The way the media works at a global level is going through a fundamental transformation where power is no longer held by the traditional powerful, but a new technological elite in charge of large technology companies such as Google, Meta, Amazon and Oracle.
According to the organization’s recent report Media Justice, This phenomenon of “media capture” is redefining who tells the stories and, therefore, who controls the future of the public narrative.
That is, this report reveals that the large technology companies, known as the Big Techhave developed a systematic strategy to take over the information ecosystem, especially in the United States.
They do this through three mechanisms: the direct purchase of media, the creation of financial dependence in the newsrooms and control of digital platforms where the majority of citizens are informed today such as YouTube, Facebook, X, WhatsApp and Instagram.
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The document, titled Media Capture: Who Controls the Story Controls the Futureis, according to its own authors, “an organizing tool” aimed at communities, activists and journalists who need understand why the information system does not honestly cover the conflicts that directly affect them.
Silicon Valley billionaires buy the information agenda in the United States
Table of Contents
- Silicon Valley billionaires buy the information agenda in the United States
- Bezos, Benioff and the pattern of editorial control at big US newspapers
- Why traditional media is giving in to Big Tech money
- Google and Meta finance newsrooms that should investigate them: the trap of dependent journalism
- AI agreements between media and big tech: the new business that compromises journalistic independence
- Algorithms, social networks and the control of information distribution in the digital age
- What media capture means for coverage of vulnerable communities
The most illustrative case in the report is that of Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle. His company finances the acquisition of Paramount, owner of the television network CBSby Skydance Media, a company run by his son, David Ellison, in an operation valued at 8,000 million dollars.
As a condition of regulatory approval before the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Skydance Committed to Comprehensive Review of CBS Editorial Line and to eliminate its diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
The editorial consequence was immediate, in October 2025, Paramount Skydance acquired The Free Pressa conservative digital media, and appointed its founder, Bari Weiss, as director of CBS News.
“Weiss has built her brand on dismissing concerns about systemic racism and attacking diversity programs”says the report, warning that this editorial stance will define which stories are told and which are silenced.
But Ellison doesn’t stop there. In February 2026, Paramount Skydance submitted a hostile takeover bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, which included CNN y HBOfor approximately 108,000 million dollars.
And it is already a fact, on February 27, Paramount confirmed that it will buy Warner Bros, after an agreement that exceeds $413 billion, and it came after a tough bidding war between Paramount Skydance and Netflix. With this operation, the platform streaming would get an immense catalog of films and with the HBO Max app.
So things are, The Ellison family would control one of the largest media and technology portfolios never assembled by a single family.
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Bezos, Benioff and the pattern of editorial control at big US newspapers
Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, bought the Washington Post in 2013 for 250 million dollars. During his early years he was praised for rescuing the newspaper from bankruptcy. That consensus was fractured.
In 2024, Bezos blocked the newspaper’s presidential endorsement of Kamala Harris, contributed a million dollars to Donald Trump’s inauguration fund and hired three columnists with a conservative profile who had appeared regularly on panels on the television channel Fox News, known for its marked republican or right-wing agenda.
The outcome came in February 2026, when he Post fired more than 300 journalists, almost 30% of its total staff, closed its sports section and drastically reduced local and international coverage.
Its digital traffic fell nearly 50% in three years. “That’s what ownership by a tech oligarch looks like in practice,” the report concludes.
For its part, Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, acquired the magazine Time in 2018 for 190 million dollars. And biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong bought the Los Angeles Times.
The pattern is repeated in these entrepreneurs who have technological liquidity compared to media debt. That is to say, lBillionaires in the technology sector acquire television channels, newspapers and digital platforms to decide what is reported, to whom and how in the United States.
Why traditional media is giving in to Big Tech money
The report identifies two structural conditions that explain the speed of these acquisitions. First, Technology companies are accumulating unprecedented capital reserves.
The combined market capitalization of the so-called “Magnificent Seven”, which are Nvidia, Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Tesla, exceeds the GDP of the European Union. Oracle alone reached a capitalization of $858 billion in October 2025.
Second, Traditional media is drowning in debt. Paramount had $14.6 billion in liabilities before the merger, and major rating agencies downgraded its debt to junk (junk bonds) in 2024.
“The pattern is simple, The tech oligarchs have the money, the media needs it, and the ransom price is editorial control”, summarizes the document.
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Google and Meta finance newsrooms that should investigate them: the trap of dependent journalism
Capturing these big tech companies does not always require direct purchase of a media outlet. The report devotes an entire chapter to what it calls “soft power” over the media.
In other words, these technology companies finance, make alliances with artificial intelligence and generate progressive financial dependence.
For example, Google and Meta have distributed funds directly to hundreds of newsrooms in the United States. He Meta Journalism Project contributed $30 million to 559 media outlets between 2018 and 2022.
He Google News Initiative has financed more than 450 newsrooms in the world. When California attempted, in 2024, to replace that voluntary funding with a mandatory tax on platforms, Google blocked Californian news sites from its search engine and threatened to withdraw its direct funding. The law was withdrawn.
“In the 1970s, tobacco companies were the main advertisers of American newspapers. The financial relationship caused newspapers to delay publishing stories about the health risks of tobacco,” the report recalls, citing academic Ben Bagdikian.
At the end of the chapter, Media Justice proposes an analogy: tech funding creates the same incentive for silence.
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AI agreements between media and big tech: the new business that compromises journalistic independence
The report documents an additional dimension of this dependency, it refers to content licensing agreements to train artificial intelligence models.
Virtually every major publishing group in the United States has signed at least one such contract with an AI company.
He New York Times sued OpenAI in 2023 for copyright infringement, while the case is still pending court resolution, but In 2025 it signed an agreement with Amazon to license its editorial content to train AI models.
News Corp, owner of the Wall Street Journalhe New York Post y Fox News, sued Perplexity AI for using its content without compensation and that same year it signed a $250 million agreement with OpenAI, publicly calling it “a company with principles.”
The document is explicit about the impact: “Smaller outlets, including black and ethnic press, do not have content libraries valuable enough to demand licensing fees from AI companies. They receive the loss of traffic without payment”.
Media Justice It also reveals the third capture mechanism that operates in the business of distributing content and information on the Internet.
For example, In 2025, social media will surpass television as the leading source of news in the United States for the first time in history. Facebook reaches 3.07 billion monthly users.
The sum of the great news sites, CNN, New York Times, Fox News, it barely reaches 964 million monthly visitors.
“Platforms don’t just compete with traditional media for attention. They operate on a completely different scale. And that scale is what gives tech oligarchs their leverage,” the report maintains.
In January 2025, Mark Zuckerberg announced the end of fact-checking on Facebook and Instagramdescribing that mechanism as “too politically biased.”
For its part, Elon Musk suspended journalists and critics at X without public explanation. Oracle, through the new consortium that manages TikTok in the United States, directly controls the platform’s data storage and algorithm for its 170 million American users. Days after the deal closed, users reported that TikTok appeared to suppress content critical of Trump and the ICE immigration service..
In parallel, searches with Google’s AI-generated summaries reduced traffic to publishing sites by an estimated 25% during 2025. Only 8% of users click on the original source after seeing an automated summary.
In that context, the Huffington Post lost 50% of its direct web traffic in three years. Business Insider recorded a drop of 55% and laid off 21% of its staff.
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What media capture means for coverage of vulnerable communities
The report of Media Justice concludes with a statement that runs through the three chapters of the study: Media capture is not a neutral phenomenon. Its consequences are distributed unequally and fall most heavily on communities with less political and economic power..
“Newsrooms with fewer Black and Latino journalists produce coverage that reflects fewer Black and Latino perspectives. Stories about policing, housing, immigration, and environmental racism receive less space,” the document warns.
The text adds that When a tech oligarch decides which coverages are profitable enough to maintain, those that serve communities with the least market power disappear first..
In the end the report states: “The technological oligarchs who consolidate control over the American media system are betting that we will not notice, or that we will feel powerless to stop it. 200 years of history of social movements say otherwise.”
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