Dan Dinello
Informed Comment / May 20, 2026
The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and CBS News were sacrificed to satisfy Donald Trump‘s childish vindictiveness. This was just part of the price paid to secure the merger between David Ellison’s Skydance and Paramount Global, owner of CBS.
Chicago – Several months ago, Paramount and the Ellisons – billionaire father Larry, founder of software company Oracle, and nepo son David, CEO of Skydance – did everything possible to kiss up to Trump. Their pandering started with Paramount’s shake-down settlement with Trump over his frivolous lawsuit against CBS, enriching him by $16 million.
Paying off this extortion demand wasn’t enough. Paramount cancelled Stephen Colbert’s Emmy award-winning Late Show, which has been the highest-rated late-night talk show for nine consecutive seasons. As one of his most outspoken persistent critics, Colbert annoyed thin-skinned Trump. With humour, he called mocking attention to the president’s lies, stupidity, and cruelty. The aggrieved president called for Colbert’s cancellation on many occasions, even demanding he be “put to sleep.”
The cancellation came just two days after Colbert criticized Paramount‘s settlement with Trump, calling it a “big fat bribe” to buy approval of the merger with Skydance. Supporting Colbert’s claim, the merger was ratified one week later by the Trump-controlled Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The Late Show ends this Thursday leaving over 200 people unemployed, including my son and nephew.
Colbert remains undiminished and will certainly rise again if he chooses, but Paramount and the Ellisons humiliated themselves by exhibiting an un-American willingness to sacrifice free speech as well as Colbert‘s network-enhancing classiness, empathy and intelligence for — pardon the cliché — money, influence, and power.
The cancellation was still not enough. Further grovelling was revealed. The Paramount Skydance merger included a side deal to run $20 million in public service announcements promoting causes supported by Trump. Skydance also pledged that it will eliminate all diversity, equity and inclusion practices and install a Trump-aligned “ombudsman” to root out “bias” at CBS News.
In yet a further capitulation, David Ellison installed anti-woke, anti-trans writer Bari Weiss, a self-described “Zionist fanatic,” as editor-in-chief of CBS News. This occurred after the merger was approved but as one media executive said, “They just wanted to hire Bari as a symbolic gesture to Donald Trump to make sure they got that deal through.”
With no experience directing television coverage, Weiss’ incompetence was on full display last week as her hand-picked news anchor was forced to cover Trump‘s trip to China while stranded one hundred miles away in Taiwan. Colbert was quick to ridicule the failure: “All the news teams are on the ground in China to cover this epic and historic summit,” he said. “All except one because our CBS News colleague Tony Dokoupil is being forced to broadcast from Taiwan after failing to get a Chinese visa in time. Well, that is disappointing, but it does fit in with their slogan: CBS News, when events happen, we’re at most one country away.”
Ideologically, Weiss pushed CBS News to the right. She chose MAGA-friendly Dokoupil as the nightly news anchor. He hosted a special on the illegal unjustified Iran war, cheering the administration and downplaying the military deaths. The network became a pro-war, “propaganda-palooza,” according to one CBS News staffer. Journalist Alicia Hastey left CBS and lamented that stories increasingly were “evaluated not just on their journalistic merits but on whether they conform to a shifting set of ideological expectations.”
CBS employees fear censorship and propaganda will replace independent journalism, especially considering Weiss’ history of downplaying Israel’s war crimes in Gaza and the Ellison family’s deep ties to Israel. For example, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu got more than a softball interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes last week, he got to choose his interviewer. High profile anchor Anderson Cooper departed 60 Minutes as staffers fretted that Weiss’ control of CBS News amounted to “dropping a grenade” in the newsroom.
Just as he crushed the journalistic independence of CBS, Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison will similarly suppress and dismantle CNN to further extend the Ellisons’ media domination. Regulatory approval of the merger between Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery, owner of CNN, hinges on Trump’s approval. And Trump hates CNN, continuously calling it “fake news” and insulting its White House reporter Kaitlin Collins.
David Ellison promised Trump “sweeping changes” at CNN as part of his Warner Bros. takeover. This included consolidation of CNN with CBS, possibly run by Weiss. CNN will become more Trump-friendly. Larry Ellison even talked with the White House about “axing certain CNN hosts whom Donald Trump is said to loathe, including Erin Burnett and Brianna Keilar.”
Secretary of War Crimes Pete Hegseth — the Islamophobic crusader — ranted against “unpatriotic” CNN at a recent news conference and ended by saying, “The sooner David Ellison takes over that network the better.” Trump has repeatedly gushed over the Ellisons in recent months, telling people that he expects changes to CNN with their ownership.
If Trump succeeds in remaking or destroying CNN, the malicious president will have effectively dismantled one of the two cable-news networks that covers him even slightly sceptically. Enabled, he will turn to fresh targets, until everyone in the kingdom submits. Yet the Ellisons’ pathetic fawning props up a severely wounded president.
Trump‘s approval numbers are tanking while inflation is sky-rocketing; his corruption level is beyond stratospheric; his war with Iran is a strategic disaster. He falls asleep at national security meetings after posting paranoid rants all night. Despite his glaring weakness, he still controls — with lackeys in charge — once-independent regulatory and investigative agencies the FCC and the Department of Justice [DOJ].
Dependent on regulatory approval of their growing media empire, the Ellisons’ Trump-appeasement machine continued in high gear, operated by David’s coddler father Larry — a heavy Trump contributor, an Israeli army donor, and a 2020 election denier.
In turn, Trump played a major role in facilitating a deal that gave Larry Ellison’s Oracle a significant ownership stake and operational control over TikTok, the addictive social media platform. This acquisition marks another tightening of the right-wing grip on America’s media power centers by a small group of billionaire men.
Alarmingly, the Ellisons join a mere five of the richest Americans who have infiltrated and ensnared the most popular social media sites and a national newspaper: Elon Musk (X), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook, Instagram and Threads), Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google, YouTube) and Jeff Bezos (The Washington Post). Together these billionaires — along with Robert Murdoch (Fox News) — dominate worldwide communication channels. The news is not safe with these hyper-capitalists in charge.
Bezos has culled viewpoints at The Washington Post that might offend Trump while firing 30% of its employees and cutting back its international coverage. After Trump threatened the Meta owner with prison if he crossed him, Zuckerberg took steps to make Facebook friendlier to MAGA: he abandoned third-party fact-checking, dropped restrictions on topics such as immigration and gender, and appointed Trump supporters, like Dana White — Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO — to Meta’s executive board. Musk turned X into a vehicle for propagandizing far-right politics across the globe.
“It is not a sign of a healthy democracy when billionaires are buying up all of the means of cultural consumption,” said Steven Buckley, lecturer in media at the University of London. If the Paramount Skydance merger with Warner Bros. Discovery is corruptly finalized, the Ellisons would not only control CNN and CBS but also streaming services, including HBO and Paramount+, with a combined 200 million–plus subscribers.
Paramount Skydance would also become the biggest movie studio in the world with a formidable base of franchises that include Mission Impossible, Star Trek, Top Gun, DC Comics, Harry Potter, Mattel licenses like Barbie and much more. Their stranglehold would create a “Hollywood jobs apocalypse.” Adding TikTok’s 170 million–plus users, Paramount Skydance approaches a position of monopolistic media dominance. This would be dangerous for democracy and, given the Ellisons closeness to Trump authoritarianism, that is the point.
In David Ellison’s most egregious democracy-disrupting move, he compelled CBS News personnel, including its chief White House correspondent Nancy Cordes and former “Evening News” anchor Norah O’Donnell, to ”honour” Trump at a private dinner two nights before the Correspondents’ dinner. The thwarted attack at the Correspondents’ Dinner, itself an unconscionable journalistic pandering to Trump, moved attention away from the Ellisons’ corruption-inducing event.
Among the guests, in a flagrant conflict of interest, was Todd Blanche — acting Attorney General and Trump toady — whose DOJ antitrust division will review the power-hungry Ellisons’ acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. The Ellisons’ sycophantic party was intended to show Trump how much their journalists liked him. CBS News chief Bari Weiss sat alongside David Ellison at Trump’s table.
The unscrupulous Ellisons’ and their CBS News underlings’ supine prostration before the altar of Trump was a contradiction beyond parody: billionaire media owners honouring the authoritarian political leader whose administration holds regulatory power over their merger ambitions. This fawning spectacle mocked the principles of a free press and grotesquely betrayed the First Amendment as journalists celebrated the president who works to silence them.
Trump demonizes reporters that scrutinize him. He sued multiple news outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and the BBC, for coverage he didn’t like; he defunded PBS, NPR, and The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which shut down. The Federal Trade Commission is investigating Media Matters over its critical coverage. At Trump’s directive, the FCC pushed for the Trump-critical comedians Jimmy Kimmel and Seth Myers to be taken off the air. The DOJ prosecuted reporters Don Lemon and Georgia Fort for the crime of reporting on an anti-ICE protest at Cities Church in St Paul. Countless regular Minnesotans have been harassed, pepper-sprayed, physically attacked, or taken into custody for protesting the ICE raids in their state as well. The examples of Trump’s attacks on free speech are endless. Trump has criminalized critical journalism.
Yet the Ellisons – owners of CBS and potentially CNN if the Warner Bros. Discovery merger is approved – continue to placate Trump. This merger is a catastrophe for unbiased journalism. “The deal with Warner Bros. Discovery,” warned Sen. Elizabeth Warren, “must be blocked as a dangerous concentration of power.”
“Paramount Warner Bros. is not a done deal,” said California Attorney General Rob Bonta in a press statement. “These two Hollywood titans have not cleared regulatory scrutiny – the California Department of Justice has an open investigation. There are red flags everywhere.” Bonta made clear that he’ll scrutinize the Paramount Warner Bros. cartel with attention to antitrust criteria that will likely be absent at Trump’s corrupt DOJ. AG Bonta and the group State Defenders of Democracy will hold a #BlocktheMerger Zoom town hall on Thursday May 21.
States can challenge the merger even after federal regulators cynically wave it through. Under the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914, states retain the power to fight monopolistic mega-mergers with the nation’s primary antitrust weapon – a law specifically designed to prevent corporations from growing so massive that they crush competition, consolidate power, and dominate entire industries.
An open revolt in Hollywood backs the anti-merger fight. More than 5,000 marquee-name actors and other film industry players, including Bryan Cranston, Ben Stiller, Kristen Stewart, Joaquin Phoenix, JJ Abrams and the deals’ most vocal opponent Mark Ruffalo have signed an open letter opposing the corporate consolidation. The letter warned it would lead to “fewer opportunities for creators, fewer production jobs, higher costs, and less choice for audiences in the United States and around the world.”
Opposition to this merger also erupted inside Paramount Skydance. Using their power as Paramount shareholders, a pair of press organizations – Freedom of the Press Foundation and Reporters Without Borders – are demanding, under a Delaware law, that David and Larry Ellison produce records related to both recent acquisitions.
The two investor groups charged that Larry Ellison promised “favours” to the Trump administration to win regulatory approval, which constituted “a breach of fiduciary duties.” Those favours included “sweeping” staff changes at CNN – ousting anchors that Trump despises. The shareholders expressed “credible concern that Paramount leadership has offered, solicited, or effectuated a corrupt exchange” that opens up the company to a “range of potential civil and criminal penalties.”
“We are participating in corporate governance to protect the freedom of the press and protect our investment,” said Seth Stern, chief of advocacy at Freedom of the Press Foundation. “When you’re overpaying dramatically for assets, promising the president of the United States you’re going to damage the product, these are not reasonable business judgements. This appears to be just blatant corruption.”
One final pressure point exists to stop the merger. Paramount has admitted that nearly 50 percent of the shares in its expanded company will be held by the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Abu Dhabi. FCC rules prohibit foreign investors from owning more than 25 percent of any company that holds broadcast licenses. FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez has publicly demanded a rigorous review, specifically citing concerns about foreign-government influence over the news. It’s no stretch of the imagination, for example, to believe that the Ellisons won’t look kindly on CBS or CNN news coverage that’s critical of fossil fuels.
Urgent action is needed to stop the Ellisons’ media coup. Investigations must be completed, lawsuits filed, and court injunctions issued. The toxic cloud of corruption engulfing the Ellisons’ purchase of Paramount and their pursuit of Warner Bros. Discovery is blatantly obvious. The silencing of Colbert, the Trumpification of CBS News, and their threatened dismantling of CNN are part of Trump’s systematic campaign to stamp out dissent and commandeer control over American media. A lifeline exists outside of Trump’s control to stop this looming disaster, but State Attorneys General must act fast.
Dan Dinello – Professor Emeritus at Columbia College Chicago
