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.”