In the span of a single week, two deals reshaped the future of American media by concentrating something more valuable than content itself: control over how Americans find and consume it. As conservative billionaires effectively monopolize the future of content beyond cable, we are witnessing the corporate takeover of the American democratic square, rubber-stamped by a captured regulatory apparatus.
On Monday, Fox Corporation announced a $22 billion acquisition of Roku, the connected-television platform that sits inside half of all U.S. homes with broadband internet. Days earlier, Donald Trump‘s Justice Department waved through David Ellison’s $111 billion bid to merge Paramount with Warner Bros. Discovery, giving the son of Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison control over both CBS News and CNN. Paramount swiftly vowed to finalize the merger “as soon as possible.”
The scale of this quiet coup is staggering. For most of the past decade, the streaming wars were framed as a contest over content. Disney poured tens of billions into Disney+. Warner Bros. Discovery bet big on HBO Max. Paramount launched Paramount+ and nearly every major media company raced to create a direct-to-consumer service capable of competing with Netflix. Fox, by contrast, largely sat it out. It didn’t chase prestige television. It stuck with what it already had: news and sports. The deal would combine Fox’s news, sports and advertising businesses with Roku’s connected television platform. Fox says the combined company would become the third-largest television business in America by viewing share.
The Fox-Roku deal is not primarily about hardware. Roku still sells streaming sticks and smart televisions, but devices account for a relatively small portion of its business. The company increasingly operates as a connected-TV advertising platform built on an operating system that sits between viewers and content providers. That interface is not neutral. It is curated, ranked, monetized and constantly optimized using first-party data that tracks what people watch, when they watch it and how they respond to ads. In practical terms, Roku controls the television home screen. It can privilege its own content. Fox already owns Tubi, the free ad-supported streaming channel it acquired in 2020 for $440 million, which has grown into an advertising juggernaut accounting for roughly five percent of streaming viewership in the U.S. Now, with Roku’s operating system, Fox controls the discovery layer for every competitor streaming on that platform.
The billionaire takeover of our newsrooms is accelerating, and the political calculations behind it are flagrant.
For years, right-wing media dominance relied on the structural welfare state of basic cable. Millions of Americans with traditional cable packages have effectively subsidized Fox News through carriage fees, regardless of whether they watch the network. But that golden goose is dying. The Pew Research Center estimates that cable and satellite TV households were down to only 36 percent of the population in 2025; that number stood at a staggering 85 percent just a decade earlier. The cord-cutting revolution was supposed to democratize television, liberating citizens from corporate gatekeepers. Instead, it has laid the groundwork for an even more insidious form of control.
The Ellison deal deserves equal scrutiny and has received far less. The Justice Department’s senior leadership reportedly shut down the antitrust review before lawyers in the division could make their final recommendation — an intervention that is extraordinary by any historical standard. This allowed David Ellison, who took control of CBS only last August, to proceed toward ownership of both that network and CNN, giving him influence over what would amount to a Fox News-lite news operation at one outlet and a nominally centrist news outlet at another.
The billionaire takeover of our newsrooms is accelerating, and the political calculations behind it are flagrant. Ellison has spent months actively seeking to ingratiate himself with the Trump administration. The cozy, transactional nature of this new media elite was laid bare when Ellison, who held a lavish banquet for Donald Trump in April, was spotted rubbing shoulders with the Kushners at Washington’s elite Cafe Milano the night before a UFC spectacle on the White House South Lawn, streamed exclusively on his Paramount+. The warning signs are already there. Paramount reportedly refused to air an advertisement from the Freedom of the Press Foundation critical of its leadership and merger, citing a “conflict of interest.” That is what consolidation looks like in practice.
On one side, Fox controls distribution, data and a massive advertising engine. On the other, Ellison consolidates content production across multiple major networks. Between them sits a shrinking field of competitors, many of whom are financially weaker, structurally disadvantaged or dependent on access to platforms they do not control. The broader pattern is not subtle. Jeff Bezos still owns The Washington Post. Elon Musk owns one of the largest social media platforms in the country and has turned it into a right-wing echo chamber. Meanwhile, fewer outlets are willing to challenge power and have an incentive to avoid controversy.
Conservative billionaires are not winning the information wars because their ideas are more compelling. They are winning because they understand that in the attention economy, the chokepoint is distribution. He who controls the pipe controls the message. The Murdochs figured this out with satellite television. The Ellisons are figuring it out with streaming consolidation. And now Fox has figured it out with the operating system of connected television itself.
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