From CBS to TikTok, American media are falling into the hands of Trump’s allies. This is how democracy collapses | Owen Jones

Ddemocracy may be dying in the United States. Whether the patient receives emergency treatment on time will determine whether the illness becomes terminal. Before Donald Trump returned to the presidency, I warned against “Orbánization” – referring to Hungarian authoritarian leader Viktor Orbán. There, democracy was extinguished not by firing squads or the mass imprisonment of dissidents, but by slow attrition. The electoral system was distorted, civil society was targeted and pro-Orbán tycoons quietly absorbed the media.

Nine months later, orbánization is booming across the Atlantic. Billionaire Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle, and his filmmaker son, David, have become ineffective instruments in this process. Trump boasts that they are “my friends – they are great supporters.” Larry Ellison, second behind Elon Musk as the world’s richest man, has poured tens of millions into Republican coffers. Shortly after the 2020 election, he joined a call to challenge the legitimacy of the vote. His son, David, has always supported Democrats – but at one time so did Trump, his daughter Ivanka and his son-in-law Jared Kushner.

In August, David Ellison’s Skydance Media acquired Paramount Global with financial backing from his father, leaving him as chairman and CEO of the new entity. Beyond a vast slice of Hollywood, this acquisition brought control of CBS News – one of the “big three” US networks. During the last election, Trump demanded that CBS lose its broadcast license due to alleged political bias and even sued the network over what he called a flattering edit of Kamala Harris’ 60 Minutes interview. Since then, his mood has improved. Ellison is “going to do the right thing” with the network, Trump sang when his ownership changed. His optimism was quickly confirmed: a Trump appointee was named CBS ombudsman to monitor “bias,” and Bari Weiss — a former Democrat turned anti-wake crusader — was named editor-in-chief.

Now, Trump officials are also in favor of Paramount Skydance purchasing Warner Bros. Discovery, the parent company of HBO and CNN. “The ownership of Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) is very important to the administration,” a senior Trump official told the conservative New York Post. The pro-Trump outlet says competing bidders will face “regulatory hurdles,” with WBD’s CEO forced to take into account the Trump administration’s desire to crack down on what it sees as endemic left-wing bias in mainstream media.

Larry Ellison, meanwhile, is also leading a group of investors ready to take over TikTok’s US operations, with other partners including Rupert Murdoch and the Abu Dhabi State Investment Company. Although much of Trump’s criticism of TikTok has focused on China, key Maga figures such as Josh Hawley and Marco Rubio have called for the app to be banned due to its “anti-Israel” bias and shifting sympathies of young Americans toward the Palestinians. Ellison is a strong supporter of Israel and has previously donated millions of dollars to its military through the nonprofit Friends of the Israel Defense Forces. They will be happy to have him in charge.

In 2015, Safra Catz, an Israeli-American executive chairman and former CEO of Oracle, reportedly told former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak in an email: “We believe we need to integrate love and respect for Israel into American culture. » Oracle will oversee the TikTok algorithm.

But it goes much further than the Ellison acquisitions. Trump threatened Meta owner Mark Zuckerberg that he would “spend the rest of his life in prison” if he upset him. The social media mogul has no reason to worry anymore, having done his best to curry favor with the administration. He abandoned third-party fact-checking in the United States, dropped restrictions on topics such as immigration and gender and appointed Trump supporters to head global affairs and to the board of directors. At the Washington Post, owned by Jeff Bezos, columnist Karen Attiah claims to have been fired for having “denounced political violence, racial double standards and America’s apathy towards guns” after the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

Liberal comedian Jimmy Kimmel had his ABC show suspended after the pro-Trump chairman of the Federal Communications Commission demanded action. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting – long considered hostile by Trump – was defunded and closed. The administration took control of media outlets with access to the White House, ousting the Associated Press. US media outlets were stripped of their Pentagon accreditations after refusing to report only officially authorized information released by the Department of Defense. Trump’s lawsuits against the media have further intimidated them.

This is well beyond the control of the media. Witness Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to Democratic strongholds and centralization of control of elections. Republicans have launched new gerrymandering offensives, while demanding the denaturalization and expulsion of New York socialist mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, as Trump threatens to defund the city if he wins. Also in Hungary, Orbán cut funding to opposition town halls. Opponents are threatened with arrest: arch-warmonger John Bolton may be politically repugnant, but the accusations against him portend worse to come. Former Trump strategist Steve Bannon claims there is a plan to circumvent the Constitution to allow his former boss to run for a third term. We could continue.

American democracy has always been deeply flawed. It is so rigged in favor of wealthy elites that a detailed academic study in 2014 found that the political system is rigged in favor of what economic elites want. Yet because unlike Hungary, the United States has no history of dictatorship, with a system of so-called checks and balances, some felt it could never succumb to tyranny. Such complacency collided with a brutal reality. In just nine months, the United States has been dragged toward an authoritarian abyss. A warning: Trump has 39 months left in office.