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By Max Towey
The Free Press’ recent $150M acquisition sent the alt media into a frenzy.
A quick refresher on what happened: Skydance – which is run by David Ellison, son of the world’s second-richest man, Larry Ellison – merged with Paramount in August and thereby took control of CBS News. Skydance then bought The Free Press for $150M and named its founder, Bari Weiss, editor-in-chief of CBS News. Ellison, Weiss, and The Free Press are all pro-Israel.
The move enraged the vast anti-Israel faction of alternative media. Evidence, they said, that Jews do control the industry.
As independent journalist Glenn Greenwald tweeted to his 2.3M followers:
Larry Ellison's son – a family whose overwhelming cause is Israel – bought Paramount and CBS from Sherri Redstone (who has the same cause), and will now give Bari Weiss $100-200m to buy her Israel state media outlet and put her in charge of CBS News' editorial direction.
Breaking Points host Saagar Enjeti wrote: “The only reason the Ellisons are interested in buying the Free Press and installing Bari as the ombudsman of CBS is because of support for Israel.”
One of Enjeti’s correspondents, James Li, wrote:
I’m just going to say the quiet part out loud: Paramount is not buying The Free Press for $200M. CBS News is not buying The Free Press. No, this is a reverse foreign takeover – Israel has just taken control of CBS News. 🤨
Even HBO host John Oliver delivered a monologue decrying the deal, saying, “She's never run a TV network, has no experience directing television coverage.”
To them, this was simple: “Bari say Israel good, Bari get lots of money.”
But, of course, there’s more to the story. In today’s deep-dive, we look at the media landscape to understand: Does it pay better to be pro- or anti-Israel?
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Editor’s Note
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