from the ministry-of-truth dept

Thu, Jan 15th 2026 05:26am - Karl Bode

The Trump empire is nothing if not predictable.

Last year we noted repeatedly how the Trump administration and Larry Ellison (owner of CBS) would be joining forces to try and stop Netflix’s $82.7 billion acquisition of Warner Brothers. Larry, if you’re not aware, is attempting to buy up what’s left of America’s soggy-ass corporate media (and TikTok) to create a propaganda safe space for America’s increasingly unhinged and anti-democratic extraction class.

Warner Brothers rejected Ellison’s higher $108 billion offer for Netflix, citing Saudi money involvement and dodgy financial math as something that might make approval more difficult. When that failed, Ellison attempted a hostile takeover attempt with the help of the president’s son in law and the Saudis. When that didn’t work, Ellison tried to sue Warner Brothers.

With that going nowhere, Ellison has clearly turned to right wing propaganda to help portray the Netflix acquisition as somehow “woke” and dangerous:

The President has also taken to his personal right wing propaganda social media company to cry about woke Netflix (which had the audacity to air a military TV show featuring gay people that made right wing zealots cry not that long ago):

While Netflix’s acquisition of Warner Brothers likely won’t be great for labor, creatives, or consumers (and Netflix will be eager to debase itself further to get regulatory approval), letting Larry Ellison and his nepobaby son turn the remnants of U.S. corporate media into yet another right wing propaganda empire is arguably a far worse outcome for a country already on the brink of collapse.

When this lazy “woke Netflix” campaign fails, I suspect the Trump DOJ will ultimately launch a bogus antitrust inquiry into the Netflix Warner Brothers merger. This campaign will highlight all manner of real and manufactured horrible impacts of the Netflix deal, ignoring the fact that letting one of the nation’s richest right wing extremists own most of U.S. media would be decidedly worse.

Something of note: Netflix has made it clear it only wants the Warner Brothers studio assets. It doesn’t want the sagging-ratings albatrosses that are CNN or the Discovery TV networks. So even if the Netflix deal somehow survives DOJ challenge, it’s still likely those spun-off assets are acquired by Ellison anyway, at which point he’ll be sure to do the same thing to them he’s currently doing to CBS. Just without the money making IP (DC Comics, Harry Potter, etc.) Warner Brothers owns as a backstop.

Which would still result in a more powerful Larry Ellison agitprop empire, but one slightly more likely to collapse from mismanagement. These are all bad outcomes, but some (authoritarian dominance of the entirety of media of the kind we’ve seen in Orban’s Hungary) are decidedly worse than others. Competent Dem strategists or fans of Democracy looking to help need to make stopping that the top priority, since the ideal outcome (blocking all of these deals) simply isn’t realistically on the table.

Filed Under: agitprop, authoritarian, consolidation, david ellison, disinformation, donald trump, journalism, larry ellison, media, propaganda, woke
Companies: netflix, oan, paramount, skydance, warner bros. discovery