‘Free’ Press: Oligopoly and the Erosion of Civil Liberties

This essay appeared in the Oct. 8, 2026 edition of UNFTR’s premium newsletter. Become a UNFTR member to receive our bonus newsletter each week and for other perks.

The last quarter century has done a number on the ostensible American principle of freedoms.

Civil liberties have been so far eroded that they’re barely recognizable anymore, with the so-called war on terror playing an outsized role in hollowing out these apparent fundamental principles.

From free speech to our right to privacy under the Fourth Amendment, nothing is what it once was. Even writing about it now sounds quaint—and perhaps most distressing, there’s little evidence that the masses actually care. Our lives—IRL and the underlying data the digital world uses to create vast dossiers on us—have become so overwhelmingly sanitized, productized, and commoditized that our collective existence has been thoroughly hollowed out.

You can try your best not to be exposed, but you eventually get vacuumed up by the public and private dragnet, including hot new apps foisted onto the market by miscreants in Silicon Valley promising to streamline your daily life. This transformation has happened at such a mind-bending pace that you now have a new generation of AI workers who would rather build an AI voice to read to their children than spend three minutes connecting over “Elephant & Piggie” themselves.

And things are about to get much, much worse.

The “Succession”-like hostile takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery by Paramount Skydance was finalized on Oct. 6, bringing to an end the protracted battle over the once-respected Hollywood giant, which was nearly poached by streaming behemoth Netflix. Amid the war over Warner Bros. Discovery, which controls such properties as “Harry Potter,” the DC universe, “Lord of the Rings,” and others, along with major assets like HBO Max, we were forced to reckon with two bad options: seeing WarnerBros. Discovery being swallowed whole by a streamer that could kill movie theaters or taken over by a media giant with disproportionate control of the movies and shows you watch, and the news you consume.

The $111 billion deal means two of the five largest studios are now under one roof. David Ellison, the son of mega GOP donor Larry Ellison, gets it all. He gets to combine HBO Max and Paramount+. He gets “Game of Thrones” and “The Sopranos.” He gets CNN and CBS News. He gets to re-employ Anderson Cooper after the cable news broadcaster quit “60 Minutes” last spring. Despite having it all, he wants you to believe that he’s the pesky neophyte being crushed under the weight of much more deep-pocketed and influential competitors.

“Add up every hour Americans spend watching television, and a combined Paramount-Warner would account for less than 20 percent of all watch time—competing every day against Netflix, Amazon, Apple, which are all companies whose resources dwarf ours,” he wrote in The New York Times this summer. “Include YouTube’s user-generated content in that math, and our share would drop to around 13 percent.”

Definitely doesn’t sound like a guy done buying other studios or media institutions.

America’s tragic descent into an oligopoly has implications that go well beyond the ever-growing inequality gap. That’s because there is no universe in which unfettered capitalism and inalienable rights can conceivably co-exist. Not when corporations and oligarchs themselves are buying elections. Not when the purchased office holders do the bidding of their mega-donors. Not when election after election sets gaudy new spending records.

To their credit, many freedom-of-the-press and media rights groups spent months trying to stop the Paramount Skydance-Warner Bros. Discovery merger. Along with the expected loss of jobs in the entertainment industry—other Hollywood mergers have led to thousands of layoffs—they’ve warned that further news consolidation would not only harm the public but also contribute to the continued erosion of press freedoms.

David Ellison himself has been at the center of the months-long controversy over at CBS News following the appointment of Bari Weiss as the network’s editor-in-chief. Weiss has been accused of inserting herself—and therefore her politics—into CBS News coverage, including pulling a “60 Minutes” investigation into CECOT, the notorious Salvadoran prison. Ellison’s tumultuous reign also includes the high-profile firing of Scott Pelley, arguably the face of “60 Minutes,” who publicly criticized Weiss’ young tenure at CBS News.

Given the Ellisons’ proximity to power, the aggressive takeover bid of Warner Bros. Discovery became one of the most closely watched deals in recent history.

Larry Ellison, one of the richest men in the world, is among the most prominent mega-donors to the GOP and Trump. The Oracle founder was 11th on OpenSecrets’ list of federal mega-donors in the 2022 election cycle, pouring $31 million into outside groups that support conservatives. Two years later, he injected $45 million into a political nonprofit supporting Trump, according to the Wall Street Journal. In 2025, TikTok, under intense pressure from the Trump administration and various members of Congress, spun off its U.S. operations to a group of investors, including Oracle. Then the multi-year campaign against the uber-popular social media giant escalated amid the genocide in Gaza. While much of the debate over TikTok previously focused on the extent to which the Chinese government had access to American users’ data, the tipping point proved to be users’ support for the Palestinian cause on the app, which Israel’s genocidal supporters in the U.S. Congress viewed as a threat. Initially dismissed as a leftist conspiracy, former U.S. Senator Mitt Romney said the quiet part out loud in May 2024 as he lamented the increased negative perception of Israel.

Somehow, the broader media ecosystem failed to connect the dismantling of TikTok’s U.S. operations to the broader attacks on free speech.

Now the Ellisons have their hands in one of the most consequential social media platforms of the last decade, and some of the most influential media networks in history.

“[M]edia corporations have become massive and massively rich—their size and reach built on policy decisions, and their extreme wealth often conditioned on cozying up to powerful political figures and parties,” the media rights group Free Press (not to be confused with Weiss’ The Free Press Substack-based outlet) wrote.

And cozying up and lavishing them with gifts they have.

ProPublica reported in July that as many as seven FCC commissioners, including Brendan Carr, the regulator’s chair, have accepted tickets to the Kennedy Center Gala over the last decade. Carr, the outlet reported, enjoyed the event from a private skybox that also included David Ellison and other CBS/Paramount overlords.

Those revelations came two months after The New York Times published its own bombshell: Paramount hosted a party in honor of the Trump White House at the U.S. Institute of Peace. Among the guests was the then-acting United States Attorney General Todd Blanche, whose DOJ operates an antitrust division responsible for scrutinizing mergers.

The decline of media independence and the wider attacks on the free press predate Trump, the Ellison media takeover, and the right-wingification of corporate media. It’s been a slow burn, one many have been warning of, seemingly yelling into the abyss.

The greatest threat to press freedoms has always been the billionaire class. They’re coming for anything and everything. It’s a race toward domination, our liberties be damned.