The Trump administration will be sued for banning CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House press room, and it will lose. Trump’s argument is that all they’ve done is lie about him for ten years. Fact check: true.
But the legacy media has committed a worse crime. It has misinformed people like Mayor Zohran Mamdani on the major issues of the day. At the top of that list is the Paramount Skydance merger with Warner Bros. Discovery.
If you were like me and got lulled into complacency watching Trump chum around with Mamdani at the Gracie Mansion press conference, this tweet should snap you back to reality:
The media is anything but free, competitive, independent, or accountable to the people. Republicans had to invent their own news channels just to get a share of voice alongside Fox News. Guess what? They’re kicking the ass of CNN and MS NOW.
This was August:
There is nothing “shameful” about the merger. It is a Hail Mary for Hollywood — a chance to break up a powerful ideological monopoly that has nearly killed the business. Hollywood has become a junk factory, and everyone knows it. That’s because of limits on what people can say and what stories they can tell.
Imagine everything we’ve just lived through: the Joe Biden coup, the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the fight for women to play fairly in sports. None of these stories can or will be told, because Hollywood is not free. Activists and the Democratic Party control it completely. Obama has a Netflix deal, for crying out loud. What are we even doing?
The idea that Paramount would buy Warner Bros. to get its hands on CNN is laughably delusional. Nobody watches CNN anymore. Why would they? It has become what most of American culture has become: 100 percent beholden to a single party, the Democratic Party.
It is hilarious and cringe that Mamdani thinks this is about mind control after what we’ve seen happen to American culture in the last ten years. It went something like this:
The minute Donald Trump won, all of the power assumed under Barack Obama was consolidated on the left. We called it “the Resistance.” Really, it was the empire - an empire now in collapse. David Ellison’s deal is like the Carpathia coming to the rescue of the sinking Titanic. Mamdani is either too dumb, too ignorant, or too much a victim of terrible, biased news coverage to realize it.
The “Resistance” meant that late-night comedy — Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, John Oliver, SNL — all pitched for the Democrats and demonized the other half of the country for ten years. Network news and legacy media told stories only from the left’s perspective. Trump had to win again in 2024 before the New York Times even tried to cover the right.
In advertising, we call it “share of voice.” Democrats probably had 99 percent of it. Activists swarmed Hollywood and turned it into a woke propaganda factory that pushed dogma into every film, every ad, every podcast, every television show.
No one was even allowed to make friends with a Trump supporter, or they’d be out. Any conservative who wanted to work in Hollywood had to stay completely silent about who they were and what they believed. This went on for years.
The result is movies no one wants to see. Television shows no one watches. The Oscars and the Emmys pass like ghost ships people barely realize are even on. When you are mandated to conform and to tell the same story over and over again, storytelling becomes bland and predictable.
Breaking up the left’s ideological monopoly on Hollywood is the greatest thing since Elon bought Twitter and turned it into X. These guys are billionaires because only billionaires have the resources to take on the totalitarian machine that has all but destroyed Hollywood.
I’m embarrassed for Mamdani that he bleats out something Mark Ruffalo could have written. He has to project his “commie cred,” but he’s getting bad intel, and he just sounds dumb.
I can only hope this merger will open movies to the free market again. When the box office mattered, the people had to matter. We all dream of the day we can be excited about movies again — when they are for everyone again.
David Ellison is attempting to break up that monopoly and maybe, just maybe, make Hollywood great again.
Sasha, in describing Mamdani as "either too dumb, too ignorant, or too much a victim of terrible, biased news coverage to realize it", you left out "or too dedicated to the destruction of America as we know it." Not criticizing. I know you wrote this column in a hurry.
Mamdani really is not very smart or he would not write such an inane opinion piece, if he even wrote it at all. For him to contend that the merger will somehow harm journalism and the movie industry has no basis in fact. What IS true, is that the Democrat party and the Leftist control of the propaganda-media was greatly damaged. Good! I can't wait to see the changes that will be made at CNN. Maybe Bari Weiss will be put in charge of cleaning house?