The Western media war: How Larry Ellison runs propaganda for 'Israel'
The Ellison family’s rapid consolidation of media power under Trump has transformed major Western outlets into vehicles for pro-"Israel" propaganda. This shift is part of a broader system in which concentrated capital, political access, and Zionist networks reshape public discourse while narrowing real debate.
Of the many head-spinning shifts that Donald Trump’s Administration has orchestrated since he took office in January 2025, arguably the least noticed and most significant is the assumption of unrivalled power in Western media of the Ellisons: the Jewish Zionist family which is the biggest single private donor to the IOF. Larry Ellison, who is 81, has been a significant player in technology and politics since the 1970s, when, with early career support from the CIA, he founded Oracle. Oracle has since become a leader in AI, Ellison has since become known for befriending Donald Trump, and, since Trump’s second election to the presidency, Ellison’s rise has been the stuff of which monopolist dreams are made, on a scale that takes the breath away.
In these fifteen months, Ellison used his company, Skydance Media, to purchase Paramount, which includes CBS News, Paramount Pictures, Nickelodeon, MTV, and Comedy Central. He is following this up with the purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery, the legacy American production company which includes CNN, the station which pioneered the 24-hour news cycle during the First Gulf War. In tandem with both of these moves, Ellison has also assumed a major stake in TikTok, either the third or the fifth most popular social media platform worldwide.
This shift amounts to something more dangerous than it seems on paper. America had, as of January 20, 2025, five television news outlets which, whatever their domestic political biases, were understood to report news about foreign policy relatively objectively: CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, and PBS. It had two newspapers, The New York Times and The Washington Post, which were understood to do the same. What “objective” in this context means is not accuracy; it means each channel or newspaper gave at least some simulation of presenting both sides of foreign conflicts in areas like the Middle East. These outlets would never have been so objective, for example, as to refer to the deaths of Fatima Ftouni, Ali Shoaib and Mohamad Ftouni as what they clearly were, a murder and an imperialist crime; but they might at least conceivably, like The Guardian did in England, have run pieces or reports questioning whether "Israel" violated international law by attacking members of the press.
One or two of the more independent creative entertainment franchises, for example, Warner Bros., take similarly open-minded lines in at least some of the content they produce regarding minority cultures or other countries. Today, 15 months into Donald Trump’s presidency, this list of 8 relatively honest brokers has dwindled by 4—as Warner Bros., CNN, and CBS have been or are being purchased by the Ellisons; and The Washington Post’s foreign correspondents’ desk has been defenestrated by its owner Jeff Bezos not long after an agent of the Ellisons expressed interest in buying it.
The result of these buys is a diminishing number of perspectives available to America’s citizens. This means insulating Americans from information at exactly the time, as the White House encircles Cuba and coerces Venezuela and bombs Iran and empowers ICE, that Americans could most use it. Examining how this situation has come to be in such a short time shows something equally concerning. Namely, that Ellison’s sudden dominance is not by accident or contingency. It is a function of American power networks and the influence exercised inside of them, not just by Ellison but by a bevy of deputies who serve as his agents and have accrued fiefdoms of their own.
These operators are his son David, the owner of Paramount Skydance who is trying to purchase Warner Bros.; Bari Weiss, the former New York Times journalist who is now Editor-in-Chief of CBS and of The Free Press, arguably the most influential magazine of the New York-Washington elite; and Gerry Cardinale, arguably the most influential dealmaker on Wall Street whose investment firm, RedBird Capital Partners, holds 22.5 percent of Paramount Skydance’s voting rights. Investigating these operators’ success shows much about how power works inside America at Zionist hands: based on insider connections unknown to the public, which are used to acquire power, then translate power into propaganda.
The Ellison takeover of media during Trump’s 15 months in office began somewhat before the 2024 election, in late 2023, with meetings between David Ellison and Shari Redstone, then the owner of Paramount. Shari Redstone had inherited the company from her father, Sumner Redstone, who had brought its legacy property CBS into the Paramount network. Redstone had succeeded, at one brief remove, Laurence Tisch as owner of CBS; and Tisch had de facto succeeded William Paley: making the Redstones the third in a line of Jewish Zionist owners. These past owners had to some extent been held in check, however unwillingly, by “creative” talent they were employing. But by the end of 2023, an uneasy détente between ownership and talent was also no longer enough from the point of view of ownership—not in the aftermath of October 7, 2023, and the ensuing media scrutiny of "Israel’s" response.
As early as 2024, Redstone had “publicly broke[n] with the CBS News management team over its handling of an interview with author Ta-Nehisi Coates,” who had written a book critical of "Israel", by the anchor Tony Dokoupil: a Jewish Zionist who had told Coates on air that Coates’s book “would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist” and was then censured by CBS management for bias. Even more decisive to Redstone than the censuring of Dokoupil was October 7 itself, which “had a profound impact on Ms. Redstone, an ardent supporter of Israel whose ex-husband, Yitzhak Korff, known as Ira, is a rabbi and direct descendant of the founder of the Hasidic movement” and whose “son Tyler is also a rabbi.” According to Redstone, speaking to The New York Times, “Once that happened, I wanted out. I wanted to support Israel.”
There never seemed, in this context, much question that a Jewish Zionist family would end up entrusted with Paramount and so of CBS. As Redstone was talking to Ellison, she was also talking to Edgar Bronfman, whose family had co-founded Taglit Birthright; Leon Black, formerly of Apollo Global Management and a patron of Jeffrey Epstein; and Barry Diller, the chairman of IAC. Bronfman, Black, and Diller all had something David Ellison didn’t: a multi-decade track record of success running large and complex corporations. Indeed, Ellison—known initially for “a collection of outrageous sports cars” and “vanity projects, including a now-defunct clothing brand he started with a friend in 2014 called the Lanai Collection, after his father’s Hawaiian island”; and more recently for bringing a hardworking but “nicer” approach than his father to his father’s business—was not an obvious operator for a corporate turnaround.
But Ellison had four things the other suitors did not. The first was his father, Larry, whose net worth is between $200 to $400 billion depending on the month, and Larry Ellison’s connections to the ascendant Trump campaign. The second was what Shari Redstone characterized as Ellison’s “vision for the future and a willingness to invest the huge sums at his disposal…to make strategic acquisitions (perhaps even a stake in TikTok, the wildly popular video-sharing platform, the Redstones speculated) and unify Paramount’s disparate technology platforms.” The third was the Ellisons’ devotion to "Israel", which even by comparison to the competition was profound. (According to New York Magazine, “Larry’s first wife…remembered him taking a week off work to watch coverage of the Six-Day War in 1967” and he “is close with Benjamin Netanyahu, who reportedly vacationed on Larry’s Hawaiian island in 2021.”) The fourth was the presence in the murky and ever-shifting waters of David Ellison’s negotiations with Redstone of a consigliere: the founder and managing partner of RedBird Capital Partners, Gerry Cardinale.
Pictured unnamed in news articles next to David Ellison but lauded in finance pages, Gerry Cardinale is also deeply tied to Jewish Zionist networks. A graduate of Harvard, where he was mentored by Martin Peretz, the then-owner of The New Republic, at the time America’s most prominent Zionist magazine, Cardinale found a foothold on Wall Street. There, his apparent mentor was John Lawson Thornton: the-then co-Chief Operating Officer of Goldman Sachs, a graduate of Hotchkiss and Harvard and Oxford and Yale, the son of the former vice chair of Consolidated Edison, and now Chairman of Redbird Capital Partners, who keeps Cardinale, in true mentor fashion, “in check…at the firm.” Along with Cardinale’s gift for finding Zionist and WASP mentors in worlds they dominated, a handy skill for an Italian Catholic from Villanova, Pennsylvania, Cardinale was also gifted at making money. He did this in part through his skill with numbers, and in part by turning what seems to be his cafeteria Catholic background into a brief for ecumenicism, which is to say for working with everyone.
He worked with the New York Yankees’ George Steinbrenner, Rupert Murdoch, and the Hollywood “super-agent” Ari Emanuel, one of whose brothers had also worked at Martin Peretz’s New Republic. He partnered with Elliott Investment Management, owned by Paul Singer, to acquire AC Milan, the Italian soccer team. He staged a takeover of Britain’s Daily Telegraph and The Spectator in conjunction with United Arab Emirates Vice President Sheikh Mansour, followed by the selling of these properties in the face of widespread resistance from journalists and readers. He and Jeff Zucker, the former CEO of CNN, floated to Jeff Bezos the idea of buying The Washington Post; and it was soon after this call that Bezos laid off The Post’s foreign correspondents and much of The Post’s staff. Cardinale now has a stake in the culture digital weekly Air Mail, founded by a famously prickly former editor at Conde Nast, and thanks to this stake, he has a stake in the insider media business website Puck. He has also made personal inroads with Robert Iger, Michael Eisner’s successor at Disney to whom he supplied an office at RedBird between Iger’s stints as CEO.
In interviews, Cardinale preemptively refutes the notion that “I’m a starf***er, and I just go after these famous people” and he seems, on the evidence, right in his refutation. In fact the more accurate word for him may be “strategic attacher,” especially to Jewish Zionists (Martin Peretz, Ari Emanuel, Paul Singer, Jeff Zucker, Robert Iger) and other players (John Thornton, Rupert Murdoch, Sheikh Mansour, Jeff Bezos, the late George Steinbrenner) with deep ties to Jewish Zionists and "Israel". All of this has made Cardinale perhaps the ideal operator for a deal where both the Ellisons and the people on the other end, Shari Redstone and Warner Bros.’ CEO David Zaslav, were Jewish Zionists.
Based on his work with these players, Cardinale is called inside Paramount Skydance and not entirely accurately “‘The Godfather” and on Wall Street, "arguably [its] most prolific dealmaker.” His brief appears to be, both before the mergers and after, convincing investors and regulators and (not least importantly) journalists that profits are possible in an industry battered by the “streaming” model of viewership at an entity, Paramount Skydance, which would acquire significant debt to purchase a company, Warner Bros., which has a history of hurting its purchasers. Throughout 2024 and 2025, as Ellison and Redstone and then Ellison as Zaslav negotiated, Cardinale was on hand to provide his own brand of reassuring expertise to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Puck, or, eventually, Paramount Skydance’s shareholder report. In the process, he provided these publications with a thru-line, or theme, about the merger: it was to be seen as a savvy business investment rather than what it was, a bare-knuckled effort to consolidate so much control over media that the normal logic of free markets (the superior product enjoys more profits) doesn’t necessarily apply.
In Autumn of 2025, as Ellison geared up to purchase Warner Bros., to widespread concern in Wall Street and Hollywood, Cardinale was “traveling to the Middle East convincing sovereign-wealth funds to join him in backing Paramount’s bid” for Warner Bros., while “tell[ing] anyone who will listen why the hostile $77.9 billion bid” by Paramount Skydance was “superior” to Netflix’s competing bid. These efforts paid off: on April 7, 2026, The New York Times reported that: “Paramount Skydance has secured money from three sovereign wealth investors,” in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar, “to fund its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery.”
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Image by Batoul Chamas.