The billionaire family poised to rewire U.S. media in
Israel’s favor
Having acquired Paramount and CBS and eyeing TikTok
and CNN, the Ellisons are constructing a pro-Israel information empire with
unprecedented reach.
By Will Alden December 4, 2025
https://www.972mag.com/ellisons-paramount-tiktok-israel-media-empire/
In early September, the Hollywood producer Lawrence
Bender — known for his work with Quentin Tarantino on films including “Pulp
Fiction” and “Inglourious Basterds” — had what he later described as “a really
tough conversation” with the investors in “Red Alert,” an Israeli miniseries
that dramatizes the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023.
With just weeks remaining before the anticipated
release on the second anniversary of the attacks, the show, produced by Israeli
mass media company Keshet Media Group, was struggling to secure distribution
outside of Israel. The news environment was far from favorable: Israeli fighter
jets had just attacked a residential compound in Qatar, and a pledge to boycott Israeli film institutions that were “implicated”
in the genocide in the Gaza Strip had collected thousands of signatures in
Hollywood.
“No one’s going to want to buy something from the
Israelis,” Bender, an executive producer of “Red Alert,” told the investors, as
he recalled on stage at a Jewish National Fund–USA conference the following
month. Among those investors was the Israel Entertainment Fund, which
JNF–USA established last year with the Israeli streaming service
Izzy to produce television and film for international audiences, with a focus
on projects filmed in the “Gaza Envelope” region of southern Israel. “We were
pretty stressed about what we were going to do,” Izzy CEO Nati Dinnar,
interviewing Bender on stage, recalled.
According to its backers, “Red Alert” is essentially a
work of Israeli propaganda at a moment when a majority of Americans view Israel’s government unfavorably. The Israel
Entertainment Fund, in a slide deck featuring “Red Alert,” says that its projects
benefit Israel by “educating viewers and altering perceptions.” Bender said
that “our purpose” in making the show was to “change the conversation” about
Israel among Americans, Europeans, and other viewers abroad.
A deal to reach that crucial international audience
materialized only after Bender encountered David Ellison, the upstart Hollywood
mogul, at a memorial service in September. With financing from his tech billionaire father, Oracle
executive chairman Larry Ellison, David Ellison had recently merged his Skydance Media with the old-line movie
studio Paramount. “It would be my honor to be a partner in this,” he emailed
after watching “Red Alert,” according to Bender. “In Hollywood, that’s a rare
thing,” Bender said at the JNF–USA conference, describing the studio head as “a big supporter of
Israel.”
Ellison’s “fast ‘yes,’” as he put it, to an Israeli government-aligned drama offers a
window into his thinking as the 42-year-old mogul and his octogenarian father —
the largest shareholder in his son’s business and among the richest individuals in the world — construct an empire
across TV, film, news, and social media. After acquiring Paramount for $8
billion over the summer, and the broadcast network CBS along with it, he
finalized a $150 million deal for reactionary online outlet The Free Press in
October and installed its CEO, the Zionist pundit Bari Weiss, as the top editor
of CBS News. Ellison was drawn to Weiss in part because of her “pro-Israel
stance,” according to The Financial Times.
Under Ellison, Paramount Skydance (as it is now known)
has also been vocal in its opposition to any boycott of Israeli films and
filmmakers: In response to the September pledge, which was signed by
celebrities including Emma Stone and Javier Bardem, Paramount was alone among
major studios at the time in publicly condemning the effort as “silencing individual creative
artists based on their nationality.” (A month later, after a group called UK
Lawyers for Israel issued a legal warning, Warner Bros. Discovery said in a statement that “a boycott of Israeli film institutions
violates our policies” on discrimination.) At the same time, according to reporting by Variety, Paramount leadership has blacklisted
individual artists deemed to be “overtly antisemitic.”
If, as Bender seemed to suggest, David Ellison’s
embrace of a work of hasbara is “rare” in today’s Hollywood, the Trump-aligned
Ellisons appear set to expand their media empire in the coming weeks. Paramount
Skydance is reportedly favored by the Trump administration in the
auction for Warner Bros. Discovery — a far bigger conglomerate that includes a
news network in CNN and a premium TV asset in HBO Max, in addition to the
Warner Bros. movie studio. And Larry Ellison’s Oracle is among the group of
investors slated to acquire the American operations of Chinese social media
platform TikTok, in a deal blessed by the White House.
Should these deals go through, the result will be a
degree of media control by a single family without parallel in modern American
history, and potentially a singular opportunity for Israel advocates to reach a
broad U.S. audience. In the words of a publicity spot for “Red Alert” on Israel’s Keshet 12, after Ellison’s
Paramount+ streaming service had acquired the worldwide rights to the series, “Tens of
millions of people around the world are finally going to see our story.
Israel’s ‘most important weapon’
It is the TikTok deal in particular that analysts say
could markedly change the information that millions of Americans receive about
Israel. After two years of livestreamed genocide — including numerous TikTok
videos posted by IDF soldiers themselves — the political views of a generation of young
people “have been shaped by what they’ve seen” online, explained Lara Friedman, the president of the Washington, D.C.-based
Foundation for Middle East Peace.
“You have TikTok just smashing our young people’s
brains all day long with video of carnage in Gaza,” Sarah Hurwitz, a former
speechwriter for President Obama, said at a Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA)
conference in November. Hurwitz lamented that, when she tries to persuade young
Jews of her pro-Israel beliefs, “they are just seeing, in their minds, carnage,
and I sound obscene.” And at a conference this week organized by the right-wing
Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom, Hillary Clinton called it “a serious problem” that young people were
learning about October 7 and what came after “from social media, particularly
TikTok.”
Faced with the evidence of genocide, Zionist
apologists “can’t explain that away,” Friedman told +972. “So what they’re
going to do now is get hold of the means by which that information is spread.”
Meeting with social media influencers in New York in September, Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israel’s “most important” “weapons” were
“on social media,” and he described the deal for TikTok, with its 170 million
American users, as “the most important purchase that is going on right now.”
In addition to acquiring an ownership stake in the
U.S. app, Oracle is expected to run data security for the platform and
oversee changes and updates to the algorithm. Most likely, Larry Ellison and
his billionaire co-investors will come under immediate pressure from Zionist
groups including JFNA, whose CEO recently described TikTok as “the largest and worst offender” in
“spreading hate and antisemitism online,” and said that “the deal engineered by
President Trump presents us with a moment of great hope.”
Yet Ellison probably won’t need much persuading to
align with Israel-friendly priorities. A major Republican donor and political ally of President Trump, the
Oracle co-founder is also a major supporter of Israeli causes, having given $16.6 million to Friends of the IDF in 2017,
then the largest gift in the organization’s history. In 2021, Oracle’s then-CEO
Safra Catz told the Israeli outlet Calcalist that the company’s
“commitment to Israel is second to none.” If Oracle employees “don’t agree with
our mission to support the State of Israel,” she said, “then maybe we aren’t
the right company for them.” That same year, Netanyahu, Israel’s opposition
leader at the time, vacationed on Ellison’s privately owned Hawaiian island.
The billionaire also enjoys a close relationship with
former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair, having poured at least $130 million into the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change
— which, in turn, has promoted Oracle’s services across the Global South. Blair
was named as a leader of the Gaza transitional authority in the Trump ceasefire plan that was approved by the UN Security Council in
November.
In predicting how the new TikTok might operate,
free-expression advocates point to Elon Musk’s apparent suppression of his critics and other disfavored accounts on
X, and the attendant flourishing of far-right voices there. The official
X policy is “Freedom of Speech, not Freedom of Reach,”
which advocates say gives Musk leeway to effectively censor content deemed
objectionable by making it harder to find.
Tech journalist Taylor Lorenz wrote recently that TikTok’s new owners “will
undeniably leverage the platform to push pro-MAGA messaging.” Israel, too, will
likely be a major subject of censorship and control, Lorenz told +972. “You’re
not going to hear from Palestinians,” she said. “You’re just going to be
exposed to more and more propaganda. It’s going to be harder and harder to find
accurate information.”
The Ellisons’ likely domination of a broad swath of
U.S. media, Lorenz argued, has no analogue in the United States. “Parallels
that come to mind are places like Russia or China or India — places where there
is no free press, no free speech, no ability to speak truth to power.”
‘We have a Gen Z problem’
The strategies used by the Israeli government and its
supporters over the years to cultivate a positive image in traditional media —
including expenses-paid press junkets and hasbara efforts to portray
Gaza-based journalists as
undercover Hamas operatives — fall short when it comes to TikTok, which is a
regular source of news for 43 percent of American adults under 30, according to a recent Pew survey. “You’ve got a generation
that is going to see a headline, and rather than look at that headline, they’re
going to say, ‘I’m going to go look for the video. I want to see it for
myself,’” Friedman told +972. “It’s very hard to control the narrative in that
kind of era, and it creates a new imperative to control what information is
able to be spread.”
When former U.S. President Joe Biden signed a bill in
April 2024 to ban TikTok in the United States absent a sale by its Chinese
parent company, ByteDance, the official rationale was lawmakers’ concern about
the Chinese government’s potential access to Americans’ data. But support for
the legislation, which necessitated the currently pending takeover by U.S.
firms, can also be traced to Zionist anxiety over Israel’s image on the
platform.
At the Munich Security Conference in February of this
year, former Republican Congressmember Mike Gallagher — who introduced the sell-or-ban bill with his Democratic
colleague Raja Krishnamoorthi in 2022 — said that the bill was “dead until October 7. And
people started to see a bunch of antisemitic content on the platform, and our
bill had legs again.”
“Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support
for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature,”
then-Senator Mitt Romney said at a McCain Institute forum in Arizona in May
2024, not long after the bill’s passage. “If you look at the postings on TikTok
and the number of mentions of Palestinians relative to other social media
sites, it’s overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts.”
By that point, American Jewish groups including the
Anti-Defamation League (ADL) had been sounding the alarm about TikTok for
months. ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, on a Zoom call in the fall of 2023,
was recorded saying, “We really have a TikTok problem, a Gen
Z problem. And our community needs … to put our energy toward this, fast.” (The
ADL has confirmed the authenticity of the recording.)
On March 6, 2024 — one day before the House Energy and
Commerce Committee voted unanimously to advance the TikTok bill to the House
floor — the leaders of JFNA said in a letter to the committee, “Our community understands
that social media is a major driver of the rise in antisemitism, and that
TikTok is the worst offender by far.” Referring to the legislation by its bill
number, the letter said, “A vote for HR 7521 is a vote against antisemitism.”
David Ellison has pushed back on the idea that
politics plays a role in his business decisions. “I’m not going to be in the
position of ever making political statements. We’re an entertainment company
first,” he said at a Bloomberg conference in Los Angeles in October, adding that
Paramount’s official statement about the boycott was “a statement that
discriminating based on where somebody is from is wrong” and that he stood by
it.
At the same time, Ellison allowed that the “value
system” of The Free Press “really does align with the value system that we
believe in.” Later in the conversation, he described President Trump’s
just-announced Gaza ceasefire plan — which, according to the Palestinian analyst Muhammad Shehada,
would “entrench permanent Israeli control” of the Strip — as “a historic
accomplishment and one that we should all be happy” about.
A changing of the guard
Owners do not typically exercise direct editorial
control over American news media, and analysts caution against overstating the
Ellisons’ influence even as they seek to extend their reach from CBS to CNN.
Complicating matters further, the latest bid by Paramount Skydance for Warner
Bros. Discovery includes minority financing from the sovereign wealth funds of
Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Abu Dhabi, according to Variety — three governments that might
push back on a staunchly pro-Israel agenda.
What’s more, CNN is hardly a bastion of left-wing
politics to begin with. As one staffer told The Guardian in early 2024, the cable network
has a “systemic and institutional bias” in favor of Israel. CNN hosts Jake Tapper and Dana
Bash, for example, have frequently relied on Israel-friendly talking points in
their coverage of U.S. campus protests. At the same time, CNN has produced hard-hitting
journalism about Gaza, including a report this week detailing how the Israeli military has bulldozed
corpses into unmarked graves, in apparent violation of international law.
It is such coverage that may be at risk, with the
Ellisons having demonstrated a willingness to make major personnel changes
that — as with the promotion of Bari Weiss to run CBS News — could entrench
political biases at the media properties under their control. In a late October
round of layoffs at CBS News, Variety reported, “the ax conspicuously fell on those whose reporting
featured an anti-Israel bent.” Among those terminated was the seasoned foreign
correspondent Debora Patta, who had reported vividly on the killing in Gaza and, according to The New York Post, had recently signed a new
three-year contract.
Patta’s work had come under attack in August by U.S.
Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, who, in claiming that a video interview he’d given her had been
misleadingly edited, echoed President Trump’s 2024 lawsuit against CBS (filed
before his return to the White House) over the editing of a “60 Minutes”
interview; Paramount, with its acquisition by Skydance under federal
review, settled that suit for $16 million. Weiss herself reportedly added Patta’s name to the dismissal list, while
saving the job of a Rome-based correspondent who professed pro-Israel views and
asked to be assigned to cover Gaza.
Whatever the Ellisons’ intentions, their moves are
being greeted as evidence of a new approach friendly to both Israel and Trump.
“They let the Zionists into Hollywood tonight,” Eve Barlow, a pro-Israel social
media personality and writer, said on Instagram after attending the L.A. premiere
of “Red Alert” on the Paramount lot.
In an interview with “60 Minutes” on Oct. 31, two days after the
CBS layoffs, Trump praised Weiss as “a great new leader.” Reminding the
interviewer, Norah O’Donnell, that “‘60 Minutes’ was forced to pay me a lot of
money,” Trump said that CBS’s “new ownership” was “the greatest thing that’s
happened in a long time to a free and open and good press.” And Larry Ellison
has reportedly discussed, in a recent conversation with a senior White House
official, firing CNN hosts whom Trump does not like.
The same week as Trump’s “60 Minutes” interview, David
Ellison schmoozed with fellow Hollywood bigwigs at a dinner honoring Warner
Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, the executive he may soon dethrone. The glittery event at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel was hosted by the
Simon Wiesenthal Center, which, through its film division, co-produced “One Day
in October,” an October 7 anthology drama that debuted in the U.S. on Zaslav’s
HBO Max. Like “Red Alert,” one reviewer noted, “One Day in October” leaves out Israel’s oppression
of Palestinians to “focus almost entirely on the survivors of the attack,” and
in so doing, imply that “overwhelming force is a justified response.”
With Warner Bros. Discovery on the auction block, the
gala for Zaslav had valedictory undertones. Presenting the studio boss with an
award for his philanthropy and efforts to fight antisemitism, Steven Spielberg
said that Zaslav “shares a certain ethos with the moguls that built Hollywood.”
In his own speech, Zaslav shared an insight from his experience owning a
broadcast network in Poland and resisting attempted censorship there: “When the
government controls the news, that is the end of democracy.”
