Ted Turner, the founding father of NCS, died today at 87. True to type, President Donald Trump wasted no time in linking Turner’s loss of life to his higher political plan.
After promoting NCS in 1996, Turner, Trump wrote in a put up on TruthSocial, “was personally devastated by the Deal because the new ownership took NCS, his ‘baby,’ and destroyed it. It became woke, and everything that he is not all about.”
But then the president moved from private and historic remembrance to a extra clear indication of what he desires for the trade that Turner irrevocably formed.
“Maybe the new buyers, wonderful people, will be able to bring it back to its former credibility and glory,” Trump wrote.
Trump is referring to the sale of Warner Brothers-Discovery to Paramount-Skydance, which already owns CBS News in addition to an enormous host of different media properties. The Paramount-Skydance merger went by with express stress from Trump, and now the president has made it clear that he enthusiastically helps additional consolidation of the nation’s already somewhat-homogenous media panorama.
The cash behind all this comes from a well-recognized place: Oracle founder and key Trump ally Larry Ellison. Ellison’s son David Ellison has been overseeing the media wings of the household’s empire because the merger, and has pulled the assorted networks into way more Trump-sympathetic territory. CBS News, for example, has a brand new chief, the conservative new-media pioneer Bari Weiss, who was put in after Ellison purchased her information and commentary website The Free Press. Trump has a long-standing feud with NCS, which implies that a sympathetic Ellison takeover is a serious victory for Trump personally. The Ellisons have made that explicitly clear by throwing a party in Trump’s honor as they waited for last sign-off on the Warner Brothers-Discovery deal.
This is greater than media inside-baseball. Aggressive company takeovers, mergers, and consolidations are being rubber stamped by the Trump administration. The main beneficiaries of all this are the Ellisons, and the businesses they take over are altering their editorial tune to match the president’s agenda. Even their cultural choices, like TV exhibits and sports activities, are altering. Paramount not too long ago received a bidding battle to safe the rights to the UFC for the higher a part of the following decade, a rising participant within the wider economic system {of professional} sports activities that Trump personally likes. Paramount’s streaming choices have been jam-packed with TV exhibits that replicate a model of politics that, whereas not explicitly pro-Trump, typically play to the identical notes that the conservative motion has been pushing in its limitless tradition wars.
All of this isn’t random. We’re witnessing the start of a government-controlled media monoculture that, if left unchecked, might carry on increasing till there’s nothing left to watch however 24-hour, wall-to-wall propaganda signed off on by no matter successor regime the conservative motion manages to elect. Sure, that sounds dire, nevertheless it’s not removed from actuality. While David Ellison has claimed that NCS will retain its editorial independence, we’ve seen how far that actually goes at CBS already, the place tales have been cut and shaped for political reasons by Weiss, the new boss Ellison installed. Regardless of whether or not Ted Turner hated “woke,” it’s unlikely that the creator of some of the profitable impartial cable information operations in historical past desires his legacy paved over by a self-interested consortium of billionaires keen to lick the boots of whoever’s presently in energy.