Ted Turner, the founder of CNN, died today at 87. True to form, President Donald Trump wasted no time in linking Turner’s death to his greater political plan.
After selling CNN in 1996, Turner, Trump wrote in a post on TruthSocial, “was personally devastated by the Deal because the new ownership took CNN, his ‘baby,’ and destroyed it. It became woke, and everything that he is not all about.”
But then the president moved from personal and historical remembrance to a more clear indication of what he wants for the industry that Turner irrevocably shaped.
“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 as well as a massive host of other media properties. The Paramount-Skydance merger went through with explicit pressure from Trump, and now the president has made it clear that he enthusiastically supports further consolidation of the country’s already somewhat-homogenous media landscape.
The money behind all this comes from a familiar place: Oracle founder and key Trump ally Larry Ellison. Ellison’s son David Ellison has been overseeing the media wings of the family’s empire since the merger, and has pulled the various networks into far more Trump-sympathetic territory. CBS News, for instance, has a new leader, the conservative new-media pioneer Bari Weiss, who was installed after Ellison bought her news and commentary site The Free Press. Trump has a long-standing feud with CNN, which means that a sympathetic Ellison takeover is a major victory for Trump personally. The Ellisons have made that explicitly clear by throwing a party in Trump’s honor as they waited for final sign-off on the Warner Brothers-Discovery deal.
This is more than media inside-baseball. Aggressive corporate takeovers, mergers, and consolidations are being rubber stamped by the Trump administration. The primary beneficiaries of all this are the Ellisons, and the companies they take over are changing their editorial tune to fit the president’s agenda. Even their cultural offerings, like TV shows and sports, are changing. Paramount recently won a bidding war to secure the rights to the UFC for the better part of the next decade, a rising player in the wider economy of professional sports that Trump personally likes. Paramount’s streaming offerings have been jam-packed with TV shows that reflect a brand of politics that, while not explicitly pro-Trump, often play to the same notes that the conservative movement has been pushing in its endless culture wars.
All of this isn’t random. We’re witnessing the birth of a government-controlled media monoculture that, if left unchecked, could keep on expanding until there’s nothing left to watch but 24-hour, wall-to-wall propaganda signed off on by whatever successor regime the conservative movement manages to elect. Sure, that sounds dire, but it’s not far from reality. While David Ellison has claimed that CNN will retain its editorial independence, we’ve seen how far that really goes at CBS already, where stories have been cut and shaped for political reasons by Weiss, the new boss Ellison installed. Regardless of whether Ted Turner hated “woke,” it’s unlikely that the creator of one of the most successful independent cable news operations in history wants his legacy paved over by a self-interested consortium of billionaires eager to lick the boots of whoever’s currently in power.
