Who Can Blame Americans For Distrusting The Media?
The imaginary wall between business and editorial is long gone, and it is clearer than ever that whoever controls the media, controls the minds of Americans.
Shari Redstone, had a controlling interest in Paramount Global, the parent company of CBS.
Redstone, a life-long and ardent supporter of Israel, regularly interfered with CBS News coverage of Israel.
For example, she said CBS made a “bad mistake” when it found CBS Mornings co-anchor Tony Dokoupil had violated network standards in an interview with African-American author Ta-Nehisi Coates. In that interview, Dokoupil called Coates an “extremist” for calling Israel's treatment of Palestinians an "apartheid" system comparable to Jim Crow in the American South.
(Hundreds of international rights organizations, including several based in Israel, have agreed that Israel is engaged in an actual genocide of Palestinians.)
In August, Redstone sold CBS to “Skydance Media,” founded in 2006 by David Ellison, 42, a one-time actor who is the son of Larry Ellison, 81, the billionaire co-founder of Oracle and the largest private donor to the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, a supposed American charity that funds Israel’s military.
One of David Ellison’s first acts was appointing Bari Weiss, a noted pro-Israel commentator who hosted a glorified blog, to serve as editor-in-chief of CBS.
Weiss’s first act was to promote Dokoupil to be the new anchor of the CBS Evening News. So it’s come full circle for Dokoupil. The once admonished interviewer has now become CBS’s brightest star.
Now Skydance is competing against Netflix to acquire the whole of Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) — including its streaming platform HBO MAX and the national news network, CNN.
Curiously, NBC News reports that it is Paramount (not Skydance) that is pursuing the Warner Brothers deal. The elder Ellison recently agreed to guarantee $40.4 billion in equity financing for the deal, and to cover any damage claims.
Some media outlets have begun to refer to Skydance as “Paramount Skydance.”
On another front, American Defense League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt blamed the social media platform TikTok in 2023 for turning public opinion against Israel by allowing clips of Israel’s genocide of mostly women and children in Gaza to circulate widely.
President Donald J. Trump promptly ordered the sale of TikTok, which was owned by a Chinese company, ByteDance, and is currently facilitating the purchase of TikTok by an investment group led by Larry Ellison. Oracle will hold the license for TikTok’s algorithm, which determines the platform’s content.
Given all this, it’s little wonder that Americans increasingly distrust the U.S. news media. There appears to be an orchestrated effort to control the narrative on Israel, and safeguard the billions in U.S. taxpayer dollars that are funneled each year to Israel by the U.S. Congress.
Meanwhile, the U.S. has fallen into worldwide disrepute for supporting Israel’s massacre of 70,000 mostly women and children in Gaza, as well as the ongoing, brutal theft of Palestinian land in Gaza and the West Bank. The U.S. is virtually alone at the United Nations in its military and diplomatic backing of Israel. No one in the mainstream media is covering this story.
Apparently, Trump, the Ellisons, Greenblatt, and Israel believe that whoever owns the media controls the minds of the American people.
Israel’s apparent strategy to control public support for Israel through media ownership seems, at this point, like a dubious and desperate strategy. But it may be all that Israel has left.
Public opinion polls show that U.S. support for Israel has sharply declined.
A recent Pew Research Center poll founds that 59% of Americans now hold an unfavorable view of the Israeli government, up from 51% in 2024. Also, 42% of U.S. adults disapprove of the Trump administration’s response to the conflict between Israel and Hamas, while only 30% approve, and 27% say they remain unsure.
An Economist/YouGov survey in August found 84% of Americans favor an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. About 45% of Americans believe Israel is committing a genoicde against the Palestinians; only 31% disagree.
Of course, a poll reflects a snapshot in time.
What will the polls find if Israel’s advocates achieve their goal of controlling the narrative in the U.S. media?
As we enter 2026, Americans’ trust in U.S. media has hit a historic low.
A recent Gallup Poll shows just 28% of Americans express a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in newspapers, television and radio to report the news fully, accurately and fairly. This is down from 31% last year and 40% five years ago.
This should come as a surprise to no one.
Really solid piecing together of the timeline here. What stands out is how the media consolidation isn't jsut about owning outlets, but about creating a closed information loop where dissenters get promoted (Dokoupil) and critics get sidelined. I worked briefly in local news yrs back and even then, the business side was bleeding into editorial constantly. The wrinkle tho is that this strategy might backfire spectacularly bcuz concentrated ownership makes the manipulation more visible, not less. When one family controls multiple major outlets, audiences start pattern-matching faster than they would with diffuse ownership.