, but journalists haven’t always helped their case by refusing to engage with critiques.
To which I’d say there are some things Gallup doesn’t measure. Like how many of the American people have been brainwashed by 30-40 years of cynical drips like Ellison and Trump claiming that everything they see that doesn’t come from an overtly winger slant is fake news, or something close to it. Many years ago, when I still worked in right-wing media (The Weekly Standard magazine, where I labored for 23 ½ years, and which was considered a winger operation until we came out loud and proud against Donald Trump, before having our throats slit by our Trump-appeasing owners), I gave an interview to a journalism jobs website, offering a quote that has haunted me for two decades and dogged me ever since.
Source: Read the original article on mattlabash.substack.com