Trump and the Oligarchs Are Killing Corporate Media

The oligarchs only care about money. The dictator only cares about power. They can make that arrangement work.

1. This Is CNN

Our oligarchs and our strongman operate on two different incentive structures that happen to be in total alignment.

Remember when David Ellison bought Paramount Global? Why did he want to own that corporation? Because it gave him a bunch of valuable assets:

• A viable streaming platform in Paramount+

• A vast library of intellectual property—including famous franchises like Mission: Impossible, Top Gun, Star Trek, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Paranormal Activity—which can be monetized for decades

• A broadcast television network with a vast advertising business and live TV assets, such as rights to NFL broadcasts

• A movie studio that generates new intellectual property and vertically integrates with the rest of the pipeline

Did David Ellison give a shit about the CBS News division? No. If you listed the top thirty pieces of the Paramount Global business, CBS News would not be in it. Qua business, it was an afterthought.

But why did Donald Trump direct his government to approve Ellison’s purchase? Trump did not give a shit about Paramount+, the Paramount film catalogue, or any of that stuff. The only thing Trump cared about was that CBS News be put under the thumb of a reliable owner who was beholden to him.

Trump and Ellison had entirely different interests—yet they were completely aligned.

And now it’s happening again.

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You have probably seen the story about Ellison attempting a hostile takeover of Warner Bros.-Discovery. Why does Ellison want to own this business, too?

• By merging HBO Max with Paramount+ he could have a true third competitor to the Netflix/Disney goliaths, and so would own the last seat at the streaming table.

• The Warner Bros. film library is even more valuable than the Paramount library and by combining the two his streaming service would have a major point of differentiation from Netflix and Disney+.

• The addition of Warner-owned cable networks would give the ad business he now owns (via CBS) more inventory and more leverage over advertisers.

• Every act of consolidation in the entertainment sector advantages the surviving players by eliminating competition, giving them more power to control costs and dictate terms.

One of the pieces of Warner-Discovery is CNN. Like CBS News, CNN is a tiny piece of the overall business. It is also a declining piece. CNN is the last-place cable news network and its revenue is (a) modest and (b) in free fall.

I want to be very clear about this: CNN is a small player in a dying category. In a world where David Ellison only cared about economics, I suspect he’d pay good money not to own CNN.

Yet if Ellison is to succeed in his takeover of Warner-Discovery, he will need President Trump’s help. And the only thing Trump cares about in this deal is getting CNN under Ellison’s control. Don’t take my word for it. Here’s the president yesterday:

“I think CNN should be sold, because I think the people that are running CNN right now are either corrupt or incompetent,” Trump told reporters during a roundtable with business executives at the White House.

“I don’t think they should be entrusted with running CNN any longer. So I think any deal should — it should be guaranteed and certain that CNN is part of it or sold separately,” he added. “I think CNN should be sold along with everything else.”

That’s how oligarchs and autocrats work. The oligarchs want political power to advantage their businesses. The autocrat wants key businesses to be controlled by allies in service of strengthening his regime.

These arrangements work out nicely for everyone until the oligarch accidentally falls out of a window.

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2. Size as Vulnerability

I do not mean to impugn the character of journalists at CBS News and CNN. Many of them do fine work. But it is a fact of life that unless a media company owns itself, its independence is conditional.

CBS News is already changing under the direction of its Trump-approved editor-in-chief. Spoiler: It is not changing in ways that challenge el presidente. If Ellison gets control of CNN, it, too, will change.

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I spend a lot of clock cycles obsessing over the business side of The Bulwark—not because I want to buy a yacht but because revenue leads to control, control leads to independence, and independence leads to honesty.¹

We’ve grown more slowly than we could have. But we didn’t want to blitz scale because that would have left us vulnerable. We grew step by step, bringing in new voices, establishing new products, and rationalizing the products into mini-businesses of their own.

There is a drawback to this model: It’s hard to get really big when you’re independent. The reason people take corporate money is because it gives them the resources to do important work. You can send reporters into the field. You can throw an entire news team at a breaking story. You don’t have to pick and choose; you can flood the zone.

Independent media companies don’t have that ability. It’s a tradeoff. You work with scarce resources, but you’re allowed to say exactly what you think without your owner and his Dolores Umbridge trying to screw you.

You trade resources and scale for control and independence.

In normal times, the corporate media side of this trade can be pretty reasonable. When liberalism is bedrock, good journalists can do great things when they get corporate-scale resources. And whatever marginal independence they lack might be worth the sacrifice.

But in illiberal times, it’s a foolish, dangerous trade. When the power of the state is wielded by an autocrat, the decline of independence isn’t marginal.

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Here’s the thing, though: Independent media companies can get bigger. The Bulwark has gone from two email newsletters and a podcast to something like a genuine media company. In the last couple of years we’ve added real reporters who break news. We’ve created a podcast empire and a wildly successful video channel. If the business keeps growing, our capabilities will keep growing, too.

But corporate media can’t get more independent. There’s no path to independence for them, no way to get out from under an oligarch. Once you hand someone else control, it’s gone. For forever.

I doubt David Ellison either realizes this fact or cares about it. But I promise you Donald Trump does.

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3. Dept. of Cucks

Mother Jones (another independent media company) has a piece about what happened after a reporter submitted a question to the DoD press office about Pete Hegseth’s mentor:

Six weeks ago, Jack Posobiec asked me to comment on whether I have a “creepy fetish for Asian women.”

That was one of several false and wildly personal allegations that the far-right pundit and newly minted member of the Pentagon press corps said that he planned to include in “a story that I’m writing about you.”

I immediately understood his October 28 email to be a threat, though it was not made explicit. The day before, I had sent the Pentagon press office a series of questions concerning Eric Geressy, a senior Pentagon adviser to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Geressy, who served with Hegseth during a tour in Iraq in the mid-2000s, is part of the Pentagon effort to instill a “warrior ethos” within the US military. He now leads a team reviewing the role of women in the armed forces.

Calling Geressy “my toughest critic and my best mentor,” Hegseth in March presented him with the Distinguished Service Cross, the Army’s second-highest award for valor, for Geressy’s conduct following an ambush in Baghdad in 2007.

I had discovered that Geressy’s email address was linked to a public Goodreads page with a “currently reading” list that included various books featuring stories about “Asian wife sharing.” These pornographic works, with titles such as “Asian Wife Went With Her Dad’s Friend: A Cuckold Story,” appeared on the list alongside two books by Hegseth and a handful of military histories. They contain detailed descriptions of cuckolding, group sex, and scenes involving “ladyboys”—a term used to refer to Thai transgender women. The page, active since 2021, was taken down the day after I contacted the Pentagon and Geressy about it.

I also asked about a 1997 domestic violence allegation against Geressy, about his dating habits, and past relationships with foreign women. I inquired if the Pentagon had assessed those relationships as part of Geressy’s security clearance process, and, more broadly, if his personal life might create concerns about his susceptibility to foreign influence operations.

The Pentagon repeatedly asked for more time to address those questions. Eventually chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell responded, in part: “Geressy has served for 38 years in the government, has been vetted numerous times by the relevant agencies, and has never posed a security risk or engaged in improper behavior as this piece tries to suggest. Mother Jones has stooped to a new low with this shoddy hit piece and should be ashamed of itself.”

Posobiec’s email arrived the day after my initial inquiries. The false claims he asked about, particularly the Asian fetish thing, seemed to mirror my questions. Posobiec, who in 2016 promoted the bogus Pizzagate conspiracy theory, gave me a deadline, 5 p.m. on October 29, that was the same as the one I had given the Pentagon press office. A Pentagon spokesperson and Posobiec both denied coordination. Geressy declined to comment. But considering the questions, timing, and Posobiec’s links to Defense Department officials, the situation seemed clear. This was either an incredible coincidence or a deliberate message: Publish your article and get smeared.

Posobiec’s email claimed I have “a history of objectifying women,” and that I had engaged in some kind of misconduct. The email also included questions about my marriage.

Posobiec’s questions suggested one of his “two sources” may have been a real woman with whom I did have a brief relationship nearly a decade ago.

Read the whole thing.

1. I’ll always be grateful to Jimmy Price Phil Anschutz for teaching me that.