Trump-Aligned Oligarchs’ Media Mergers Transforming Outlets into MAGA Propaganda Platforms

Interview with Victor Pickard, professor of media policy and political economy at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication and co-director of the Media, Inequality and Change Center, conducted by Scott Harris

oligarch media monopolies

On Feb. 4, The Washington Post, known for decades as one of the nation’s preeminent investigative news outlets which broke major stories like the Watergate scandal, laid off some 300 employees—one-third of its workforce. Jeff Bezos, the multi-billionaire owner of the Washington Post, Amazon and Blue Origin, relies on favorable treatment by Donald Trump to retain valuable government contracts. Since just before the 2024 election, Bezos has very publicly shaped the Post’s editorial policy to quash criticism of Trump.

What’s happened at the Washington Post fits a pattern across U.S. media where Trump’s verbal attacks, multi-million dollar lawsuits and threats to revoke FCC licenses from broadcast outlets have succeeded in causing some of the nation’s most powerful media companies to surrender to Trump. Media CEOs have paid out millions of dollars in settlements in frivolous lawsuits, fired hosts critical of Trump—including CBS late night TV host Stephen Colbert and suspended ABC host Jimmy Kimmel—and cancelled a CBS’ 60 Minutes newsmagazine story critical of Trump’s deportation of men to El Salvador.

Trump-aligned billionaires like David Ellison, founder of Skydance Media and CEO of Paramount, backed by his tech billionaire father Larry Ellison are reshaping the U.S. media industry. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Victor Pickard, the C. Edwin Baker professor of media policy and political economy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication. Here Pickard assesses the danger posed to democracy by the right-wing oligarchs now buying up media properties that could dramatically impact political news coverage and cultural content.

VICTOR PICKARD: Paramount Skydance controlling CBS and immediately pushing them dramatically to the right—and of course, most recently, what we have seen is this recent acquisition of Netflix buying or in the process of buying Warner Brothers Discovery, which has many holdings, including CNN. But then as soon as this was announced, the Ellison-controlled Paramount Skydance conglomerate tried to make a hostile bid to buy out Warner Brothers Discovery in place of Netflix. So we see basically these two major media conglomerates fighting over yet another major media conglomerate. And meanwhile, this sets it up. We know that Paramount Skydance has close ties to the Trump administration, so they’re doing everything they can to try to get favor, especially regulatory favor in order to acquire Warner Brothers. And this just creates all these leverages, all these leverage points and vulnerabilities for what we’re seeing is kind of corporate capture of our entire media system. And really to be more specific, media oligarchic capture. And it tends to be very right-wing politically.
So when we see these structural shifts happen, we’re also seeing how it manifests at the level of media content against skewing our media to the right. And this is dangerous for democratic society by any measure, by any standard.

SCOTT HARRIS: Victor, we have a federal system of regulation, but so often in the past it has failed to regulate in the public interest in the view of many people who criticize the concentration of media ownership and the lack of variety in so many ways in our major media outlets. If you could reshape the FCC, the SEC and other regulatory bodies, what kinds of changes would you recommend be made in the future—if we have a future? 

VICTOR PICKARD: Yeah, that’s an open question. I mean, there are a number of changes that I would love to see happen. And at the very least, we need to reassert this public interest principle that has been just withering away in the years leading up to our current moment. It’s not like this just happened yesterday. It’s been a long term, long developing historical process. But really, one way of looking at it is that there are these three levels of capture. I think the first stage of capture was the commercialization of our entire media system in that we did not have a predominantly public system as many democratic countries did, such as the UK had the BBC, and most democracies around the world have these strong public media systems. We started out with a hyper-commercialized broadcast media system. So that kind of capitalistic stage of capture was number one.

The second one was this corporate capture that we keep referring to where, because our media is being treated as these commodities and not as a public service that democracy requires, it tees it up for these handful of corporations and oligarchs to buy up more and more of our media. So that’s sort of step two, stage two of media capture.

But then the third one is this kind of authoritarian capture that once you have all these oligarchs in power, it’s quite easy for an autocratic authoritarian figure to basically rely on these friendly oligarchs to capture the media system for the government. And that’s kind of where we are today. And so I think the best thing we can do to try to create an alternative system would be to really focus on that first stage of capture, which is to try to take our media out of this commercial system so that it’s not just profit driven. It actually focuses on serving democracy first.

So that really would be, I think, something we need to at least have on our horizon for the future—is to work towards a more public media oriented system that is not so profit driven, that is not sitting there to be bought up by these oligarchs and that can’t be so easily captured by an authoritarian government. It’s not something we will be able to do tomorrow, but it’s something that we need to work towards if we care about having any semblance of democracy in the future.

SCOTT HARRIS: And what we’re seeing unfold now—and you can sort of provide some more detail here—is part of a blueprint that we’ve seen unfold in Hungary under their authoritarian leader, Victor Orban, as well as what we saw happen in Russia after the “perestroika” after Yeltsin took over and right around the time Putin came to power, where there was a vast sell-off of the media system to oligarchs aligned with the leader.

VICTOR PICKARD: That’s exactly right. It’s a well-worn playbook by this point where these authoritarian figures realize that they don’t have to take over their media outlets by gunpoint, right? They can rely on friendly media oligarchs to take over these media institutions and then just flood the zone with their preferred narratives and to really snuff out any capacity for dissenting views.
Listen to Scott Harris’ in-depth interview with Victor Picard (18:01) and see more articles and opinion pieces in the related links section of this page. See more articles and opinion pieces in the related links section of this page. For periodic updates on the Trump authoritarian playbook, subscribe here to our Between The Lines Radio Newsmagazine Substack newsletter.

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