On Thursday night, David Ellison—whose allowance from his father Larry has enabled him to build a vast media empire—hosted a private dinner in honor of Trump at the newly renamed (by Trump) Trump U.S. Institute of Peace, several stone’s throws from the Lincoln Memorial (not named by Lincoln, btw). The Ellisons’ purchase last week of Warner Bros. Discovery, putting it under control of Paramount Skydance, which they own, must pass antitrust muster with the Trump administration’s Justice Department. Not surprisingly, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche was also a dinner guest, as were Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Deputy President and Nativist Supremo Stephen Miller. Lest that fail to demonstrate deference sufficiently, Miller and WarSec Pete Hegseth were reportedly the guests of CBS News two nights later at the Washington Hilton gala.
Papa Ellison has been a major donor to Trump’s presidential campaigns and his PAC, while Paramount has shelled out for Trump’s ballroom. Moreover, once Jr. Ellison’s purchase of Paramount gave him ownership of CBS, he responded to Trump’s lawsuit against the network for its coverage of the 2024 presidential campaign by ordering the network to pay off Trump in the amount of $16 million.
Inasmuch as the Ellisons’ dinner coincided with political journalists’ big weekend, and in case that $16 million wasn’t enough, their soiree was also intended to show Trump how much their own journalists at CBS News really liked him. CBS News chief Bari Weiss, whom Ellison had hired on the strength of her anti-woke and pro-conservative politics, sat alongside Jr. Ellison at Trump’s table, though The New York Times reported that “several CBS News journalists said they were taken aback by the existence of the dinner.” Politicized news media we have always, in varying degrees, had with us, but the network of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite was known for setting the mainstream mass media’s non-fawning, nonpartisan news coverage standards of the 20th century. And not even the fawning, partisan Murdoch/Ailes gnomes at Fox News had ever contemplated hosting a dinner honoring a sitting president. Which is to say, the norm-shattering D.C. event of last week wasn’t Saturday’s correspondents’ dinner, even with the attempted assassination factored in; it was the Ellisons’ and their CBS News underlings’ supine prostration before the altar of Trump.
Looks to me like the Ellisons are going to use their media purchases as a way to control information. They want to lie to the public about the goings on of rich people like themselves.
What they aren’t going to do is try to turn a profit by using their media holdings to create art or even moderately entertaining media products.
They are going to sit on the IP they purchased and milk it for all it’s worth as they strip down the production companies to virtually nothing.