Who Owns the News

The Concentration

A useful exercise: name the people who decide what news reaches the majority of Americans.

The list is shorter than you think.

Elon Musk owns X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. The Ellison family — Larry and his son David — now controls Paramount, which owns CBS, and is positioned to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns CNN. Mark Zuckerberg controls Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post and Amazon MGM Studios. Rupert Murdoch and his family control Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post through News Corp and Fox Corporation. The Ochs-Sulzberger family controls The New York Times through a family trust established in 1896.

According to research by FAIR, which tallied Press Gazette data over twelve months from December 2024 to November 2025, total US visits to major news sites reached 45.6 billion. More than half of those visits — nearly 25.5 billion — went to sites controlled by just seven families or corporate entities.

This is not a recent development. Media consolidation has been accelerating for decades. But the current moment is different in two ways that matter. First, the owners are no longer primarily media people. They are technology billionaires whose primary businesses operate in sectors where government regulation, contracts, and political favour directly affect their fortunes. Second, their acquisitions now span both the platforms that distribute information and the organisations that produce it.

The Ellison Expansion

The most significant shift in American media ownership in 2025 and 2026 has been the rise of the Ellison family.

In August 2025, Skydance Media, led by David Ellison, completed its acquisition of Paramount. The deal, backed by his father Larry Ellison, the co-founder of Oracle and one of the wealthiest people on earth, gave the family control of CBS News, CBS television, and Paramount's vast entertainment catalogue. The changes were immediate: DEI policies were gutted, a right-wing opinion journalist with no broadcasting or newsroom experience was installed as editor-in-chief of CBS News, and a new ombudsman role was created and filled with a conservative policy analyst.

The Ellisons are now positioned to add CNN to their portfolio. If Paramount acquires Warner Bros. Discovery — a deal Trump has pledged personal involvement in reviewing — the family would control both CNN and CBS News. The Guardian reported that Larry Ellison has told Trump that if Paramount gains control of Warner Bros. Discovery, it will fire CNN hosts whom Trump does not like.

The implications are stark. CBS and CNN together represent two of the three broadcast and cable news operations that maintained at least a posture of independence from political alignment. If both fall under the control of a family with documented ties to the current administration, the structural diversity of American broadcast journalism narrows to a historically precarious point.

The Platform Owners

The acquisition of news organisations by technology billionaires is one vector of consolidation. The control of distribution platforms is another.

Social media is now how millions of Americans consume news, and nearly all major platforms are controlled by individuals with significant political and business interests in government policy. Musk's X openly promotes his political views and those of his preferred candidates through algorithmic amplification and direct editorial intervention. Zuckerberg's Meta has, since 2025, shifted its policies to align with the current administration, disbanded its fact-checking programme in favour of Community Notes, and relaxed its hate speech protections.

The result is that both the production of news and its distribution are now concentrated in the hands of a remarkably small group of individuals, most of whom have direct financial interests that are affected by government action.

This is not a conspiracy theory. It is a structural observation. Billionaires do not need to actively direct every editorial decision to influence the news. Ownership sets the boundaries within which editorial decisions are made. The journalist who knows that her employer has a business relationship with the administration does not need to be instructed to soften a story. The instruction is implicit in the structure.

The Historical Parallel

The concentration of media ownership has precedent, and the precedent is instructive.

After World War II, the Allied powers restricted media concentration in occupied Germany and Japan because they understood that such concentration had promoted anti-democratic political cultures. The assumption was straightforward: a diverse press is a structural requirement of democratic governance, and a concentrated press is a structural risk to it.

For much of the twentieth century, the United States maintained at least the aspiration of media diversity through regulatory frameworks including ownership caps, cross-ownership rules, and public interest obligations for broadcast licensees. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 and subsequent deregulation largely dismantled these protections. What followed was a wave of mergers, acquisitions, and private-equity buyouts that reduced the number of independent media voices in the United States to a level the postwar architects of media regulation would have found alarming.

The current landscape represents the culmination of that deregulatory trajectory. Not a sudden capture, but a gradual accretion of ownership until the structural diversity that once characterised American media became a historical artefact.

What Ownership Changes

The case that billionaire ownership of media is dangerous does not depend on proving that owners directly dictate coverage. The evidence that it shapes coverage indirectly is substantial enough.

The Washington Post's decision not to endorse a presidential candidate in 2024, breaking with decades of tradition, came from its owner, not its editorial board. The timing — immediately before a closely contested election — suggested that business considerations outweighed editorial independence. Bezos denied any such motivation. But Amazon held billions in government contracts, and the perception of editorial interference was sufficient to damage the paper's credibility and trigger a wave of subscription cancellations.

Warner Bros. Discovery, even before its potential acquisition by the Ellisons, had a track record of accommodating political pressure. Taken together with the CBS changes, a pattern emerges: owners with significant non-media business interests are structurally incentivised to avoid coverage that threatens those interests.

The effect is not censorship in the dramatic sense. It is a steady narrowing of the range of stories that get assigned, the investigations that get funded, and the angles that editors feel comfortable pursuing. The most important stories — those involving the intersection of political power and corporate wealth — are precisely the ones most likely to be quietly deprioritised.

The Local Dimension

The billionaire ownership story is usually told at the national level, but its local dimension may be more consequential.

Private equity firms, which represent a different form of concentrated ownership, have acquired struggling local newspaper chains across the United States. The most widely documented case is Alden Global Capital, which has pursued a strategy of acquiring newspapers and stripping them of assets rather than investing in their journalism. But Alden is not alone. The pattern of acquisition, cost-cutting, and decline has been replicated by multiple firms whose interest in journalism extends no further than its capacity to generate returns during a managed decline.

The result is a landscape in which the local journalism most communities depend on is owned by entities with no stake in the community and no interest in the journalism itself. This is arguably a more direct threat to democratic accountability than the ownership of national outlets, because local journalism is where the vast majority of accountability reporting actually happens.

The Incentive Structure

It is worth being precise about the mechanism by which concentrated ownership affects journalism.

Billionaires do not, in general, buy media companies in order to control the news. They buy them for reasons that range from vanity to strategic positioning to genuine interest in journalism. Bezos has described his purchase of The Washington Post as driven by belief in its mission. Musk described his acquisition of Twitter as motivated by concern for free speech. Larry Ellison's motivations appear to be primarily strategic.

But motivation matters less than structure. When the owner of a media company has other businesses that depend on government favour — cloud computing contracts, space launch contracts, social media regulations, antitrust exemptions — the editorial independence of the media property is structurally compromised whether or not the owner intends it to be. The journalists know who signs the cheques. The editors know which stories might create problems for the parent company. The self-censorship that results is not imposed. It is absorbed.

This is not a new insight. It is as old as the concept of editorial independence itself. What is new is the scale at which it now operates and the degree to which the owners of American media are simultaneously the largest beneficiaries of American government policy.

What Independence Looks Like

The alternative to concentrated ownership is not a fantasy of perfectly independent journalism. Every news organisation has an owner, and every owner has interests. The question is whether the structure of ownership creates sufficient insulation between those interests and the editorial function.

Historically, this insulation has taken several forms: family trusts that separate ownership from editorial control, nonprofit structures that remove the profit motive entirely, public broadcasting models funded by licence fees rather than advertising, and editorial charters that contractually protect journalists from owner interference.

Each model has limitations. Family trusts concentrate power within a dynasty. Nonprofits depend on donors whose priorities may shift. Public broadcasting is vulnerable to political defunding. Editorial charters are only as strong as the legal framework that enforces them.

But all of these models share one feature that the current era of billionaire ownership increasingly lacks: a structural separation between the interests of the owner and the editorial judgments of the newsroom. When that separation narrows, the range of journalism narrows with it. And the stories that are not told — the investigations not funded, the questions not asked, the angles not pursued — are precisely the ones that the concentration of power makes most necessary.

The news that reaches you is shaped, before it is written, by the question of who owns the organisation that employs the journalist who might write it. That has always been true. What has changed is how few people now answer that question for how many.