\n<\/p>\n
Donald Trump revealed last week the US and China are close to inking a deal to let TikTok continue operating in the US. Details are not final, but should the agreement go through as has been reported, the owners of the US\u2019s most powerful cable TV channels may soon also steer the nation\u2019s most influential social network. The arrangement would gift Trump\u2019s billionaire allies a degree of control over US media that would be vast and unprecedented.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s what we know. Under the known terms of the deal, which Trump declared has the tentative buy-in of Chinese president Xi Jinping, TikTok in the US would get a new group of US investors, led by the US software giant Oracle, which would license TikTok\u2019s vaunted recommendation algorithm and take over its security.<\/p>\n
Among the other investors, Trump said in a Fox News interview on Sunday, are media mogul Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan, the CEO of Fox Corporation. Trump said Michael Dell, the CEO of the computer maker Dell, would also be involved.<\/p>\n
TikTok would get a new seven-member board of directors, six of them Americans. It is a distinct possibility that Rupert Murdoch, Lachlan Murdoch, Oracle\u2019s Larry Ellison and David Ellison, CEO of Paramount Skydance and Larry\u2019s son, will occupy some of those seats.<\/p>\n
Lachlan Murdoch, the 54-year-old son of 94-year-old Rupert, is executive chair and chief executive officer of Fox Corporation, the parent company of Fox News. The Murdoch scion took control of the company following a legal settlement in September with his siblings, one of whom, James, reportedly no longer wants anything to do with his father\u2019s conservative empire. The deal for TikTok will likely involve Fox\u2019s parent company investing, rather than Rupert or Lachlan individually, CNN reported.<\/p>\n
\u201cI hate to tell you this \u2013 a man named Lachlan is involved. You know who Lachlan is? That\u2019s a very unusual name, Lachlan Murdoch,\u201d Trump said. \u201cRupert is probably gonna be in the group, I think they\u2019re gonna be in the group, a couple of others. Really great people. Very prominent people. And they\u2019re also American patriots, they love this country, so I think they\u2019re gonna do a really good job.\u201d<\/p>\n
Asserting supervision of TikTok would offer the elder Murdoch a mulligan for his abortive ambitions in tech. News Corp purchased Myspace in 2005 for a whopping $580m. Three years later, it peaked, becoming the most-visited site in the US. However, the insurgent social network Facebook soon dethroned it, and Mark Zuckerberg\u2019s net worth today amounts to 10 times that of Rupert Murdoch\u2019s, per Bloomberg\u2019s billionaires index.<\/p>\n
Trump seems to have a fondness for father-son pairs. At the other end of TikTok\u2019s American boardroom may sit Larry and David Ellison, 81 and 42, the founders of Oracle and Skydance Media, respectively.<\/p>\n
The elder Ellison is the co-founder and chief technology officer of Oracle, an enterprise software and cloud-computing company worth nearly $900bn. Ellison himself, who holds roughly 40% of Oracle\u2019s shares, briefly dethroned Elon Musk as the richest person in the world after the company reported superlative earnings earlier this month. He\u2019s a longtime Silicon Valley fixture and Trump donor who hosted a fundraiser for the president at his southern California estate in 2020. He\u2019s known for a jet-setting lifestyle of multiple mega-yachts and the deed to almost all of the Hawaiian island of Lanai.<\/p>\n
The younger Ellison\u2019s company has become an entertainment industry vacuum, sucking up Paramount \u2013 which operates CBS, BET, Nickelodeon, Paramount+ and the UK\u2019s Channel 5 and which produces the Mission: Impossible franchise \u2013 in August. Hot off the heels of its corporate consummation, Paramount Skydance is now reportedly preparing a majority-cash offer to take over Warner Bros Discovery, owner of CNN, HBO, DC Comics, the Discovery Channel, HGTV and the Food Network, to name a few.<\/p>\n
In the months leading up to the merger, CBS News made a series of Trump-friendly moves like settling a lawsuit against 60 Minutes, appointing a Trump ally as an ombudsman and courting \u201canti-woke\u201d former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss as a potential leader of a changed version of the channel. The moves may serve as a roadmap for how David Ellison would helm TikTok.<\/p>\n
The power centralized in the Murdoch and Ellison families would be enormous should the TikTok deal and David Ellison\u2019s purchase of Warner Bros Discovery go through. They would command media outlets that reach both young and old audiences, with high degrees of authority and influence. The only age groups perhaps immune to their sway would be gen X, so suspicious of their parents\u2019 viewing habits, and millennials, just too old for TikTok.<\/p>\n
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Privacy Notice: <\/strong>Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.<\/span><\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Would this type of consolidation be legal? The Federal Communications Commission\u2019s website is blunt in its anti-monopoly rules when it comes to broadcast television: \u201cFCC rules effectively prohibit a merger between any two of the big four broadcast television networks: ABC, CBS, Fox [Broadcasting Company], and NBC.\u201d The regulation does not pertain to Fox News Channel or CNN, as they require paid subscriptions to view.<\/p>\n Still, the rule is instructive. What if the owners of the US\u2019s most powerful cable channels also steer the nation\u2019s most important social network? Would that violate monopoly laws?<\/p>\n The answer may lie in a rule change the commission made eight years ago when it eliminated a prohibition on owning both a broadcast station and a daily newspaper in the same region. The reason: \u201cthe growth in the number and variety of sources of entertainment, news and information in the modern media marketplace\u201d.<\/p>\n If a person can have a town\u2019s TV station and its newspaper, why can\u2019t a billionaire take control of a social network used by hundreds of millions and the president\u2019s favorite channel?<\/p>\n Parsing the letter of the FCC\u2019s rules likely does not matter as much as the current currency of high-level US government decisions: Trump\u2019s favor. The president\u2019s takeover of the FCC has already been incredibly successful, establishing a fiat over deals that allows him to pressure networks not under his allies\u2019 control. The supreme court ruled earlier this week that Trump\u2019s firing of the lone Democrat on the commission could stand. Though he denies it, head commissioner Brendan Carr seemed to play a leading role in Disney\u2019s brief suspension of Jimmy Kimmel from ABC\u2019s airwaves with threats against the network.<\/p>\n The landscape of American media is looking very red as Trump\u2019s TikTok deal takes shape. The largest owner of local TV stations in the US, Nexstar, declared fealty to Trump with its decision to no longer air Kimmel\u2019s show, as did local TV titan Sinclair. Now two of the nation\u2019s marquee news networks, CBS and CNN, may follow Fox\u2019s rightwing lead. Online, X has turned from a heterogenous feed into a conservative social network. TikTok may go the same way under its Maga-approved board.<\/p>\n At the moment, the Murdochs and the Ellisons must be savoring Trump\u2019s favor.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Donald Trump revealed last week the US and China are close to inking a deal to let TikTok continue operating in the US. 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