All the reach in the world

On Monday, December 8, Paramount launched a hostile takeover bid for Warner Bros. Discovery—a US$108 billion offer that went straight to shareholders, bypassing the board that had just approved an $83 billion deal with Netflix. If successful, the Ellison family would add CNN, HBO, and the Warner Bros. studio to a media portfolio that already includes CBS, MTV, Comedy Central, and a major stake in TikTok’s American operations.

It’s a remarkable shopping spree. David Ellison’s Paramount spent some US$150 million just on The Free Press, the digital publication founded by Bari Weiss. His father, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, is part of the consortium that acquired TikTok’s U.S. business from Beijing-based ByteDance in a deal blessed by the White House—a deal Project Liberty and other opponents are fighting in court. The world’s second-richest person now stands to control platforms reaching hundreds of millions of Americans.

But the Ellisons aren’t operating in a vacuum. Elon Musk owns X. Mark Zuckerberg controls Facebook and Instagram. Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post. A few ultra-wealthy American businessmen have consolidated their hold over a vast range of media properties. Meanwhile, the emergence of Substack, podcasts, and countless online outlets has fragmented the sources Americans actually get their news from.

So how much does it actually matter that a few billionaires own so many media companies?

Michael Socolow is a professor of communication and journalism at the University of Maine. Socolow sees something counterintuitive in the Ellison family’s acquisitions: not a sign that billionaires are consolidating control over American media, but that they’re consolidating control over the most valuable media companies—properties whose audiences have shrunk dramatically but whose relative worth has soared. But reaching Americans isn’t the same as persuading them. And while we may overestimate the media’s power over politics, we may be underestimating politics’ power over the media …

Gustav Jönsson: How consolidated is American news media in the hands of billionaires?

Michael Socolow: It’s complicated, because if you go simply by the data, they aren’t as consolidated as they were in the 1980s and 1990s, when everybody tuned in to the broadcast channels. But there’s a paradox here: As media companies get smaller, the bigger ones become much more valuable relative to the smaller ones. You can see this in live sports: The value of NFL contracts in the United States has soared far beyond what it was 20 years ago, when the audiences were much larger. This doesn’t make any sense, right? Your advertising used to reach tens of millions more people 20 years ago, and yet buying advertising on football games now costs far more. That’s because when everything fragments, there’s nothing else that generates audiences.

Ellison is buying lots of media companies—CBS, TikTok, and if Paramount’s bid for Warner Bros. Discovery goes through, CNN. There’s no equivalent to Ellison’s agglomeration. But these audiences are relatively small: 3.6 million people watch CBS Evening News; half a million people watch CNN during prime time. TikTok has a much larger audience, but it’s not clear what its numbers really mean. So I wouldn’t say the media is consolidating in a few hands I’d say the most valuable media properties are consolidating in a few hands. And we still don’t really know the relative power and influence of those properties. It’s not clear how much political persuasive power TikTok really has.

As media companies get smaller, the bigger ones become much more valuable relative to the smaller ones.

The trend in American media right now is toward the power of micro-influence. When I say “micro-influence,” I’m talking about audiences that could be anywhere from 10,000 to a million. These audiences are much smaller than they were 20 or 30 years ago, when 20 million people tuned in to Walter Cronkite on CBS. But they’re tremendously valuable if you can consolidate them. So the big picture is that while American media audiences have become smaller, organizations that can gather those fragments into something larger have become worth more than they were previously.

It’s worth mentioning that some large media organizations are doing very well. People sometimes overemphasize the death of mass media in the United States. The subscription base of The New York Times is fantastic—they’re hugely profitable, making billions every year, more through subscriptions than advertising. ABC World News Tonight is the most-watched television program outside of sports in the United States: With about 7.3 million viewers a night, more people watch it than any prime-time program, morning show, soap opera, or competition show. Some of these old legacy media properties are still making a fortune.

Jönsson: What makes ABC so popular?

Socolow: It’s on broadcast, so it’s free. You don’t have to pay a TV license in America. If you plug in a television, you get ABC World News Tonight. By contrast, cable television numbers have been going down by millions every quarter.

And the broadcast is very modern—flashy graphics, a handsome anchor, everything. They know how television works.

Jönsson: Is this simultaneous consolidation and fragmentation changing how American media organizations report the news?

Socolow: American media isn’t like European media, but it’s becoming more like it. In search of commercial riches, American media organizations have long neutered their politics, giving people the news without telling them it’s coming from a political angle. In Europe, it’s the opposite—people buy newspapers or tune into radio stations based on their political loyalties. But now, with audiences fragmenting, American media is moving toward the European model, where political allegiances align with commercial rewards. Media organizations increasingly make more money by serving smaller audiences with a reliable political product than by serving a giant audience with “objective” news.

Jönsson: How do you assess the role of the state in this consolidation?

Socolow: Its role is very interesting. I used to believe that because of the First Amendment’s free-speech protections, the political economy of American media was about which newspapers would sell the most copies. But now it’s increasingly about political influence. The state has become much more important as the media has evolved out of the 20th-century mass-media model, both through legislation and ordinary regulation.

For example, Congress passed a law barring China from owning TikTok—which meant ByteDance had to sell it. TikTok sued, but it lost in the Supreme Court. So up to that point, everything Donald Trump did with TikTok was legally unprecedented—extending deadlines Congress had set, engineering a sale structured around his allies. Because if Congress passes a law and the Supreme Court rules it constitutional, the president doesn’t normally get to negotiate his own terms. Trump did. It really makes you wonder about the future of the state’s relationship to media when a president can operate that way.

I wouldn’t say the media is consolidating in a few hands I’d say the most valuable media properties are consolidating in a few hands.

Jönsson: How much does the fact that people like Ellison control these tremendously large media empires really matter when everyone has access to the internet?

Socolow: We don’t yet know what Ellison is going to do with his media properties, because he doesn’t have a track record like Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch is fascinating because Donald Trump is currently suing him for billions of dollars over The Wall Street Journal’s reporting, and at the same time, Murdoch’s Fox News celebrates and promotes Trump. That’s because Rupert Murdoch is first and foremost about media revenue generation. He understands The Wall Street Journal’s brand. We don’t know if Ellison feels the same way about his properties—whether he’ll be more like Murdoch, or whether he’ll be more hands-on, the way Bezos has been at The Washington Post.

As I mentioned, we don’t really know how much persuasive power TikTok has over Americans. But there are plenty of examples of large media organizations failing to persuade their audiences. There’s this big media star in America, Tucker Carlson, who used to have the number-one show on Fox News. Carlson went on TV basically every single night for about six months after the 2020 presidential election. He had three main political points: January 6 wasn’t a riot, and the people involved in it were patriots; the Covid-19 vaccine is medically dangerous; and the United States should stay out of the Russia-Ukraine war—and if America must pick a side, better Russia than Ukraine. Despite having the number-one show, Carlson couldn’t move American public opinion at all on any of those issues.

So we overestimate the media’s power over other people. The sociologist W. Phillips Davison called this the “third-person effect” in communication. Basically, you assume that others are persuaded by the media, even though you know that you yourself aren’t. Think about it: How many times have you voted for somebody antithetical to your own political position because of what you saw on TV or read in a newspaper? People’s voting patterns and political persuasions are based much more on the house they grew up in, their socioeconomic condition, their peer group, or whether they’re religious than on the media they follow. But they still think the media has vast influence over other people.

Jönsson: I was talking with a civil servant at the British Home Office the other day who told me about being phoned up toward midnight by members of Parliament and ministers absolutely frantic about what some journalist had been saying. In complete panic, they shout, “What are we going to do? People are going to hate me!” Most voters don’t pay close attention to what people in the press are saying, but politicians certainly do.

Socolow: And of course, exaggerating the power of the media to persuade is tremendously useful for politicians. Donald Trump attacks the media every day because it distracts people from looking at his own political failures. He can always blame the media for anything that causes him problems. He can say, Those good voters out there are being misled by the media. It’s a very useful political strategy—used everywhere, in the United States, in Britain, in Sweden. But the reality is that the media’s power of political persuasion is very tenuous.