FREEDOM of the press, AJ Liebling famously said, belongs to the man who owns one.

And Liebling ought to know. He was an ardent critic of the press of his day.  

These days freedom of the press and of the media, and more specifically of mainstream media outlets, belongs to the oligarch who owns it, almost all of whom are, as in Liebling’s day, men.

Mainstream media was never much to shake a stick at. But there was what is considered a golden age, that of, for example, CBS and Walter Cronkite, where a beloved newscaster was the voice of a nation and, instead of distorting, honed the news to at least attempt to give his audience a snapshot of reality.

It was Cronkite’s reporting and the images of body bags coming back from Vietnam every evening around the dinner table that as much as anything helped turn the US population against the war.

Those days are long gone and what we have now on the amalgam of TV news in particular, the four networks NBC, ABC, CBS and Fox and cable news, is an endlessly repeated, depending on who is in power, either genuflecting or politely or riotously opposing the regime, with the point often being to draw attention away from the fact that regimes come and go in the US, Britain, France and Germany but the underlying power and direction of a West led by the US is a hell-bent and destructive focus on maintaining its stranglehold over the global economy and its resources even as it watches that hold slip away. And as it becomes more desperate and bellicose in the process.

The media has always been concentrated, five major companies in the US, in England and the Commonwealth in the hands of the right-wing fanatic Rupert Murdoch and in France in the hands of the luxury barons Vincent Bellore and Bernard Arnault, two of the richest men in that country and in the world.

We’re watching a new wave of consolidation, an attempt to take over mainstream media and utterly erase what is by now only the spectre of “responsible journalism,” in a far-right and zionist attempt to control the airwaves, to turn all media into Fox News.

Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, who alternates with Elon Musk as the richest man in the world, heavily invested in the coming bubble that is AI, is footing the bill for the Paramount/CBS takeover. Oracle itself was a spin-off of the security state, its database developed for and by the CIA.

Ellison is a rabid zionist who at the drop of a hat professes his admiration for the IDF and is the largest private donor to that august body, the perpetrator of the Gazan genocide. Ellison was accused in a lawsuit, before the genocide, of promoting the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Israel.

The first move of the new regime at CBS was to appoint Bari Weiss editor-in-chief of CBS news.

Weiss, once an editor for the New York Times, left to found a right-wing start-up erroneously titled The Free Press, described by media critics as “hawkish and anti-Palestinian” and more damningly as a scheme to “empower right-wing factions within established elite institutions.”

As news censor at CBS, Weiss claims her goal is to represent the supposed other 80 per cent of Americans and she wants to promote “charismatic” guests such as Alan Dershowitz, another zionist, defender of Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein, and reputed visitor to Epstein Island.

If the film and television concentration weren’t enough, Larry may soon own a significant share in the new American version of TikTok, the short video network whose audience of under-40s has been watching clips of the Gaza slaughter which has partly accounted for a change in attitude towards Israel from victim to bloodthirsty aggressor which is now more widespread.

Israel banned most journalists and all Al-Jazeera journalists from Gaza as the genocide mounted, killing many journalists in the process. But with do-it-yourself reporting and filming, the Gaza atrocity continues to appear on the screens of the world’s youth and is having the same effect as Walter Cronkite’s body bags.

In the proposed deal, Ellison’s Oracle would be named the “security provider” which will grant it control over the algorithms that manage the news, allowing the company to start censoring posted content, ie the videos from Gaza. To say nothing of granting Oracle AI access to users’ data to spy on consumers and add to its version of AI.

The naked assertion of this much power, in a no-holds barred oligarchic and corporate takeover of mainstream media, is not a sign of strength, but of weakness.

That bourgeois democracy functions best, that is, in the interest of the wealthy, when it keeps its cards close to the vest instead of spewing them across the table so we can all see they aren’t holding anything in their hands.

This article is part of a podcast titled Culture & Barbarism. Listen to the podcast, like and subscribe on Substack at dennis.broe@substack.com and on Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/posts/culture-8-media-145438018