Are We Captured Yet? Now Trump’s Pals Are Taking Over CNN
Question Everything
Brian Reed
4.6 • 707 Ratings
🗓️ 10 March 2026
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
News recently broke that Paramount, which is newly controlled by David Ellison and his billionaire dad Larry Ellison, won the bid to buy Warner-Brothers Discovery, after aggressively squeezing out Netflix.
As Trump himself has said, the Ellisons are “friends of mine…big supporters of mine, and they’ll do the right thing.”
Is the “right thing” squashing critical coverage of the president? Doing stories he’s more inclined to like? The Ellisons already own CBS News, through Paramount; now they’re about to own CNN. Larry Ellison also has a new ownership stake in TikTok, via a deal anointed by Trump.
Is this what experts call “media capture?” Is the U.S. in it, right now?
In this conversation we first ran in October 2025, after the Ellisons took control of Paramount, foreign correspondent Natalia Antelava explains the insidious implications of media capture from her experience living and reporting in captured countries around the world.
“Question Everything” is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. And don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter.
This episode originally aired October 30th, 2025.
Guests:
- Natalia Antelava, founder of Coda Story
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | A few months ago, I told you I was absolutely freaking out after Skydance media took over Paramount. |
| 0:06.5 | The reason? The owners are buddy-buddy with Donald Trump. |
| 0:10.4 | Larry Ellison is great and his son David is great. |
| 0:13.3 | They're friends of mine. They're big supporters of mine. |
| 0:16.5 | And they'll do the right thing. |
| 0:18.6 | Now, those same friends of Trumps are buying another media empire, Warner Brothers Discovery, |
| 0:25.0 | which includes the iconic movie studio Warner Brothers, HBO, and the news network that Donald Trump just can't stand. |
| 0:32.4 | CNN. |
| 0:33.5 | We've got a Brian Reed freakout 2.0. |
| 0:52.0 | So in the last couple months, there's been this dramatic bidding war going on between Netflix and Paramount to gain control of Warner Brothers discovery. |
| 0:55.4 | For a while, it looked like Netflix was going to come out on top. |
| 0:57.5 | Warner Brothers accepted their offer. |
| 1:01.6 | But then, Paramount kept throwing more money at Warner Brothers until finally, a couple weeks ago, Netflix backed out, and Paramount won. |
| 1:07.7 | Economic reporter Robin Farzad told PBS NewsHour, |
| 1:17.0 | it wasn't even necessarily the cash that sealed the deal for the owner of Paramount, David Ellison, and his dad, Larry Ellison. |
| 1:21.4 | Netflix just came to realize it probably couldn't win, no matter how high it bid. |
| 1:28.3 | Netflix got every signal from this White House and the FCC and Donald Trump being explicit and both with kind of background suasion that by far he prefers Paramount and the Ellison's taking this over. He'd like to see CNN |
| 1:34.9 | under new ownership, ideally friendly to the persuasions of Donald Trump. Larry Ellison, one of the |
| 1:41.9 | richest men in the world, founder of Oracle, is a big donor of Donald Trump's. |
| 1:47.5 | We've already seen what happened after the Ellison's took control of CBS News. |
| 1:52.5 | One of David Ellison's first moves was to install a new editor-in-chief, Barry Weiss, |
| 1:57.4 | who before this had never worked in broadcast news or even been a news reporter. |
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