December 15, 2025 • 26 mins
Mia discusses Larry Ellison’s takeover of CBS, Jeff Bezos’ transformation of the Washington Post, Teen Vogue, and the broader wave of tech fascists buying out the media.
Sources:
https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/10/nbc-and-cbs-cuts-hit-race-and-culture-verticals/
https://archive.ph/gg6UO#selection-471.223-471.275
https://tech.yahoo.com/social-media/articles/elon-musk-reportedly-helped-larry-112145682.html
https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/10/nbc-and-cbs-cuts-hit-race-and-culture-verticals/
https://www.theroot.com/massive-black-firings-at-cbs-but-what-about-gayle-king-2000070868
https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/23/media/ellison-wbd-trump-warner-bros-discovery-bid
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/gayle-king-leaving-cbs-mornings-b2855747.html
https://www.status.news/p/washington-post-layoffs-cuts-morale
https://x.com/JeffBezos/status/1894757287052362088
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/07/nyt-opinion-bennet-resigns-cotton-op-ed-306317
https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/10/media/trump-cnn-sold-paramount-warner-bros-netflix
https://fortune.com/2025/09/28/larry-ellison-ai-surveillance-oracle-tiktok-deal-social-media/
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/07/14/new-york-times-bari-weiss-resigns-360730
https://newrepublic.com/article/203758/bari-weiss-cbs-news-strategy
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
All Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
Welcome to it could happen here a podcast about how
freedom is a joke in our Lives of the punchline,
I am your host, Mia Wong. Long ago twenty thirteen,
in a galaxy basically exactly where this one is now,
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and now a terminal fascist,
purchased The Washington Post. This was a sign of things
(00:30):
to come. The danger of the American free press is
and has always been, that we do not have a
free press. We have a capitalist press. Writing and especially reporting,
is a material product. Journalists have to eat, they have
to travel, they have to go places, they have to
(00:51):
meet people. All of this requires capital. And the problem
with all of this requiring capital is that the capital
is not a neutral entity, and the people who possess
capital have interests. Fast forward to twenty twenty, as protests
(01:11):
and uprisings raised across the United States against the police
and white supremacy, a battle broke out inside of the
New York Times newsrooms and editorial staff about the newspaper
publishing an opinion piece called send in the Troops, calling
for You've Guessed it, Sending in the troops to attack
(01:31):
protesters published by a member of the American governments named
Tom Cotton. Editors resigned in outrage debates raised across journalists slacks.
It was the culmination of decades of battles about the
direction of politics and race in the United States, fought
simultaneously in the streets and in the newsroom. Twenty twenty
(01:55):
was a significant danger to the ruling class. The actual
ideology that was so dangerous it had to be destroyed
was this. If the premise of twenty twenty is true,
which is that the US is a structurally racist country
founded on slavery and genocide, and that reproduces those same
violences through the prison system, which has legal slavery in
(02:19):
it from the structure of the Thirteenth Amendment, and reproduces
it again through the police, then the American project is indefensible,
and here there be dragons. The ruling class needed to
move to stop it, and so they created what they
(02:41):
would call, I guess, a new ideology, but was really
a continuation of centuries old strategies, this time rebranded as
anti woke. One of the avatars of anti woke was
Barry Weiss. Barry Weiss is that the New York Times
at the time was an ideological diversity higher, which is
to say, affirmative action for why conservatives as affirmative action
(03:04):
has only existed in the figments of the minds of conservatives.
She was given a cozy make work job at the
beginning of the Trump administration as an opinion staff editor
and writer for the New York Times. She was hired
specifically to bring in more Trumpian figures into the opinion section.
This is, and I cannot emphasize this enough, this is
(03:27):
the fever dream of affirmative action in the conservative mind right,
and these are going to be about to people who
really hate affirmative action. But again, what they are being given.
They are being handed by the most important newspaper, probably
in the entire world. You know, she was handed a
job because she was a fucking right winger. Now. Weiss
(03:49):
was part of the shall we say, conversations at the
New York Times about again whether or not a newspaper
should print a letter from a sitting US representative calling
for the deployment of US soldiers against the American people.
She saw this as an opportunity not to resist a
(04:12):
obviously tyrannical program by again, a sitting member of the
United States government. She saw this as her moment to
do a grift. Now, in this moment, she resigned from
The New York Times in a huff raving about the
quote lack of ideological diversity, who had a giant rants
about how the Twitter is not the massthead of the
(04:32):
New York Times. Blah blah blah blah, blah blah blah. Again.
I kind of emphasize this enough, like that she was
brought in as a right wing affirmative action higher in
order to appease the demand from the ruling class. I
guess for like pro Trump people, they already had electric
right wingers. This is completely unhinged. But you know, she resigns,
(04:55):
and she has this big press tour in the right
wing press trying to talk about how she was canceled,
and of course none of this ever even happened. Right
We can debate the effect to which cancelation ever was
even really a thing or did anything at all, But
she was not canceled. She literally resigned of her own
free will. She was not forced out. She chose to
leave in order to pursue a career as a right
wing grifford in other fields. Namely Substack, where she ran
(05:18):
a newsletter that was sort of rebranded as like, oh,
it's a media outlet called the Free Press. It's like, no,
this is Barry Weiss's Substack. Come on, what are we
doing here? What are we doing here? Now? Weiss is
not a journalist. She is a right wing idea loge.
She's also a hardline Zionist. If you want to go
into all of the absolutely unhinded shit that Barry Weiss
(05:41):
has said and done over the years, all of the
just unbelievably somophobic shit, all of the weird racist shit,
all of the anti immigrant shit that she said, there's
a very good John Oliver thing about her. She is
part of this story. But if we spent this entire
episode just talking about how much she fucking sucks, we
would be here for like two decades now. In a
(06:03):
just world, none of this would matter at all. This
would just be a conservative walking off from the free
job that she was given by the New York Times,
stomping off at a huff and going to start a
substack whatever. Who cares. This is not a just world.
This is the United States. She now controls one of
the most powerful and important news organizations in the United States.
(06:27):
The story of how she got there is the story
of the future of the American media. Unfortunately, for all
of us, the story is astressingly simple. Barry Weiss and
her outlet, I'm using that in immense quotations. Again, this
is just a substack was bought out by one Larry Allison.
(06:48):
Larry Ellison then appointed Weiss to be the ideological hatchet
woman for his takeover of Paramount, which owns CBS. There
was no secret plan, there was weird strategy. There was
no Illuminati cabal behind the scenes. It didn't require any
effort at all. All you have to do in order
(07:08):
to install a right wing hack as the editor in
chief of CBS News is by the company. The results
have been devastating. I would call what happened to resegregation.
There was a large scale firing of non white employees.
NBC eliminated the editorial teams for NBC Asian America, NBC Black,
(07:32):
NBC Latino, and NBC Out. NBC Out was the queer one.
They fired Gail King. They did some stuff that frankly
sounds like a joke. I'm just going to read this
quote from the root and the CBS News bureau in Johannesburg,
South Africa has been shut down, with coverage of Africa
shifting to London. That is again, they closed the South
(07:56):
Africa Bureau. This is a CBS bureau in South Africa
and moved their coverage of Africa from Africa to London.
If a hardline Marxist ideologue had written this in nineteen
sixty seven, no one would have believed them. And in
the process, what they've done here is they've destroyed the
NBC outlets that were responsible for doing a whole bunch
(08:18):
of comfort for different groups of non white people. Right NBCBLKS,
EMC Black did a whole bunch of very good coverage
of the uprising in twenty twenty. Right NBC Asian America
did a bunch of good work. NBC out was a
place where you could occasionally find a transperson who was
allowed to write. And all of that is gone because
one man, Larry Allison and his son David Allison, bought
(08:43):
the fucking media company and installed this unhinged right wing
hack as their ideological secret police. I don't even know
what you would call this position. The ideological purge executor.
I guess you could call it of CBS. Now, obviously
(09:04):
there are multiple aspects to this. We'll talk about Larry
Ellison himself in a second, because he is a very
important figure. But first, before we talk about the consolidation
of capital into increasing monopolies. Let's go here from some
of those monopolies, product services. Let's go we are so back.
(09:37):
One of the obvious driving factors behind what has become
a right wing fascist takeover of the media has been
the consolidation of capital into increasing monopolies. Now, it's been
a very, very famous thing in the US to say
that most of American media is controlled by five companies.
Here's the thing. Even those five companies can always be
(10:00):
consolidated into fewer and fewer companies. Right as the companies
start to struggle, and as any one of them sees
weakness in the other ones, you get attempts to buy
them out. And this is what happens with Paramount, which
is again the parent company that owns NBC. So the
way that it's framed, if you read it in the press, is, oh,
it was a merger between Skydance, which was Ellison's sort
(10:23):
of outlet, and Paramount. But that's not really what happened. Really,
what happened was Paramount was bought by Ellison and Skydance
and they were merged together after that. And this is
a problem with the concentration of capital.
Speaker 1 (10:38):
Right.
Speaker 2 (10:39):
As capital becomes increasingly more and more concentration, as there
are individual people and also entities that control more and
more capital, their ability to simply swallow the rest of
their competition and consume it increases. And this is a
significant advantage to the companies. To get the swallow this capital,
they get to absorb all of the intellectual property, and
so now they have control over the property regimes that
(11:02):
allow them to control cultural production, and as a sort
of incidental bonus, they can take control of the media.
Now it's worth getting into the Ellisons themselves now. Larry Allison,
back in the Halcyon Days of twenty twenty, was merely
the eleventh richest man in the world when he quote
(11:23):
participated in a call shortly after the twenty twenty election
that focus on strategies for contesting the legitimacy of the vote.
According to court documents and a participant, the November fourteenth
call included Lindsey Graham, Fox News host Sean Hannity, Jay Seclau,
an attorney for President Donald Trump, and James Bob Junior,
(11:44):
an eternity for True the Vote, a Texas based nonprofit.
True of the Vote was a completely unhanged organization dedicated
to overturning the twenty twenty election by doing all these
weird voter fraud things. And they had a strategy call,
like their attorney in a strategy call with a bunch
of Trump supporters Incline Voting one. Larry Ellison, now again
that was back in twenty twenty. Here in twenty twenty
(12:07):
five and now fighting with Elon Musk for the title
of the richest person in the fucking world. Ellison said,
and I quote, we're going to have supervision. Every police
officer is going to be supervised at all times, and
if there's a problem, AI will report that problem and
report it to the appropriate person. Citizens will be on
their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting
(12:30):
everything that's going on now in that intervening time. Larry
Ellison is one of the people behind Oracle, and Oracle
has benefited enormously as a company that got really in
on the cloud storage boom. Daven benefited enormously from selling
a bunch of shit to AI companies. Lary Ellison is
(12:50):
also a huge AI supporter, a huge backer of AI,
a huge someone who wants to spread AI, and someone
who wants to spread AI, you know, very specifically, and
this is very important into surveillance technology. He is also
one of the people who, as twenty twenty went on
and as the last half decade has come on, and
(13:11):
as the giant sort of backlash against against the uprising,
and as his attempt to reassert racism as the dominant
ideology of the United States and to make sure that
capitals hold over this country and that white supremacies hold
over this country would be maintained, he has become one
(13:31):
of the large drivers of this entire project. He's not
the only one. Jeff Bezos, as we started this program with,
already owned the Washington Post in twenty twenty five he
went in to very seriously change it. Jeff Bezos on
the now fascist Twitter and we will get to that
(13:52):
in a second. Two wrote and this was a letter
that he was sent to his staff, and this is
this is the editorial section to let you know about
a change coming to our opinion. Pages. We are going
to be writing every day in support and defense of
two pillars, personal liberties and free markets. We'll cover other
topics too, of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will
(14:15):
be left to be published by others. David Shipley, who
had been his handpicked editor, resigned rather than lead the effort.
It's not like Shipley had been like a leftist right
but you know, I'm gonna read another part of this letter.
Quote I offered David Shipley, who I admire greatly because
you know he was the pamback guy, the opportunity to
(14:36):
lead this new chapter. I suggested to him that the
answer wasn't hell yes, that it had to be no.
After careful consideration, David decided to step away. So okay,
what was actually happening here he came in was like,
our board is not fascist enough, and if you're not
going to make it more fascist, then get the fuck
(14:57):
out of the way. And the guy he had picked
to run the editor board like three years ago, when
this is unacceptable. I cannot be involved in this. And
left and now Washington Post publishes pieces with titles like
quote Pam Bondi's welcome Woke rollback, the Justice Department rescinds
regulations encouraging racial preferences, you know, and you can in
(15:20):
some ways see all of the things that are coming together. Obviously,
Bezos was a major supporter of the Trump administration, is
a major support of the Trump administration. Put a bunch
of money into the unhinged Trump ballroom. And when he
says Justice harn't rescins regulations encouraging racial preferences, they're talking
about anti discrimination ordinances, right, That's what they're actually talking about.
(15:41):
But these people have been so cooked and have stewed
so much in the ideology of countering the ideology of
twenty twenty that they're now doing all of this reverse
racism stuff where they think that if you're not allowed
to discriminate, that's anti white discrimination. And the Washington Post
has been tanking effectively in the wake of a whole
bunch of a whole bunch of writing editorial changes. Its
(16:04):
audience has significantly declined since this. A whole bunch of
people who subscribed to the Post called it in their
subscriber count is just absolutely pitiful. Now the reach has
been contracting. The paper is going to shit. But that
doesn't matter because the Washington Post is not a money
making outlet. The Washington Post is a chance to shape
(16:24):
the way that the country thinks. And it is better
that you know seven people in Washington, DC, who are
all identically minded conservatives read the Washington Posts and agree
with it than it is for there to be any
sort of independence whatsoever from anything on the shop floor,
from any of the people writing for it. We've also
(16:46):
seen in recent months the elimination of teen Folk Conte Nasty.
Teenvogue's parent company eliminated Team Vogue as an independent outlet.
Teen Vogue had been the furthest left of the even
sort of mainstream outlets in the US. It had carried
a bunch of extremely good and radical work on race
and gender. It was also one of the few outlets
(17:06):
with consistent trans writing. And of course, the other aspect
of all of these purges has been unbelievable on hinde transphobia.
And this was them just destroying what had been a
very very important outlet on the left for telling the
stories of non white people, telling the stories of workers,
and telling the stories of trans people. And they just
(17:27):
destroyed it even though and this is actually very interesting,
Ever since teen Vogue had you know, shifted to doing
a bunch of leftist coverage and covering the protests against
Donald Trump in its first administration, and had gone towards actually,
you know, talking about labor and talking about struggle and
talking about unions and talking about you know, the like
(17:50):
the experiences of people living under white supremacy. Its readership
had exploded, but again that doesn't matter because it's bad
for Donald Trump. And so we're seeing the ideological tightening
consolidation of the media as what had been an outlet
that allowed people to talk about shit was just destroyed.
Now speaking about outlets destroying things ideologically, Hey, product and services,
(18:12):
please don't destroy USOO. Now, as we covered on this
show a few weeks ago, Conde Nasts also fired several
(18:32):
union workers legally for you know, staging a again protected
workplace action, demanding to know what the fuck was going
on with these teen Vogue firings. And that's another aspect
of all of his takeover, which is that these outlets
just viciously and radically hates and this is this is
the ruling classes to people who run these outlets viciously
(18:55):
hate unions. And this is something that's very important to
understand in terms of media unions, because media unions were
also a very powerful force for encouraging diversity because, as
it turns out, workers and this is true, I could
say that someone who's part of a media union less
racist than the bosses, and in fact would like there
to be more non white people and don't like it
(19:16):
when non white people are discriminated against. And this is
one of the things that these media unions and that
unions in general do, is try to help you not
get fucking discriminated against on racial grounds. So of course
a part and partial of this has been the targeting
of the union and that's what we've been seeing at
conte Nast, where they also fired workers who had nothing
to do with teen Vogue and also one of whom
(19:38):
was on the show and is trans and you should
go listen to that episode because it's very good. But
that's another aspect of this right being consolidation is that
media unions are able to push back against the untrammeled
power of these fascist billionaires to turn news coverage into
whatever the fuck they want. And that's what's happened at CBS,
(19:59):
where there are an doing giant specials with like Kirk's
Widow and all of these just absolutely deranged, unbelievably bizarre
right wing pieces that they're just sort of airing now.
And in order to you know, stop that shit, you
need powerful media unions, and this is one of the
things the ruling class is trying to crush now. It's
(20:22):
also worth mentioning that these fight wing billionaires are trying
to consolidate their hold on social media as well as
the traditional media. And obviously the largest example of this
is Elon Musk, who's purchased Twitter and has you know,
effectively turned Twitter into another arm of Stormfront. It is
a just unhinged stew of racism and conspiracy that is
(20:43):
now effectively unusable if you don't want like the most
racist shit you've ever seen in your entire life, just
in every single one of your replies. And it's also
become a major, you know, vector of targeting for the
Trump administration, where what Twitter is used for now, instead
of being a platform that at one time actually was
able to play a role as a thing that does resistance,
(21:05):
as a tool of protesters and as a tool of
people who opposed the untrammeled rule of billionaires, it's now
been converted into just racist slop and a way to
track down anyone who's sort of vaguely centered left and
just put them in the eyes of the administration so
they can be targeted by the States. And it's also
(21:26):
worth noting that one of the people who helped bankworld
the purchase of Twitter because Elon Musk couldn't just purchase
it directly, was one Larry Ellison. Larry Ellison is also
part of a massive attempt to buy TikTok. Listeners of
the show are probably familiar with the whole extremely weird
story about how TikTok was banned last year under the
(21:48):
Biden administration sort of bafflingly, and then Trump sort of
just broke the law and made it still be usable,
but has been trying to force TikTok to be sold
to American buyers. And the conglomerate that's supposed to buy
it is a Larry Ellison thing, so he's also attempting
to buy TikTok. And finally, the story we're going to
(22:10):
close on is that Larry Ellison has been doing a
hostile takeover bid of Warner Brothers. Now Warner Brothers currently
is set to be bought by Netflix. Larry Ellison kept
on submitting bids to them, and his efforts to actually
get the purchase to go through were consistently denied. But
in the wake of that, they're attempt to get to
(22:31):
a hostel takeover bid where they just go to the
shareholders directly and try to buy them out at what
they claim as a higher share price. I'm not going
to go into that whole thing as a fiasco, but
what is interesting for our purposes is that David Allison,
who's the guy running Paramount, who's the guy who's been
directly running the ideological purchase, has met several times with Trump,
(22:53):
and last time they met, Trump has promised that he
would change the coverage of CNN in order to make
it better for Trump. Now. It's also worth noting that
buying CNN is not part of the deal for the
Warner takeover bid by Netflix. Right if Netflix takes over
Warner Bros. They don't get CNN. Under Paramount and Larry
Ellison's deal. They would get CNN now, even though CNN
(23:15):
has done a whole bunch of unhandshit like having Ben
Shapiro on to do fucking electron coverage Jesus fucking Christ. Okay,
Trump has still been mad at them for reporting even
a tiny bit critically about his administration. And Trump has
been kind of refusing to pick a side directly in
terms of the takeover bid for Warner Brothers in the
(23:37):
fight between Netflix and Paramount, but he's now said that
he wants to make sure that CNN is sold and
that it should get new leadership, presumably along the style
of what happened with CBS. And so this is sort
of the final phase of all of this, right, which
is trumpdministration has the ability to use is quote unquote
antitrust power in order to stop one of these two
(24:00):
companies from doing this buy out, and Trump administration is
using the fact that the media is being bought out
by his allies in order to try to get people
to buy CNN and simply eliminate negative news coverage of him.
And I don't really think I need to explain why
it's extremely bad that the president of the United States
(24:21):
could simply order a news outlet to be bought out
and then suddenly it's bought out. I think it's kind
of self explanatory why that's unbelievably bad, But that is
the situation that we may rapidly find ourselves in because
we don't live in anything that even sort of looks
like a democracy. We live in the dictatorship of capital.
(24:43):
And a thing about the press under a dictatorship, even
one that's as decentralized as the distainship of capital, is
that one particularly fascist faction of capital can simply roll in,
buy the media and take control of it. And that's
the project that we're seeing now. But these people are
not under We beat them before we can beat them again.
(25:04):
And in some ways the project is kind of self
defeating in that they have spent a significant amount of
time hollowing out people's trust in these institutions. And there
is an extent to which, as bad as all of
this is, they may simply be taking control of a
husk that they had already caused or rot from the inside.
And meanwhile, all of these, all of us control of
(25:26):
the media that they've been taking has not stopped everyone
from fucking hating them. And that's the note that I
want to leave everyone here on. It doesn't matter how
much of the media these people buy, everyone still hates them.
We can fight them, and we can.
Speaker 1 (25:40):
Win It could Happen Here is a production of cool
Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit
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Happen here listed directly an episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.
All Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
Welcome to it could happen here a podcast about how
freedom is a joke in our Lives of the punchline,
I am your host, Mia Wong. Long ago twenty thirteen,
in a galaxy basically exactly where this one is now,
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and now a terminal fascist,
purchased The Washington Post. This was a sign of things
(00:30):
to come. The danger of the American free press is
and has always been, that we do not have a
free press. We have a capitalist press. Writing and especially reporting,
is a material product. Journalists have to eat, they have
to travel, they have to go places, they have to
(00:51):
meet people. All of this requires capital. And the problem
with all of this requiring capital is that the capital
is not a neutral entity, and the people who possess
capital have interests. Fast forward to twenty twenty, as protests
(01:11):
and uprisings raised across the United States against the police
and white supremacy, a battle broke out inside of the
New York Times newsrooms and editorial staff about the newspaper
publishing an opinion piece called send in the Troops, calling
for You've Guessed it, Sending in the troops to attack
(01:31):
protesters published by a member of the American governments named
Tom Cotton. Editors resigned in outrage debates raised across journalists slacks.
It was the culmination of decades of battles about the
direction of politics and race in the United States, fought
simultaneously in the streets and in the newsroom. Twenty twenty
(01:55):
was a significant danger to the ruling class. The actual
ideology that was so dangerous it had to be destroyed
was this. If the premise of twenty twenty is true,
which is that the US is a structurally racist country
founded on slavery and genocide, and that reproduces those same
violences through the prison system, which has legal slavery in
(02:19):
it from the structure of the Thirteenth Amendment, and reproduces
it again through the police, then the American project is indefensible,
and here there be dragons. The ruling class needed to
move to stop it, and so they created what they
(02:41):
would call, I guess, a new ideology, but was really
a continuation of centuries old strategies, this time rebranded as
anti woke. One of the avatars of anti woke was
Barry Weiss. Barry Weiss is that the New York Times
at the time was an ideological diversity higher, which is
to say, affirmative action for why conservatives as affirmative action
(03:04):
has only existed in the figments of the minds of conservatives.
She was given a cozy make work job at the
beginning of the Trump administration as an opinion staff editor
and writer for the New York Times. She was hired
specifically to bring in more Trumpian figures into the opinion section.
This is, and I cannot emphasize this enough, this is
(03:27):
the fever dream of affirmative action in the conservative mind right,
and these are going to be about to people who
really hate affirmative action. But again, what they are being given.
They are being handed by the most important newspaper, probably
in the entire world. You know, she was handed a
job because she was a fucking right winger. Now. Weiss
(03:49):
was part of the shall we say, conversations at the
New York Times about again whether or not a newspaper
should print a letter from a sitting US representative calling
for the deployment of US soldiers against the American people.
She saw this as an opportunity not to resist a
(04:12):
obviously tyrannical program by again, a sitting member of the
United States government. She saw this as her moment to
do a grift. Now, in this moment, she resigned from
The New York Times in a huff raving about the
quote lack of ideological diversity, who had a giant rants
about how the Twitter is not the massthead of the
(04:32):
New York Times. Blah blah blah blah, blah blah blah. Again.
I kind of emphasize this enough, like that she was
brought in as a right wing affirmative action higher in
order to appease the demand from the ruling class. I
guess for like pro Trump people, they already had electric
right wingers. This is completely unhinged. But you know, she resigns,
(04:55):
and she has this big press tour in the right
wing press trying to talk about how she was canceled,
and of course none of this ever even happened. Right
We can debate the effect to which cancelation ever was
even really a thing or did anything at all, But
she was not canceled. She literally resigned of her own
free will. She was not forced out. She chose to
leave in order to pursue a career as a right
wing grifford in other fields. Namely Substack, where she ran
(05:18):
a newsletter that was sort of rebranded as like, oh,
it's a media outlet called the Free Press. It's like, no,
this is Barry Weiss's Substack. Come on, what are we
doing here? What are we doing here? Now? Weiss is
not a journalist. She is a right wing idea loge.
She's also a hardline Zionist. If you want to go
into all of the absolutely unhinded shit that Barry Weiss
(05:41):
has said and done over the years, all of the
just unbelievably somophobic shit, all of the weird racist shit,
all of the anti immigrant shit that she said, there's
a very good John Oliver thing about her. She is
part of this story. But if we spent this entire
episode just talking about how much she fucking sucks, we
would be here for like two decades now. In a
(06:03):
just world, none of this would matter at all. This
would just be a conservative walking off from the free
job that she was given by the New York Times,
stomping off at a huff and going to start a
substack whatever. Who cares. This is not a just world.
This is the United States. She now controls one of
the most powerful and important news organizations in the United States.
(06:27):
The story of how she got there is the story
of the future of the American media. Unfortunately, for all
of us, the story is astressingly simple. Barry Weiss and
her outlet, I'm using that in immense quotations. Again, this
is just a substack was bought out by one Larry Allison.
(06:48):
Larry Ellison then appointed Weiss to be the ideological hatchet
woman for his takeover of Paramount, which owns CBS. There
was no secret plan, there was weird strategy. There was
no Illuminati cabal behind the scenes. It didn't require any
effort at all. All you have to do in order
(07:08):
to install a right wing hack as the editor in
chief of CBS News is by the company. The results
have been devastating. I would call what happened to resegregation.
There was a large scale firing of non white employees.
NBC eliminated the editorial teams for NBC Asian America, NBC Black,
(07:32):
NBC Latino, and NBC Out. NBC Out was the queer one.
They fired Gail King. They did some stuff that frankly
sounds like a joke. I'm just going to read this
quote from the root and the CBS News bureau in Johannesburg,
South Africa has been shut down, with coverage of Africa
shifting to London. That is again, they closed the South
(07:56):
Africa Bureau. This is a CBS bureau in South Africa
and moved their coverage of Africa from Africa to London.
If a hardline Marxist ideologue had written this in nineteen
sixty seven, no one would have believed them. And in
the process, what they've done here is they've destroyed the
NBC outlets that were responsible for doing a whole bunch
(08:18):
of comfort for different groups of non white people. Right NBCBLKS,
EMC Black did a whole bunch of very good coverage
of the uprising in twenty twenty. Right NBC Asian America
did a bunch of good work. NBC out was a
place where you could occasionally find a transperson who was
allowed to write. And all of that is gone because
one man, Larry Allison and his son David Allison, bought
(08:43):
the fucking media company and installed this unhinged right wing
hack as their ideological secret police. I don't even know
what you would call this position. The ideological purge executor.
I guess you could call it of CBS. Now, obviously
(09:04):
there are multiple aspects to this. We'll talk about Larry
Ellison himself in a second, because he is a very
important figure. But first, before we talk about the consolidation
of capital into increasing monopolies. Let's go here from some
of those monopolies, product services. Let's go we are so back.
(09:37):
One of the obvious driving factors behind what has become
a right wing fascist takeover of the media has been
the consolidation of capital into increasing monopolies. Now, it's been
a very, very famous thing in the US to say
that most of American media is controlled by five companies.
Here's the thing. Even those five companies can always be
(10:00):
consolidated into fewer and fewer companies. Right as the companies
start to struggle, and as any one of them sees
weakness in the other ones, you get attempts to buy
them out. And this is what happens with Paramount, which
is again the parent company that owns NBC. So the
way that it's framed, if you read it in the press, is, oh,
it was a merger between Skydance, which was Ellison's sort
(10:23):
of outlet, and Paramount. But that's not really what happened. Really,
what happened was Paramount was bought by Ellison and Skydance
and they were merged together after that. And this is
a problem with the concentration of capital.
Speaker 1 (10:38):
Right.
Speaker 2 (10:39):
As capital becomes increasingly more and more concentration, as there
are individual people and also entities that control more and
more capital, their ability to simply swallow the rest of
their competition and consume it increases. And this is a
significant advantage to the companies. To get the swallow this capital,
they get to absorb all of the intellectual property, and
so now they have control over the property regimes that
(11:02):
allow them to control cultural production, and as a sort
of incidental bonus, they can take control of the media.
Now it's worth getting into the Ellisons themselves now. Larry Allison,
back in the Halcyon Days of twenty twenty, was merely
the eleventh richest man in the world when he quote
(11:23):
participated in a call shortly after the twenty twenty election
that focus on strategies for contesting the legitimacy of the vote.
According to court documents and a participant, the November fourteenth
call included Lindsey Graham, Fox News host Sean Hannity, Jay Seclau,
an attorney for President Donald Trump, and James Bob Junior,
(11:44):
an eternity for True the Vote, a Texas based nonprofit.
True of the Vote was a completely unhanged organization dedicated
to overturning the twenty twenty election by doing all these
weird voter fraud things. And they had a strategy call,
like their attorney in a strategy call with a bunch
of Trump supporters Incline Voting one. Larry Ellison, now again
that was back in twenty twenty. Here in twenty twenty
(12:07):
five and now fighting with Elon Musk for the title
of the richest person in the fucking world. Ellison said,
and I quote, we're going to have supervision. Every police
officer is going to be supervised at all times, and
if there's a problem, AI will report that problem and
report it to the appropriate person. Citizens will be on
their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting
(12:30):
everything that's going on now in that intervening time. Larry
Ellison is one of the people behind Oracle, and Oracle
has benefited enormously as a company that got really in
on the cloud storage boom. Daven benefited enormously from selling
a bunch of shit to AI companies. Lary Ellison is
(12:50):
also a huge AI supporter, a huge backer of AI,
a huge someone who wants to spread AI, and someone
who wants to spread AI, you know, very specifically, and
this is very important into surveillance technology. He is also
one of the people who, as twenty twenty went on
and as the last half decade has come on, and
(13:11):
as the giant sort of backlash against against the uprising,
and as his attempt to reassert racism as the dominant
ideology of the United States and to make sure that
capitals hold over this country and that white supremacies hold
over this country would be maintained, he has become one
(13:31):
of the large drivers of this entire project. He's not
the only one. Jeff Bezos, as we started this program with,
already owned the Washington Post in twenty twenty five he
went in to very seriously change it. Jeff Bezos on
the now fascist Twitter and we will get to that
(13:52):
in a second. Two wrote and this was a letter
that he was sent to his staff, and this is
this is the editorial section to let you know about
a change coming to our opinion. Pages. We are going
to be writing every day in support and defense of
two pillars, personal liberties and free markets. We'll cover other
topics too, of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will
(14:15):
be left to be published by others. David Shipley, who
had been his handpicked editor, resigned rather than lead the effort.
It's not like Shipley had been like a leftist right
but you know, I'm gonna read another part of this letter.
Quote I offered David Shipley, who I admire greatly because
you know he was the pamback guy, the opportunity to
(14:36):
lead this new chapter. I suggested to him that the
answer wasn't hell yes, that it had to be no.
After careful consideration, David decided to step away. So okay,
what was actually happening here he came in was like,
our board is not fascist enough, and if you're not
going to make it more fascist, then get the fuck
(14:57):
out of the way. And the guy he had picked
to run the editor board like three years ago, when
this is unacceptable. I cannot be involved in this. And
left and now Washington Post publishes pieces with titles like
quote Pam Bondi's welcome Woke rollback, the Justice Department rescinds
regulations encouraging racial preferences, you know, and you can in
(15:20):
some ways see all of the things that are coming together. Obviously,
Bezos was a major supporter of the Trump administration, is
a major support of the Trump administration. Put a bunch
of money into the unhinged Trump ballroom. And when he
says Justice harn't rescins regulations encouraging racial preferences, they're talking
about anti discrimination ordinances, right, That's what they're actually talking about.
(15:41):
But these people have been so cooked and have stewed
so much in the ideology of countering the ideology of
twenty twenty that they're now doing all of this reverse
racism stuff where they think that if you're not allowed
to discriminate, that's anti white discrimination. And the Washington Post
has been tanking effectively in the wake of a whole
bunch of a whole bunch of writing editorial changes. Its
(16:04):
audience has significantly declined since this. A whole bunch of
people who subscribed to the Post called it in their
subscriber count is just absolutely pitiful. Now the reach has
been contracting. The paper is going to shit. But that
doesn't matter because the Washington Post is not a money
making outlet. The Washington Post is a chance to shape
(16:24):
the way that the country thinks. And it is better
that you know seven people in Washington, DC, who are
all identically minded conservatives read the Washington Posts and agree
with it than it is for there to be any
sort of independence whatsoever from anything on the shop floor,
from any of the people writing for it. We've also
(16:46):
seen in recent months the elimination of teen Folk Conte Nasty.
Teenvogue's parent company eliminated Team Vogue as an independent outlet.
Teen Vogue had been the furthest left of the even
sort of mainstream outlets in the US. It had carried
a bunch of extremely good and radical work on race
and gender. It was also one of the few outlets
(17:06):
with consistent trans writing. And of course, the other aspect
of all of these purges has been unbelievable on hinde transphobia.
And this was them just destroying what had been a
very very important outlet on the left for telling the
stories of non white people, telling the stories of workers,
and telling the stories of trans people. And they just
(17:27):
destroyed it even though and this is actually very interesting,
Ever since teen Vogue had you know, shifted to doing
a bunch of leftist coverage and covering the protests against
Donald Trump in its first administration, and had gone towards actually,
you know, talking about labor and talking about struggle and
talking about unions and talking about you know, the like
(17:50):
the experiences of people living under white supremacy. Its readership
had exploded, but again that doesn't matter because it's bad
for Donald Trump. And so we're seeing the ideological tightening
consolidation of the media as what had been an outlet
that allowed people to talk about shit was just destroyed.
Now speaking about outlets destroying things ideologically, Hey, product and services,
(18:12):
please don't destroy USOO. Now, as we covered on this
show a few weeks ago, Conde Nasts also fired several
(18:32):
union workers legally for you know, staging a again protected
workplace action, demanding to know what the fuck was going
on with these teen Vogue firings. And that's another aspect
of all of his takeover, which is that these outlets
just viciously and radically hates and this is this is
the ruling classes to people who run these outlets viciously
(18:55):
hate unions. And this is something that's very important to
understand in terms of media unions, because media unions were
also a very powerful force for encouraging diversity because, as
it turns out, workers and this is true, I could
say that someone who's part of a media union less
racist than the bosses, and in fact would like there
to be more non white people and don't like it
(19:16):
when non white people are discriminated against. And this is
one of the things that these media unions and that
unions in general do, is try to help you not
get fucking discriminated against on racial grounds. So of course
a part and partial of this has been the targeting
of the union and that's what we've been seeing at
conte Nast, where they also fired workers who had nothing
to do with teen Vogue and also one of whom
(19:38):
was on the show and is trans and you should
go listen to that episode because it's very good. But
that's another aspect of this right being consolidation is that
media unions are able to push back against the untrammeled
power of these fascist billionaires to turn news coverage into
whatever the fuck they want. And that's what's happened at CBS,
(19:59):
where there are an doing giant specials with like Kirk's
Widow and all of these just absolutely deranged, unbelievably bizarre
right wing pieces that they're just sort of airing now.
And in order to you know, stop that shit, you
need powerful media unions, and this is one of the
things the ruling class is trying to crush now. It's
(20:22):
also worth mentioning that these fight wing billionaires are trying
to consolidate their hold on social media as well as
the traditional media. And obviously the largest example of this
is Elon Musk, who's purchased Twitter and has you know,
effectively turned Twitter into another arm of Stormfront. It is
a just unhinged stew of racism and conspiracy that is
(20:43):
now effectively unusable if you don't want like the most
racist shit you've ever seen in your entire life, just
in every single one of your replies. And it's also
become a major, you know, vector of targeting for the
Trump administration, where what Twitter is used for now, instead
of being a platform that at one time actually was
able to play a role as a thing that does resistance,
(21:05):
as a tool of protesters and as a tool of
people who opposed the untrammeled rule of billionaires, it's now
been converted into just racist slop and a way to
track down anyone who's sort of vaguely centered left and
just put them in the eyes of the administration so
they can be targeted by the States. And it's also
(21:26):
worth noting that one of the people who helped bankworld
the purchase of Twitter because Elon Musk couldn't just purchase
it directly, was one Larry Ellison. Larry Ellison is also
part of a massive attempt to buy TikTok. Listeners of
the show are probably familiar with the whole extremely weird
story about how TikTok was banned last year under the
(21:48):
Biden administration sort of bafflingly, and then Trump sort of
just broke the law and made it still be usable,
but has been trying to force TikTok to be sold
to American buyers. And the conglomerate that's supposed to buy
it is a Larry Ellison thing, so he's also attempting
to buy TikTok. And finally, the story we're going to
(22:10):
close on is that Larry Ellison has been doing a
hostile takeover bid of Warner Brothers. Now Warner Brothers currently
is set to be bought by Netflix. Larry Ellison kept
on submitting bids to them, and his efforts to actually
get the purchase to go through were consistently denied. But
in the wake of that, they're attempt to get to
(22:31):
a hostel takeover bid where they just go to the
shareholders directly and try to buy them out at what
they claim as a higher share price. I'm not going
to go into that whole thing as a fiasco, but
what is interesting for our purposes is that David Allison,
who's the guy running Paramount, who's the guy who's been
directly running the ideological purchase, has met several times with Trump,
(22:53):
and last time they met, Trump has promised that he
would change the coverage of CNN in order to make
it better for Trump. Now. It's also worth noting that
buying CNN is not part of the deal for the
Warner takeover bid by Netflix. Right if Netflix takes over
Warner Bros. They don't get CNN. Under Paramount and Larry
Ellison's deal. They would get CNN now, even though CNN
(23:15):
has done a whole bunch of unhandshit like having Ben
Shapiro on to do fucking electron coverage Jesus fucking Christ. Okay,
Trump has still been mad at them for reporting even
a tiny bit critically about his administration. And Trump has
been kind of refusing to pick a side directly in
terms of the takeover bid for Warner Brothers in the
(23:37):
fight between Netflix and Paramount, but he's now said that
he wants to make sure that CNN is sold and
that it should get new leadership, presumably along the style
of what happened with CBS. And so this is sort
of the final phase of all of this, right, which
is trumpdministration has the ability to use is quote unquote
antitrust power in order to stop one of these two
(24:00):
companies from doing this buy out, and Trump administration is
using the fact that the media is being bought out
by his allies in order to try to get people
to buy CNN and simply eliminate negative news coverage of him.
And I don't really think I need to explain why
it's extremely bad that the president of the United States
(24:21):
could simply order a news outlet to be bought out
and then suddenly it's bought out. I think it's kind
of self explanatory why that's unbelievably bad, But that is
the situation that we may rapidly find ourselves in because
we don't live in anything that even sort of looks
like a democracy. We live in the dictatorship of capital.
(24:43):
And a thing about the press under a dictatorship, even
one that's as decentralized as the distainship of capital, is
that one particularly fascist faction of capital can simply roll in,
buy the media and take control of it. And that's
the project that we're seeing now. But these people are
not under We beat them before we can beat them again.
(25:04):
And in some ways the project is kind of self
defeating in that they have spent a significant amount of
time hollowing out people's trust in these institutions. And there
is an extent to which, as bad as all of
this is, they may simply be taking control of a
husk that they had already caused or rot from the inside.
And meanwhile, all of these, all of us control of
(25:26):
the media that they've been taking has not stopped everyone
from fucking hating them. And that's the note that I
want to leave everyone here on. It doesn't matter how
much of the media these people buy, everyone still hates them.
We can fight them, and we can.
Speaker 1 (25:40):
Win It could Happen Here is a production of cool
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Happen here listed directly an episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.
It Could Happen Here News
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Robert Evans
Garrison Davis
James Stout
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