Can David Ellison Be Trusted?

When the sphinx-like David Ellison broke his silence today — in the op-ed pages of the New York Times of all places (maybe the fake-news Liberal Media Industrial Complex still has swat!) — I had to laugh. Not at David Ellison himself, necessarily. We’ve never met, though I’m sure he’s a perfectly nice billionaire scion. Or as nice as you can be whenever your daddy buys you whatever toy you want, including the Liberal Media Industrial Complex. (My dad bought me some Kansas City Steaks once from QVC, so we have a lot in common.)

And mind you, I have laughed at the Ellisons plenty — at least in my dark heart and private emails, the latter of which are often a direct reflection of the former. Sometimes, in unproud moments, I laugh at David’s octogenarian dad, Oracle founder Larry, whose sixth wife is nearly one-third his age, even though he’s started to look like a melting Mickey Rourke after Rourke’s post-reconstructive facial surgery. (Sorry, I’m trying to be less mean in print. Starting next week.)

I have to laugh, though, when the Ellisons pretend they can’t understand why everyone thinks they’re in the tank for Trump.

When as the Wall Street Journal tells it, Larry “gave roughly $45 million to a political nonprofit group supporting Trump’s election efforts in 2024,” and “has given millions more to groups that support Trump since the election…..with some of the funds going to Trump’s legacy initiatives in Washington.” Also: “Trump’s investment accounts were actively trading Oracle shares earlier this year, including a sale worth at least $1 million in January and a purchase worth at least $1 million in March, federal disclosure filings show.” Also, David was a VIP at Trump’s recent UFC bread’n’circuses spectacular on the White House lawn, “days after a decision by the Justice Department to clear the $81 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery by his company, Paramount Skydance. The spectacle was streamed by Paramount, which under David Ellison’s leadership, paid billions for the rights to UFC events.” And also, as the WSJ recounts, when Trump spotted David from the stage in a Miami crowd, he said, “You’re going to be a great success. You’re going to blow away your father, and he’ll be very happy about that because he loves you. Say hello to him. OK?”

And still also, pay no mind that “the day after Trump’s second inauguration, Larry Ellison was in the West Wing when Oracle was selected as the architectural backbone for the administration’s $500 billion plan to build artificial-intelligence data centers in the U.S. Later in 2025, Oracle was part of an investor group that gained control of TikTok’s U.S. operations in a deal brokered by the U.S. government.”

All this, without considering all the other putting-in-of-fixes. Such as when Pro Publica reported that “FCC officials took pricey gifts from Paramount as the company needed approval for billion-dollar deals.” Like when FCC chairman/Trump shineboy Brendan Carr – a man I have referred to, not even a little unfairly, as an “Un-American Weasel,” for trying to chase Trump-thumping late-night talk show hosts off the air — and his wife shared a skybox at the Kennedy Center with David Ellison and other CBS and Paramount execs (just months after the administration approved Paramount’s $8 billion merger with the Ellisons’ Skydance Media). Seats which commonly sell for around $125 grand apiece. And that, after former Paramount chair Shari Redstone cleared the way for the Ellison merger by paying Donald Trump $16 million for complaining about a 60 Minutes interview edit that 11 out of 10 legal experts say would have gotten laughed out of court if she’d chosen to defend her company against the lawsuit. (Or as Stephen Colbert called it — before also getting run off CBS’s airwaves, to Trump’s/Carr’s delight — “a big fat bribe.” )

And yet, when Ellison popped off today in the Gray Lady, he complained of being misunderstood. Asserting that when 12 state attorneys general and the Writers Guild of America sued to stop Paramount’s pending acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery — now delayed until at least June of next year — that motives are being ascribed to him that he doesn’t necessarily possess.

He claims this is less about their concern about one company having monopolistic control over theatrical releases and cable operators, and that their combined market power will hurt writers (“a Hollywood that no longer exists,” as he not unconvincingly puts it). Even as Paramount-Warner’s resources would still be dwarfed by the resources of the likes of Netflix, Amazon, and Apple. But that the “plainer worry sits beneath the briefs and the news releases: the news. The issue is whether I can be trusted as a steward of Warner’s CNN. There has been speculation about my politics, my loyalties, my intentions.”

Which, he caught me! That’s precisely my biggest worry. And why would I and others worry about such a thing? Well, put to the side for a second what’s already transpired: Ellison’s merger likely being responsible for chasing Colbert off the air, and his lieutenants gutting 60 Minutes, which has been the most successful news program on television for a half century, even amidst cries of Trump-flavored censorship from its recently-fired correspondents. (Full disclosure: I’ve written for Ellison’s handpicked CBS News honcho Bari Weiss before at her Free Press, and she was perfectly nice without asking me to pull punches, even sending me a pricey bottle of bourbon when I was raked by her site’s Trumpster commenters, but I’m not a 60 Minutes correspondent.) It has likewise been reported that the Ellisons promised the Trump administration sweeping changes to CNN if they approved his acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery’s assets. (Which Paramount Skydance has denied.)

So wherever would we get the idea that he was up to no good? Especially after Pete Hegseth, Trump’s Secretary of Disinformation/War, recently said that “the sooner David Ellison takes over the network, the better.”

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An even 50 percent less skeptical person than me might call this a lot of things. But an “encouraging sign” would not be one of them. Unless you want CNN to more closely parrot the President’s fictions, who, during his first term, when it’s generally assumed he lied a little less often, the Washington Post’s Trump lies tracker still clocked him at 30,573 false or misleading claims over four years. (That averages out to 21 untruths PER DAY.) At that rate, Trump might as well not even be president anymore. He’d easily qualify as a Fox News anchor, who draw much higher salaries, if you don’t include Trump’s crypto-scams and other nest-feathering presidential profiteering operations. Which do add additional billions.

And yet, Ellison, in his Times piece, represents himself not as a MAGA axe-grinder or regulatory-approval opportunist, but as a straight G, transparent and humble, just trying to do the right thing by The News: “Unfortunately, I can’t give anyone a view into my heart and mind, but I can share this: I have regularly voted for candidates of both parties; I hold some views that would be called conservative and others that would be called liberal, just like most Americans; and when it comes to our news operations, I do not aspire to lead these companies to bend their newsrooms to my views. I believe that news should be based on facts and truth.”

Hell, that sounds pretty great! He could almost be describing my worldview! Give his ghostwriter a bonus! Or maybe a complimentary Paramount+ subscription, so he/she can watch a Taylor Sheridan show before he decamps to NBCUniversal, as Sheridan is in the midst of doing. (I have one of those subscriptions myself, as I’m a particular fan of Sheridan’s Landman, Lioness, and Mayor of Kingstown). Except a few paragraphs later, Ellison lets loose with the tell that everything he said prior to it is BS. When discussing the news, he says:

There is much ground to recover. By Gallup’s latest measure, just 28 percent of Americans said they trust the news — the lowest share ever recorded. The temptation is to say the problem lies elsewhere. Our obligation is to look inward and say: We can do better. We are in a moment when Americans trust few institutions, but journalists haven’t always helped their case by refusing to engage with critiques.

I hate doing spoken or filmed interviews as a rule. I almost always insist on written Q&A’s, since I’m a writer by temperament and training, used to choosing his words deliberately instead of rushing them out of his piehole in a hurry. But before the reporter called, I had a few beers to loosen myself up, and then let it fly.

When asked why there was an upsurge in conservative media, I was being facetious when I said: “We’ve created this cottage industry in which it pays to be un-objective. It pays to be subjective as much as possible. It’s a great way to have your cake and eat it too. Criticize other people for not being objective. Be as subjective as you want. It’s a great little racket. I’m glad we found it actually.”

It’s followed me around as a literal quote, when I was actually offering a smartass critique of the time that we were living in, and live in even more so now. Which was that I’d noticed that there were generally two kinds of stories in conservative media: liberal media bias stories, and everything else. I wrote the everything-else kind, because the former bored the living hell out of me. But the former was exactly what Fox News — once a corporate cousin of The Standard, when Rupert Murdoch owned us both — was founded upon. They, and many like them, have spent three decades encouraging paranoia and distrust of anything that doesn’t sound like them, even if they shade the truth on an hourly basis. As anyone who has ever argued with their elderly parents about the Trump era can attest. (It’s not that your parents are necessarily dishonest. They probably just haven’t heard any of the same news of reality that you have, since they’re “protected” by such entities as Fox.)

When opportunists like Ellison claim to want to split the truth straight up the middle, that presumes that both sides tell the truth equally. Or more likely, that they lie equally. And both sides do lie, don’t get me wrong. Which is why I try not to choose sides unless utterly unavoidable. But some, like Ellison, still seem to hold at this late date in our failing republic, that the Trumpsters are having their side misrepresented by the likes of CNN (who ironically, employs — as a commentator, not an anchor — Scott Jennings, a paid liar who happily tells untruths on behalf of the Trump administration on a nightly basis), or MSNOW, who covers Trump’s every dishonest hiccup, but who does so mostly honestly, and without wokely indoctrinating you on the need for trans swimmers.

The problem being, that splitting the dishonesty difference assumes that one side isn’t lying A LOT more than the other. And sorry MAGAbots, but your side is. As even many of your own podcasters are admitting these days, when considering The Trumpsters’ Iran War propaganda, or the Epstein Files cover-up, or affordability representations. All of which are discrediting, way before any CNN fact-checkers even get sicced on them.

Is that really the side, then, that we should demand has equal time? Is a billionaire media mogul who pretends he’s just playing it up the middle really doing so? Or is he looking to thumb the scale, be it for ideology’s sake, or more likely, for profit and acquisitions? And how, exactly, does he think that a failing news network, like CNN — I have good friends there, and respect what they do, but ratings is ratings — is going to come up roses the more he makes them look like Fox? (Fox having dominated the cable news ratings for over two decades straight — not because of their actual quality, but because cultists gotta cult.) Cultists generally don’t look for Fox News alternatives, unless those alternatives are located even further to the right than Fox News is. Or rather, “news” establishments who misrepresent the truth even more than they do.

So if you’re going to do some Nerf version of lying on behalf of Trump (or sorry, telling the Trumpsters the best version of their own story) on CBS or CNN or wherever else, good luck pulling in additional viewers. And not just because you’re chasing old moderate/liberal viewers off. While CBS News has gotten loads of credit for MAGAfying, their ratings are at all-time low. Though many of its critics are unwilling to acknowledge it, CBS DOES still criticize Trump plenty. I’ve watched it, and read it. But now, they’re basically offering heroin addicts medical marijuana. Because Fox offers next to no criticism. So good luck with that, Ellison properties. But you ain’t gonna win a lot of converts. You can’t win hardcore addicts over by offering softer addictions.

And so, when Ellison says this, as he did in his Times piece, it sounds great:

Trust can’t be argued back, but it can be earned back — story by story, day by day. In an age when so much of what fills our screens is machine-generated or engineered to enrage, journalism from real reporters matters more than ever. That is the work I intend to pay for, patiently, for a long time.

But is it? If you don’t want to be considered a Trump tool — which is the opposite of earning trust since he is so untrustworthy — it’s pretty simple: whether you acquire CNN or don’t, quit climbing into his toolbox.

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Bonus Movie Snippet: Speaking of putting the fix in, here’s one of my all-time favorites. The late great Jon Polito (with the late great Albert Finney), doing a monologue in the greatest Coen Brothers movie ever made, Miller’s Crossing. Which also happens to be one of the greatest films ever made. (Are you sensing a greatness pattern? Trust me on this. See it today.) On the ethics of trusting a fix: “It’s getting so a businessman can’t expect no return from a fixed fight. Now if you can’t trust a fix, what can you trust?”: