Trump Pals The Ellison Boys Gonna Save CBS And TikTok From Woke Bias!
Here comes TrumpTok.
Sounds like President Trump is inching closer towards his wish to be king of all media and star of every stage! He coyly hinted on his shitty web platform on Monday:
The big Trade Meeting in Europe between The United States of America, and China, has gone VERY WELL! It will be concluding shortly. A deal was also reached on a “certain” company that young people in our Country very much wanted to save. They will be very happy! I will be speaking to President Xi on Friday. The relationship remains a very strong one!!! President DJT
And Trump’s sherpa of deals/ mean drunk/ Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said there was a “framework for a deal” for a TikTok sale, though he has said the words “framework for a deal” eleventy-hundred times. Through the months of Trump’s insane pingponging deals with China we have learned that “framework” and “deal” are two very different things. Though at least this is better than the “handshake for a framework” Howard Lutnick said they had back in June. So on Friday are Trump and Scott Bessent really, finally going to get that deal from China on those rare earth minerals, the ones US tech companies need to make all of their AI chips, planes, and high-tech gadgets that Trump screwed them out of by self-embargoing the US? It’s concepts of a framework for maybe!
But anyway, word on the street, aka CBS and the Wall Street Journal, is that the deal old Pappy was going on about up there is the potential sale of TikTok to Oracle, whose CEO is his close pal Larry Ellison, and some private equity firms. If the name rings a bell, it’s because Larry Ellison’s son David is the new chairman and CEO of Paramount, after completing a merger between Paramount (CBS’s parent company) and Ellison’s company, Skydance. And both father and son are longtime Republican donors. And father Larry may be richer than Elon Musk now! At least he’s not in on the deal.
Oh, and now Paramount Skydance is reportedly in talks to buy Warner Brothers Discovery, too, the parent company of CNN. Those Ellison boys are making the kind of cross-platform Republican media control that Project 2025 once only dreamed of! How long until somebody greenlights that immigration reality show that Kristi Noem denied she was workshopping?
TikTok being forced under his thumb has apparently long been a wish of Trump’s, at least since app users first ground his gears back in 2020 by registering to attend his rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with no intention of showing up, causing his delicate ego embarrassment when the yuge surging crowd he was expecting turned out to be a mere trickle. He raged for TikTok to be BANNED, because something something Chinese spies, and Congress passed an act that banned the app unless its algorithm was put under the control of a US company. And Joe Biden signed it!
Remember that extra-stupid hearing with TikTok’s CEO Shou Chew, with Tom Cotton refusing to accept that he is from Singapore, which is a whole different country than China, and how embarrassingly pig-ignorant the senators were about the basics of how the Internet even works?
But, the Chinese government doesn’t and has never owned TikTok. A Chinese man founded it and is still 20 percent of the board, but the company was never incorporated in China. There has been no evidence that the Chinese government ever had access to user data, much less that they were using it to spy on dissidents or Americans making cucumber salads.
TikTok is owned by ByteDance Ltd., which is headquartered in the Cayman Islands, and TikTok Inc. is headquartered in Los Angeles and Singapore. And its servers — ORACLE servers, in fact — dish out its secret-sauce algorithm from Virginia. Sixty percent of ByteDance is currently owned by non-Chinese global institutional investors including Susquehanna International Group (majority shareholder Jeff Yass), the Carlyle Group, General Atlantic, KKR, BlackRock, and Tiger Global Management; 20 percent of the firm is owned by Beijing-based founder Zhang Yiming, and 20 percent is owned by employees.
But Congress and Biden decided to ban the app anyway, after Trump had said it was a CHINESE SPY EMERGENCY. And then some curious things happened!
Jeff Yass, the managing director of Susquehanna International Group, the company that is also the largest shareholder of TikTok’s parent company, bought two percent of Digital World Acquisition Corporation, which merged with Trump Media & Technology Group, making its share price surge 140 percent, defibrillating Trump’s flatlining company.
And then right before the ‘24 election, the TikTok algorithm underwent a noticeable shift, and Trumpy content began appearing in people’s feeds when it hadn’t before. And TikTok CEO Shou Chew attended Trump’s inauguration in January.
And after his win, Trump credited TikTok with helping him win more young voters, so he loved it again and decided to save it, even going to the Supreme Court to try to stop them from enacting the ban he himself had asked Congress to pass. The deadline for a sale has since been extended four times already, and has now been pushed off until December 16.
The Wall Street Journal has more details of the prospective deal: The company’s board would stay the same, except that Zhang Yiming’s stake would be reduced to less than 20 percent, and a consortium of US companies, including Susquehanna International, KKR, General Atlantic Oracle, Silver Lake, and Andreessen Horowitz would control 80 percent of the company. A new US entity would be created, with a board with one member designated by the US government, which is unheard of. And the US company would license the magic algorithm, putting it into a new US version of the app, so that the Trumpy board would be able to customize it and make it massage everybody’s feed this way and that, promoting the reach of some accounts and limiting access to others.
Meanwhile, CBS under control of its new owner Paramount has a whole other vibe. Paramount Global and CBS CEO George Cheeks hasn’t been fired (yet), but he obeyed in advance. The Late Show with Stephen Colbert was cancelled before the deal even went down, and Trump’s claims against 60 Minutes for making Kamala Harris look too smart got settled for a $16 million donation to his presidential library before the merger was approved.
And CBS News employees say Ellison the younger broke his promise not to politicize their news reporting almost immediately, reportedly entering talks to buy The Free Press, owned by anti-woke “free speech” crusader Bari Weiss, who got her start ratting out professors for being pro-Arab, for “well above” $100 million and installing her into some kind of a senior leadership role to tone-police the reporting at CBS News.
PREVIOUSLY!
And Ellison brought on a conservative thinktanker from the Hudson Institute, Kenneth R. Weinstein, to be an ombudsman rooting out any “complaints of bias” that might aggrieve conservatives at CBS.
But it all doesn’t go far enough for everybody on the Right, of course. Now at least one Federalist Society weirdo is proposing that the government shut down Bluesky, and Discord too.
But social media sites, they’re not just for cat memes! Businesses do about $15 billion in sales a year on TikTok. And TikTok and Discord have been critical to documenting human rights abuses, and organizing protests, such as recently in Nepal. There’s many times more young people in the US and around the world on Discord (614 million users) and on TikTok (2 billion users) than who are watching 60 Minutes (about 8 million viewers) so, of course the dominionists want to dominate it. And whatever other platforms they can get their filthy paws on, to better control every sphere of American life. Oh did they throw Jimmy Kimmel off the air, “indefinitely”? They did that last night too, with the FCC threatening that ABC’s broadcast license was in danger after Kimmel criticized the regime’s response to the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
Subversive meme-clips, better get them while humor is still legal!
(<3 Hail Caesar!)
[CBS / WSJ gift link]
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Bari Weiss doesn't get enough attention as a serious candidate for "Worst Person in the World."
She brings to mind Winston Churchill's exchange with Lady Astor:
"Mr. Churchill, if I were married to you, I would give you poison."
"Madam, if I were married to you, I would drink it."
Matthew Dowd, damn...
"I would love to be part of the conversation on MSNBC related to the Kimmel story and it's chilling effects on first amendment, but unfortunately I was terminated by MSNBC for stating that 'hateful thoughts lead to hateful words which lead to hateful actions'."
https://bsky.app/profile/matthewjdowd.bsky.social/post/3lz4izcf7ek2w