It Could Happen Here - The Tech Fascist Takeover of the Media

Episode Date: December 15, 2025

Mia discusses Larry Ellison’s takeover of CBS, Jeff Bezos’ transformation of the Washington Post, Teen Vogue, and the broader wave of tech fascists buying out the media. Sources: https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/10/nbc-and-cbs-cuts-hit-race-and-culture-verticals/ https://archive.ph/gg6UO#selection-471.223-471.275 https://tech.yahoo.com/social-media/articles/elon-musk-reportedly-helped-larry-112145682.html https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/ceos-everything-david-larry-ellison-oracle-skydance-paramount-kimmel-carr.php https://archive.ph/xBjST https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/10/nbc-and-cbs-cuts-hit-race-and-culture-verticals/ https://www.theroot.com/massive-black-firings-at-cbs-but-what-about-gayle-king-2000070868 https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/23/media/ellison-wbd-trump-warner-bros-discovery-bid https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/gayle-king-leaving-cbs-mornings-b2855747.html https://www.status.news/p/washington-post-layoffs-cuts-morale https://x.com/JeffBezos/status/1894757287052362088 https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/07/nyt-opinion-bennet-resigns-cotton-op-ed-306317 https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/10/media/trump-cnn-sold-paramount-warner-bros-netflix https://fortune.com/2025/09/28/larry-ellison-ai-surveillance-oracle-tiktok-deal-social-media/ https://www.politico.com/news/2020/07/14/new-york-times-bari-weiss-resigns-360730 https://newrepublic.com/article/203758/bari-weiss-cbs-news-strategy https://nwasianweekly.com/2025/10/nbc-news-dissolves-asian-america-blk-latino-and-out-teams-in-sweeping-cuts/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Gentleman'scuturban.com. Please enjoy responsibly. Hey, everybody, it's Chuck and Josh from the Stuff You Should Know podcast, and it's that time of year again when we knuckle down to do our annual holiday episodes. We collected our best past classic holiday episodes and compiled them into a 12 days of Christmas toys playlist that the whole family can enjoy. That's right. Maybe you missed it the first time we detailed the history of Beanie Babies, Monopoly, or Yo-Yo's, and a whole lot more.

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Listen on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What up, y'all? It's your boy, Kevin on stage. I want to tell you about my new podcast called Not My Best Moment, where I talk to artists, athletes, entertainers, creators, friends, people I admire who had massive success about their massive failures. What did they mess up on? What is their heartbreak?

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Welcome to It Could Happen here, a podcast about how freedom is a joke in our lives of the punchline. I am your host, Mia Wong. Long ago, 2013, in a galaxy, basically exactly where this one is now, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, and now a terminal fascist,

purchased the Washington Post. This was a sign of things to come. The danger of the American free press is, and has always been, that we do not have a free press, we have a capitalist press.

Writing, and especially reporting, is a material product. Journalists have to eat. they have to travel, they have to go places, they have to meet people. All of this requires capital. And the problem with all of this requiring capital is that capital is not a neutral entity and the people who possess capital have interests. Fast forward to 2020. As protests and uprisings raised across the United States against the police and white supremacy, a battle broke out inside of the New York Times' newsrooms and editorial staff

about the newspaper publishing an opinion piece called Send in the Troops, calling for, you guessed it, sending in the troops to attack protesters published by a member of the American government named Tom Cotton. Editors resigned in outrage, debates raised across journalist slacks. It was the culmination of decades of battles about the direction of politics in race.

in the United States fought simultaneously in the streets and in the newsroom. 2020 was a significant danger to the ruling class. The actual ideology that was so dangerous it had to be destroyed

was this. If the premise of 2020 is true, which is that the U.S. is a structurally racist country founded on slavery and genocide and that reproduces those same violences through the prison system, which, you know, has legal slavery in it

from the structure of the 13th Amendment and reproduces it again through the police, then the American project is indefensible. And here there be dragons. The ruling class

needed to move to stop it. And so they created what they would call, I guess, a new ideology, but was really a continuation of centuries-old strategies, this time rebranded as anti-woke. One of the avatars of anti-woke was

Barry Weiss. Barry Weiss was at the New York Times at the time, was an ideological diversity hire, which is to say affirmative action for white conservatives, as affirmative action has only existed in the figments of the minds of conservatives. She was given

a cozy make-work job at the beginning of the Trump administration as an opinion staff editor and writer for the New York Times. She was hired specifically to bring in more Trumpian figures into the opinion section. This is, and I cannot emphasize this enough, this is the fever dream of affirmative action in the conservative mind, right? And these are going to be a bunch of people who really hate affirmative action.

But again, what they are being given, they are being handed by the most important newspaper, probably in the entire world. You know, she was handed a job because she was a fucking right-winger. Now, Weiss was part of the, shall we say, conversations at the New York Times about, again, whether or not a newspaper should print a letter from a sitting U.S. representative, calling for the deployment of U.S. soldiers against the American people. And she saw this as an opportunity not to resist a obviously tyrannical program by, again, a sitting member of the United States government,

she saw this as her moment to do a grift. Now, in this moment, she resigned from the New York Times in a huff, raving about the quote, lack of ideological diversity who had a giant rant about how the Twitter is not the masked head

of the New York Times, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, which again, I can't emphasize this enough that she was brought in as a right-wing affirmative action hire in order to appease the demand from, like, the ruling class, I guess, for, like, pro-Trump people. They already had a bunch of right-wingers. This is completely unhinged.

But, you know, she resigns, and she has this big press to her in the right-wing press trying to talk about how she was canceled. And, of course, none of this ever even happened, right? We can debate the effect to which cancellation ever was even really a thing or did anything at all, but she was not canceled. She literally resigned of her own free will. She was not forced out. She chose to leave in order to pursue a,

career as a right-wing griff for another fields, namely substack, where she ran a newsletter that was sort of rebranded as like, oh, it's a media outlet called the Free Press. It's like, no, this is Barry Weiss's substack. Come on. What are we doing here? What are we doing here? Now, Weiss is not a journalist. She is a right-wing ideologue. She's also a hardline Zionist. If you want to go into all of the absolutely unhinged shit that Barry Weiss has said and done over the years, all of the just unbelievably homophobic shit, all of the weird racist shit all of the anti-immigrant shit

that she said there's a very good John Oliver thing about her she is part of this story but if we spent this entire episode just talking about how much she fucking sucks we would be here for like two decades now in a just world none of this would matter at all

this would just be a conservative walking off from the free job that she was given by the New York Times stomping off at a huff and going to start a substack, whatever. Who cares? This is not a just world. This is the United States. She now controls one of the most powerful and important news organizations in the United States. The story of how she got there is the story of the future of the American media. Unfortunately for all of us, the story is a stressingly simple.

Barry Weiss and her outlet, I'm using that in immense quotations again, this is just a substack. was bought out by one Larry Ellison. Larry Ellison then appointed Weiss to be the ideological hatchet woman for his takeover of Paramount, which owns CBS. There was no secret plan. There was no weird strategy. There was no Illuminati cabal behind the scenes. It didn't require any effort at all.

All you have to do in order to install a right-wing hack as the editor-in-chief of CBS News is by the company. The results have been devastating. I would call what happened to resegregation. There was a large-scale firing of non-white employees. NBC eliminated the editorial teams for NBC Asian America, NBC Black, NBC Latino, and NBC Out. NBC Out was the queer one.

They fired Gail King. they did some stuff that frankly sounds like a joke. I'm just going to read this quote from the root. And the CBS News Bureau in Johannesburg, South Africa, has been shut down with coverage of Africa shifting to London. That is, again, they closed the South Africa Bureau, the Citizens' CVS Bureau in South Africa, and moved their coverage of Africa from Africa to London.

If a hardline Marxist ideologue had written this in 1966, no one would have believed them and in the process what they've done here is they've destroyed the NBC outlets that were responsible for doing a whole bunch of coverage for different groups of non-white people, right? NBC BLK, O's NBC Black,

did a whole bunch of very good coverage of the uprising in 2020, right? NBC Asian America did a bunch of good work. NBC Out was a place where you could occasionally find a trans person who was allowed to write. And all of that is gone because one man

Larry Allison and his son, David Allison, bought the fucking media company and installed this unhinged right-wing hack as their ideological secret police. I don't even know what you would call this position, the ideological purge executor, I guess you could call it, of CBS. Now, obviously, there are multiple aspects to this.

We'll talk about Larry Allison, himself in a second because he's a very important figure. But first, before we talk about the consolidation of capital into increasing monopolies, let's go hear from some of those monopolies. Product and services, let's go. It's 5.23 p.m. One of your kids is asking for a snack. Another is building a fort out of your clean laundry, and you're staring at a half-empty fridge and thinking, What are we even going to eat tonight? Or you could just hello-fresh it.

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Listen to Crimless on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. What up, y'all? It's your boy, Kevin on stage. I want to tell you about my new podcast called Not My Beard. best moment where I talk to artists, athletes, entertainers, creators, friends, people I admire who had massive success about their massive failures. What did they mess up on? What is their heartbreak? And what did they learn from it? I got judged horribly. The judges were like,

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One of the obvious driving factors behind what has become a right-wing fascist takeover of the media has been the consolidation of capital into increasing monopolies. Now, it's been a very, very famous thing in the U.S. to say that most of American media is controlled by five companies. But here's the thing. Even those five companies, those can always be consolidated into fewer and fewer companies, right, as the company start to struggle, as any one of them sees weakness in the other ones,

you get attempts to buy them out. And this is what happens with Paramount, which is, again, the parent company that owns NBC. So the way that it's framed, if you read it in the press, it was a merger between Skydance, which was Ellison's sort of outlet and Paramount. But that's not really what happened. Really what happened was Paramount,

like, was bought by Ellison and Skydance. and they were merged together after that. And this is a problem with the concentration of capital, right? As capital becomes increasingly more and more concentrated, and as there are individual people and also entities that control more and more capital, their ability to simply swallow the rest of their competition and consume increases. And this is a significant advantage to the companies to get to swallow this capital. They get to absorb all of the intellectual property.

and so now they have control over the property regimes that allow them to control cultural production. And as a sort of incidental bonus, they can take control of the media. Now, it's worth getting into the Ellison's themselves. Now, Larry Ellison, back in the Halcyon days of 2020, was merely the 11th richest man in the world when he, quote, participated in a call

shortly after the 2020 election that focus on strategies for contesting the legitimacy of the vote, according to court documents and a participant. The November 14th call included Lindsay Graham, Fox News host Sean Hannity, Jay Seckleau, an attorney for President Donald Trump, and James Bob Jr., an attorney for True the Vote, a Texas-based nonprofit.

True The Vote was a completely unhinged organization dedicated to overturning the 2020 election by doing all these weird voter fraud things, and they had a strategy call with a attorney and a strategy call with a bunch of Trump supporters including one Larry Ellison. Now, again, that was back in 2020.

Here in 2025, and now fighting with Elon Musk for the title of the richest person in the fucking world, Ellison said, and I quote, we're going to have supervision. Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times, and if there's a problem,

AI will report that problem and report it to the appropriate person citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on. Now, in that intervening time, Larry Ellison is one of the people behind Oracle. And Oracle has benefited enormously as a company that got really in on the cloud storage boom. They've benefited enormously from selling a bunch of shit to AI companies. Larry Ellison is also a huge AI supporter, a huge backer of AI, a huge someone who wants to spread AI and someone who wants to spread AI, you know, very specifically, and this is very

important, into surveillance technology. He is also one of the people who, as 2020 went on and as the last half decade has come on, and as the giant sort of backlash against the uprising, and as his attempt to reassert racism as the dominant ideology of the United States, to make sure that capitals hold over this country and that white supremacies hold over this country would be maintained, he has become one of the large drivers of this entire project. He's not the only one. Jeff Bezos, as we started this program with, already owned the Washington Post. In 2025, he went in to very seriously change it. Jeff Bezos on the now fascist Twitter, and we will get to that in a second, too.

wrote, and this was a letter that he was sent to his staff, and this is the editorial section, I'm writing to let you know about a change coming to our opinion pages. We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars, personal liberties and free markets. We'll cover other topics too, of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others. David Shipley, who had been his hand-picked editor, resigned rather than lead the effort. It's not like Shipley had been like a leftist, right?

But, you know, I'm going to read another part of this letter. Quote, I offered David Shipley, who I admire greatly, because, you know, he was an hampic guy, the opportunity to lead this new chapter. I suggested to him that the answer wasn't hell yes, that it had to be no. After careful consideration, David decided to step away. So, okay, what was actually happening here? He came in was like, our board is not fascist enough. And if you're not going to make it more fascist, then get the fuck out of the way.

And the guy he had picked to run the editorial board like three years ago went, this is unacceptable, I cannot be involved in this, and left. And now, Washington Post publishes pieces with titles like, quote, Pam Bondi's welcome woke rollback. The Justice Department rescinds regulations encouraging racial preferences. You know, and you can in some ways see all of the things coming together. Obviously, Bezos was a major supporter of the Trump administration, is a major supporter of the Trump administration, put a bunch of money into the unhinged Trump

ballroom. And when he said Justice Warren rescinds regulations encouraging racial preferences, they're talking about anti-discrimination ordinances, right? That's what they're actually talking about. But these people have been so cooked and have stewed so much in the ideology of countering the ideology of 2020, that they're now doing all of this reversion. racism stuff, where they think that if you're not allowed to discriminate, that's anti-white discrimination? And the Washington Post has been tanking, effectively, in the wake of a whole bunch of right-wing editorial changes. Its audience has significantly declined since this. A whole bunch of people who described to the Post called it in. Their subscriber count is just absolutely

pitiful now. The reach has been contracting. The paper is going to shit. But that doesn't matter. because the Washington Post is not a money-making outlet. The Washington Post is a chance to shape the way that the country thinks. And it is better that, you know, seven people in Washington, D.C., who are all identically-minded conservatives, read the Washington Post and agree with it, than it is for there to be any sort of independence whatsoever from anything on the shop floor or from any of the people writing for it. We've also seen, in recent months, the elimination,

of Teen Folk. Conte Nass, Teen Fogue's parent company, eliminated Team Vogue as an independent outlet. Teen Vogue had been the furthest left of the even sort of mainstream outlets in the U.S. It had carried a bunch of extremely good and radical work on race and gender. It was also one of the few outlets with consistent transwriting. And of course, the other aspect of all of these purges has been unbelievable on hinged transphobia, and this was them just destroying what had been a very, very important outlet on the left for telling the stories of non-white people, telling the stories of workers, and telling the stories of trans people, and they just destroyed it, even though, and this is actually very interesting, ever since Teen Vogue had, you know, shifted to

doing a bunch of leftist coverage and covering the protests against Donald Trump in his first administration, and had gone towards actually, you know, talking about labor and talking about struggle, talking about unions and talking about, you know, the experiences of people living under white supremacy. Its readership had exploded. But again, that doesn't matter because it's bad for Donald Trump. And so, we're seeing the ideological tightening consolidation of the media as what had been an outlet that allowed people to talk about shit was just destroyed. Now, speaking about outlets, destroying things ideologically, hey, products and services, please don't destroy us. Woo!

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Bourbon, please visit gentlemen's cuthuburn.com. Please enjoy responsibly. Have you ever listened to those true crime shows and found yourself with more questions than answers? And what is this? How is that not a story we all know? What's this? Where is that? Why is it wet? Boy, do we have a show for you? From Smartless Media, Campside Media, and Big Money Players comes Crimeless. Join me, Josh Dean, investigative journalists. And me, Rory Scoville, comedian, as we celebrate the amazing creativity of the world's dumbest criminals. We'll look into some of the silliest ways folks have broken the laws. Honestly, it feels more like a high-level prank than a crime. Who catfishes a city? And meets some memorable anti-heroes. There are thousands

of angry, horny monkeys. Clap if you think, she's a witch. And it freaks you out. He has X-ray vision. How could I not follow him? Honestly, I got to follow me. He can see right through me. Listen to Crimless on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. What up y'all? It's your boy, Kevin on stage. I want to tell you about my new podcast called Not My Best Month, where I talk to artists, athletes, entertainers, creators, friends, people I admire who had massive success about their massive failures. What do they mess up on. What is their heartbreak? And what did they learn from it? I got judged horribly. The judges were like, you're trash. I don't know how you got on the show. Boo. Somebody had

tomatoes. If they had tomatoes, they would have thrown the tomatoes. Let's be honest. We've all had those moments we'd rather forget. We bumped our head. We made a mistake. The deal fell through. We're embarrassed. We failed. But this podcast is about that and how we made it through. So when they sat me down, they were kind of like, we got into the small talk, and they were just like, so what do you got? What? What ideas? And I was like, oh, no. What? Check out not my best moment with me, Kevin on stage on the high heart radio app, Apple podcast, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcast. Now, as we covered on this show a few weeks ago, Condi Nast also fired several union workers legally. for, you know, staging a, again, protected workplace action

demanding to know what the fuck was going on with these Teen Vogue firings. And that's another aspect of all of this takeover, which is that these outlets just viciously and radically hate, and this is the ruling class, as people who run these outlets, viciously hate unions. And this is something that's very important to understand

in terms of media unions, because media unions were also a very powerful force for encouraging diversity. Because, as it turns out, workers, and this is true, I could say this is someone who's part of a media union, less racist than the bosses, and in fact would like there to be more non-white people and don't like it when non-white people are discriminated against. And this is one of the things that these media unions and that unions in general do is try to help you not get fucking discriminated against on racial grounds. So, of course, a part and parcel of this has been the targeting of the union. and that's what we've been seeing at Conte Nass, where they also fired workers who had nothing to do with Teen Vogue,

and also one of whom was on the show and is trans, and you should go listen to that episode because it's very good. But that's another aspect of this right-wing consolidation, is that media unions are able to push back against the untrammeled power of these fascist billionaires to turn news coverage into whatever the fuck they want. And that's what's happened at CBS, where they're now doing giant specials with like Kirk's Widow and all of these just

absolutely deranged, unbelievably bizarre right-wing pieces that they're just sort of airing now. And in order to, you know, stop that shit, you need powerful media unions. And this is one of the things the ruling class is trying to crush. Now, it's also worth mentioning that these white-wing billionaires are trying to consolidate their hold on social media as well as the traditional media. And obviously, the largest example of this is Elon Musk, who's purchased Twitter and has effectively termed Twitter into another arm of stormfront. It is a just unhinged stew of racism and conspiracy that is now effectively unusable if you

don't want, like, the most racist shit you've ever seen in your entire life, just in every single one of your replies. And it's also become a major, you know, vector of targeting for the Trump administration, where what Twitter is used for now, instead of being a platform that at one time actually was able to play a role as a thing that does resistance, as a tool of protesters and as a tool of people who opposed the untrammeled rule of billionaires, it's now been converted into just racist slop and a way to track down anyone who's sort of vaguely center left and just put them in the eyes of the administration so they can be targeted by the state. And it's also worth noting that one of the people who helped bankroll the purchase of Twitter, because Elon Musk couldn't just purchase it directly, was one Larry Ellison. Larry Ellison is also part of a massive attempt to buy TikTok. Listeners of the show are probably familiar with the whole extremely weird story about how TikTok

was banned last year under the Biden administration, sort of bafflingly, and then Trump sort of just broke the law and made it still be usable. but has been trying to force TikTok to be sold to American buyers, and the conglomerate that's supposed to buy it is a Larry Ellison thing. So he's also attempting to buy TikTok. And finally, the story we were to close on is that Larry Ellison has been doing a hostile takeover bid of Warner Brothers. Now, Warner Brothers currently is set to be bought by Netflix.

Larry Ellison kept on submitting bids to them and his efforts to actually get the purchase to go through were consistently denied. But, comma, in the wake of that, they're attempting to do a hostile takeover bid where they just go to the shareholders directly and try to buy them out at what they claim is a higher share price. I'm not going to go into that whole thing. It's a fiasco. But what is interesting for our purposes is that David Ellison, who's the guy running Paramount,

who's the guy who's been directly running the ideological purges, has met several times with, Trump, and last time they met Trump, has promised that he would change the coverage of CNN in order to make it better for Trump. Now, it's also worth noting that buying CNN is not part of the deal for the Warner takeover bid by Netflix, right? If Netflix takes over Warner Bros, they don't get CNN. Under Paramount and Larry Ellison's deal, they would get CNN. Now, even though CNN has done a whole bunch of unhinged shit, like having Ben Shapiro on to do fucking electron coverage. Jesus

fucking Christ, okay. Trump has still been mad at them for reporting even a tiny bit critically about his administration. And Trump has been kind of refusing to pick a side directly in terms of the takeover bid for Warner Brothers and the fight

between Netflix and Paramount. But he's now said that he wants to make sure that CNN is sold and that it should get new leadership, presumably along the style of what happened with CBS. And so this is sort of the final phase of all of this, right? Which is Trump administration has the ability to use its quote-unquote antitrust power in order to stop one of these two companies from doing

this buyout. And Trump administration is using the fact that the media is being bought out by his allies in order to try to get people to buy CNN and simply eliminate negative news coverage of him. And I don't really think I need to explain why it's extremely. bad that the President of the United States could simply order a news outlet to be bought out and then suddenly it's bought out. I think it's kind of self-explanatory why

that's unbelievably bad, but that is the situation that we may rapidly find ourselves in because we don't live in anything that even sort of looks like a democracy. We live in the dictatorship of capital. And a thing about the press under a dictatorship,

even one that's as decentralized as the dictatorship of capital, is that that one particularly fascist faction of capital can simply roll in by the media and take control of it. And that's the project that we're seeing now. But these people are not undefeatable. We beat them before, we can't beat them again. And in some ways, their project is kind of self-defeating in that they have spent a significant amount of time hollowing out people's trust in these institutions. And there is an extent to which, as bad as all of this is, they may simply be taking control

of a husk that they had already caused or brought from the inside. And meanwhile, all of these, all of his control of the media that they've been taking has not stopped everyone from fucking hating them. And that's the note that I want to leave everyone here on. It doesn't matter how much of the media these people buy. Everyone still hates them. We can fight them and we can win. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media.

For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for it could happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. If a Lenovo gaming computer is on your holiday list, don't shop around. Just go directly to the source, Lenovo.com. It's your last chance to score exclusive deals on the gaming PCs you want,

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