The Billionaires Who Decide What You See

Almost everything you know about current news events, you take on trust. A broadcast, a feed, a search result, a push alert tells you what happened — at the border, in a committee room, or at the ballot box — and you treat it as basically true. You weren’t there. You can’t check. You move on, because there’s no other way to follow a country this big. That trust is reasonable. It is also the most quietly powerful currency in American public life — and it is only ever as sound as the people who own the channels you hand it to.

Consider one family. CBS belongs to Paramount, and Paramount is controlled by David Ellison. Tens of millions of Americans still turn to CBS for their daily news. Paramount is now moving to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, which would bring CNN and HBO under the same roof. David’s father, Larry Ellison, co-founded Oracle, the tech company that helps control TikTok’s U.S. operations, and retrains the algorithm that decides what about 170 million Americans see when they open the app. Oracle is also a lead builder of Stargate, a half-trillion-dollar plan to construct the data centers the country’s biggest AI systems will run on. One family now has a hand on the evening news, on the cable news it’s buying, on the feed in your pocket, and on the computing power beneath all of it.

The Ellisons aren’t alone. Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post, along with Amazon and the cloud much of the internet runs on. Mark Zuckerberg owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads — the feeds where billions of people get their news. Elon Musk owns X. The Murdoch family owns Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post. Google’s founders control Search and YouTube. This isn’t about one sinister family. The channels Americans rely on to understand current events are consolidating into very few hands.

Concentration by itself would be an old story; rich men have always owned newspapers. What makes this moment different is who these owners need. They don’t all relate to the administration the same way, and the difference matters. Rupert Murdoch has backed President Trump for years; he doesn’t need to be pressured. But several of the others are courting a White House that’s been open about its hostility to coverage it can’t control. Bezos killed The Post’s Kamala Harris endorsement and now praises the president in interviews. Zuckerberg settled a lawsuit with him and ended Meta’s fact-checking. Ellison needed federal sign-off on two enormous mergers, and got it. When the people who own the information depend on the government’s goodwill, the safe business move is coverage that keeps the government happy. You don’t have a seat at that table. The cheapest favor an owner can offer a president is the coverage you see.

The Paramount takeover is the clearest example. Before the deal could close, CBS had a problem: Trump was suing the network over its editing of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris. Most legal experts thought the case was weak. CBS settled anyway — about $16 million dollars, sent to Trump’s future presidential library, with no apology. Separately, to clear the FCC, Skydance, the Ellison company buying Paramount, promised the agency’s Trump-appointed chairman, Brendan Carr, a wider range of viewpoints on air, an ombudsman for bias complaints, and an end to its diversity programs. Then the deal went through. The friendlier network that followed wasn’t a side effect of the new ownership. It was part of the price.

No one in the government had to order any of it. Nobody called a CBS producer to soften a story. Ellison did the calculating himself, because he had billions riding on staying in the administration’s good graces. That’s what makes this kind of pressure so effective, and so hard to see. Open censorship leaves marks — a banned book, a jailed reporter, a padlocked newsroom. An owner protecting a deal leaves almost none. It looks like ordinary business, one quiet decision at a time. But the result is the same: coverage bends toward power, and the public is the last to know.

You might be thinking that no one owns everything. You’re right. You’re reading this on an independent platform, one of thousands of newsletters, podcasts, and feeds that prove the gates aren’t all shut. But notice what it runs on. This platform sits on Amazon’s cloud. It reaches people through feeds those same owners tune. It lives or dies by whether it surfaces in a Google search. Controlling what the public knows has never meant owning every voice. It means owning the ground the voices stand on, and deciding who gets seen. The independent outlets are real, but they’re small, scattered, and renting their reach from the handful of people they’re trying to hold accountable. A few independent voices on borrowed infrastructure isn’t a free press. It’s a margin. And most people don’t live in the margin. They live in the defaults.

You don’t have to take the mechanism on faith. You can watch it run. Over the past year, CBS dismantled its own most respected newsroom. In the spring of 2025, Bill Owens, executive producer of 60 Minutes, resigned rather than keep running the show under the incoming owners; he said he could no longer make the independent decisions the job required. More than a year later, the rest followed in quick succession. CBS fired the show’s executive producer, Tanya Simon, executive editor Draggan Mihailovich, and correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega. On her way out, Vega said her teams had faced efforts to insert political bias into their reporting. She named the result plainly: censorship, both imposed and self-driven, dangerous for the show and for democracy. CBS said her account “was not based in reality.”

Days later, CBS fired Scott Pelley, who had reported for the program for thirty-seven years. The network said it was for cause, after he stood up in a staff meeting and accused the new bosses of “murdering” the broadcast. Take that at face value: a veteran lost his temper and was shown the door. It doesn’t explain what he laid out afterward. Pelley said new management had ordered him to “inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story” — and in a New York Times interview, he got specific. On a February 2026 report about the Minneapolis immigration protests, he says, editor-in-chief Bari Weiss emailed a list of changes after deadline. Two stood out: make the protesters look more violent, and describe Renee Good — the woman an ICE agent had shot and killed — as “driving toward the officer,” the way the president had, even though the video showed her wheels turned away. Pelley refused, and the story aired unchanged. CBS says Weiss raised “four points in the course of editorial back-and-forth,” with no political motivation.

You can also point to a single story the public nearly didn’t see. Last year, 60 Minutes prepared a segment on Venezuelan men the Trump administration had deported to a brutal prison in El Salvador. It included criticism of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. Weiss held it off the air. CBS said it needed more reporting. Alfonsi, the correspondent who reported it, said the real reason was political. It finally ran in January 2026, with statements from the administration attached. The story survived. But a newsroom learns fast what gets a piece held and what gets it on the air, and it starts adjusting before anyone has to ask. That adjustment is the self-driven half Vega was describing.

None of this is unique to CBS. Weeks before the network gutted its newsroom, Bezos’ Washington Post used its editorial page to defend Nick Shirley, a right-wing influencer whose viral video accusing Minnesota daycares of fraud had already been picked apart by other outlets. One owner pushed out the journalists who do the scrutiny. The other defended a man who skipped it. Two billionaires, opposite moves, the same direction: away from the journalism that makes power uncomfortable.

CBS is the kind of control you can see. There’s a more powerful kind you can’t. One in five American adults now regularly gets news from TikTok, up from three percent in 2020; among those under thirty, it’s forty-three percent. Add Facebook and YouTube, at thirty-eight and thirty-five percent, and a huge, growing share of the country now gets its news from a feed rather than a paper or broadcast they chose. On TikTok, the news comes less from outlets people follow than from strangers the algorithm serves them. The algorithm is the editor.

That’s what makes the feed the ultimate weapon. A broadcast airs the same thing to everyone; you can see what it ran and what it left out. A feed shows every person something different, and no one sees the whole. There’s no front page to check. A buried story doesn’t look like censorship. It looks like nothing — a video that never reaches your scroll, on a subject you never find out you missed. No one can prove the feed was tilted, even if it was. But we know the lever can be pulled, because at X it already was: In 2023, Musk had his engineers override the algorithm so his own posts swamped everyone’s feed. That is exactly why it matters who tunes the algorithm. The company retraining TikTok’s algorithm for its American users is Oracle — Larry Ellison’s company, the same family that now runs CBS. The lever deciding what a fifth of the country sees, and nearly half its young people, sits in hands that need the government’s goodwill and could quietly tip the scales, unseen.

This has happened before. In the 1890s, William Randolph Hearst ran one of the country’s great press empires for circulation and influence, not truth. His papers fed readers lurid, often invented stories about Cuba — because outrage sold — and helped inflame the war fever that pushed a reluctant President William McKinley into the Spanish-American War. No one in Washington ordered it. The owner’s incentives shaped the story, and the country went to war.

Set the facts side by side. A handful of people own the channels most Americans rely on for their news. Those people need things from the government — approvals, contracts, settlements — and the government has made clear it rewards loyalty and punishes scrutiny. So the coverage softens, the hard segments get held, and the reporters who won’t go along are shown the door. Put those pieces together and you have a small circle deciding what the public is allowed to know and clearing out the people who would tell them otherwise. There’s a word for that arrangement. We are used to applying it to other countries. It is authoritarian.

The reason it doesn’t feel that way is that no one had to seize anything. There’s no state newspaper, no censor’s office, no journalist hauled off to jail. The takeover runs through ordinary, legal machinery: a merger, a settlement, a regulator’s signature, a quiet decision about which story airs. The machine that’s been built will wait for whoever holds power next. A press that bends to one administration will bend to the next. The danger isn’t a single villain. It’s the structure.

You are not outside of this machine. You extend your trust to these channels every day, mostly without noticing. That trust is what is being spent. But there’s one place the arrangement is still answerable to you. The mergers, the approvals, the regulators who wave these deals through — none of it is private. It runs on government power, and government power runs on votes. The people who decide whether a few billionaires get to own the country’s information are people you elect. Which means the question of who controls what you know isn’t settled in a boardroom. It’s settled at the ballot box. So, treat it that way.

If this changed how you read the news, share it. Subscribe to Safe Online Futures. The regulators who wave these deals through answer to whoever you elect — so choose like your information depends on it.