Five Tracks at Once — How the FCC, the Ellisons, and Israel Became the Same Story in 2026

There is a way of looking at news that treats every story as discrete: this is an FCC story, that is a corporate-merger story, that other thing over there is a press-freedom story, that fourth thing is a foreign-policy story. Each lives on its own desk; each gets its own beat reporter; each receives its own thoughtful 800-word treatment. The stories pass each other in the hallway and nod politely. Then five of them turn out to be the same story, and nobody on any of the desks has the room in their column inches to say so. This is a piece about one of those moments. The five tracks below are not five stories. They are one structural transformation of how broadcast news in the United States works, who owns it, what licensing power the federal government exercises over it, and what foreign-policy alignments the people who own it have publicly committed themselves to. The transformation is happening now. It is happening fast. And almost nobody in the US press is putting all the pieces on the same table at once.

The five tracks, side by side

Each of the five tracks below has been covered, at least somewhere, in the US press. None has been covered together. The structural story is what they make when stacked.

Track 1 — FCC chairman, license threats, content

The most-reported track. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, appointed by Trump in January 2025, has spent the past year using the chairmanship as a public bully pulpit to threaten broadcasters' licenses over news coverage Trump dislikes. The pattern is consistent and accelerating.

In September 2025, after ABC's Jimmy Kimmel made comments about the suspect in Charlie Kirk's assassination, Carr told podcaster Benny Johnson on air that the comments were "a very, very serious issue right now for Disney." Within hours, ABC pulled Jimmy Kimmel Live! from the schedule. Nexstar and Sinclair — which own large numbers of ABC affiliate stations — also pulled the show. The show returned six days later. The pre-emption demonstrated the mechanic clearly: Carr cannot revoke a network's license because networks don't have licenses; only local affiliates do. But local affiliates owned by Nexstar and Sinclair, which need FCC approval for their own ongoing M&A activity, can be persuaded to pre-empt content if the regulator's chair is publicly displeased.

In March 2026, mid-Iran-war, Carr posted on X: "Broadcasters that are running hoaxes and news distortions — also known as the fake news — have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up. The law is clear. Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will lose their licenses if they do not." Public-interest law expert Andrew Jay Schwartzman told CNN the threats were "hollow" — broadcast licenses do not even come up for renewal until late 2028, and the FCC has not denied a license renewal in decades. Carr's response: "The Communications Act authorizes the FCC to call in licenses for early renewal."

In May 2026, Carr formally "launched" an FCC review of ABC's broadcast licenses over a Jimmy Kimmel joke about the president's wife. Trade press has covered it as legally baseless theater. The serious point — the one that gets lost when the act of threatening is itself dismissed as theater — is not whether Carr can revoke licenses. The serious point is that the threats create the conditions for the next four tracks. They are not the substance. They are the soundtrack.

Track 2 — The ownership caps come down

In parallel with the threats, Carr is pursuing what would normally be a separate technocratic deregulatory agenda. The current rules limit:

• National audience reach cap (39%): No single entity can own TV stations reaching more than 39% of US TV households. With the historical "UHF discount" applied, the practical cap is closer to 78%.
• "Top Four" rule: A single owner cannot hold two of the four major broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC) in the same local market.
• Local TV ownership cap: A single owner is generally limited to two stations per local market.
• Local radio sub-caps: Per-market limits based on the size of the radio market.

In July 2025, the Eighth Circuit vacated the "Top Four" prohibition in Zimmer Radio of Mid-Missouri v. FCC, holding that Section 202(h) of the 1996 Telecom Act is fundamentally deregulatory and cannot be used to maintain ownership restrictions. Carr — who as a Commissioner had dissented from the FCC's 2023 decision to keep the rule — applauded the decision publicly.

In September 2025, the FCC formally launched a new review of media ownership limits, taking public comment on whether to repeal the national 39% cap and the local two-station limit. In November 2025, Carr announced a separate review of broadcast network/affiliate relationships, questioning contractual restrictions that prevent affiliates from pre-empting network shows or airing rival programming. Read in context with the September 2025 Kimmel pre-emption episode (which depended exactly on affiliates being able to pre-empt the network feed), the implication is harder to miss: strengthen the affiliates' hand against the networks, weaken the editorial coherence of network news, and make the FCC's licensing leverage over local stations more consequential.

Track 3 — The mergers

Three major deals, one family in the middle of two of them.

Track 4 — Foreign capital, just in time

The fourth track is the one easiest to miss because it appears procedural. On April 9, 2026, the FCC published a Report and Order codifying definitions and procedures governing the disclosure and approval processes for foreign ownership of FCC licensees and authorization holders. The rules take effect May 11, 2026 — six days from the publication of this piece. The stated rationale is consolidating long-standing precedent into clearer rules that "promote efficient and shorter processing times" for Section 310(b) review.

Section 310(b) of the Communications Act limits foreign ownership of FCC licensees to 25% absent FCC approval. The Paramount Skydance/Warner Bros. Discovery merger, per Techdirt's reading of shareholder filings, would result in a merged entity that is approximately 49.5% foreign-owned — well above the 25% statutory threshold and squarely in the territory where Section 310(b) review is required. The new rules, taking effect six days from now, are the procedural framework under which that review would happen.

The timing is striking enough that any reasonable observer would note it. The framework that streamlines the review for a 49.5%-foreign-owned media merger goes into effect days before that merger needs the framework. The FCC's stated interest in efficient processing is genuine and defensible on its own terms; whether that interest happened to align with the calendar of a specific pending merger is left as an exercise for the reader.

Track 5 — The Ellison family's commitments, on the public record

This is the track that requires the most careful framing, because anything written about a specific Jewish family's relationship with the State of Israel can — depending on tone — slide into territory that is either antisemitic or evasive. The frame this piece adopts is the same frame you would adopt for any other named individual whose specific public-record financial commitments are relevant to assessing what they will do with their corporate power: identify the documented commitments by name, source, and dollar amount; let the reader assess. The relevant fact is not that Larry Ellison is Jewish (he has publicly described himself as a religious skeptic and refused his own bar mitzvah). The relevant fact is that he is, on the public record, the largest known private US donor to the Israeli military — and he is now in operational control of CBS News, bidding for CNN, and (through Oracle) running TikTok US's data security and algorithm.

The documented record:

• Friends of the IDF donations: $10M (2014). $16.6M (2017) — the largest single donation in FIDF's history at the time. Subsequent donations bringing the cumulative figure above $30M. Ellison has called Israel "our home."
• Personal Netanyahu relationship: Netanyahu has vacationed on Ellison's privately owned Hawaiian island (Lānaʻi). Ellison reportedly offered Netanyahu a $450,000-salary seat on Oracle's board. Ellison reportedly lobbied Israeli mogul Arnon Milchan to drop his lawyer so Netanyahu could hire that lawyer for one of his corruption cases.
• East Jerusalem archaeological excavation: Ellison helped fund a 2019 project that was criticized by Palestinians, Israeli peace activists, and some archaeologists. A $1B lawsuit filed against several supporters including Ellison was dismissed in February 2024.
• Sderot fortification: $500K pledge in 2007 to fortify a community center in the Israeli town of Sderot against rocket attacks.
• Oracle's corporate identification: Then-CEO Safra Catz, Calcalist 2021: "our commitment to Israel is second to none." Catz: if Oracle employees "don't agree with our mission to support the State of Israel, then maybe we aren't the right company for them." This is a corporate position, not a personal opinion.
• Oracle/Israel state contracts: Multiple lucrative contracts with the Israeli national security state.
• Tony Blair Institute: Ellison has reportedly contributed at least $130M to the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, which has promoted Oracle's services across the Global South and which has been involved in post-October-7 Gaza policy advisory.

None of these facts are contested. They are reported in mainstream Israeli press (Ynet, Calcalist), confirmed by FIDF, included in the Wikipedia entry on Ellison, and acknowledged in Oracle's own public communications.

What is also no longer hypothetical is what has already happened at CBS post-acquisition. In fall 2025, after taking control of Paramount, David Ellison's leadership oversaw layoffs that gutted CBS News' "Race and Culture Unit" — the in-house team that had been responsible for accountability conversations with on-air talent over editorial standards. (That same unit had previously reprimanded "CBS Mornings" co-host Tony Dokoupil over a 2024 confrontation with Ta-Nehisi Coates regarding Coates's book on Palestinian dispossession, in which Dokoupil characterized Coates's writing as reading like the work of someone in "the backpack of an extremist.") In December 2025, Bari Weiss — confirmed as part of the editorial restructuring after the merger — named Dokoupil as the new CBS Evening News anchor. The Young Turks' Cenk Uygur put it cleanly on social media: "Bari Weiss named Tony Dokoupil the new CBS Evening News anchor. In a wild coincidence, he happens to be the most pro-Israel anchor they have." Former Paramount Global chair Shari Redstone publicly took the Dokoupil-on-Coates side after the original 2024 controversy, telling reporters CBS bosses had "made a mistake" reprimanding him. The post-Ellison editorial direction is therefore not speculative. It is documented, in motion, and consistent with what the public-record commitments described above would have predicted.

The ownership network, simplified

What the consolidated entity looks like, if the pending Paramount Skydance / Warner Bros. Discovery merger closes:

The diagram is deliberately simplified. The actual network includes additional entities — Tony Blair Institute, the Free Press, the various Skydance subsidiaries, Oracle's contracts with the Israeli state, and so on — but the structural shape is clear from the simplified version. One family at the top, three operational media properties beneath, two flows of financial commitment to a foreign state at the bottom.

The synthesis sentence

If the five tracks are stacked properly, the sentence that emerges from the public record is this:

That sentence is not a conspiracy theory. Each clause is supported by named, dated, sourced public documents — court rulings, FCC filings, SEC documents, FIDF acknowledgments, Oracle press releases, Calcalist interviews, Ellison's own quoted statements. The sentence does not assert that the Ellison family has used or will use editorial control of CBS News to shape coverage of Israel. It asserts only that the structural conditions under which such shaping would be straightforward have been put in place, and that those conditions are now near-complete after a 12-month sequence of regulatory and corporate moves that, taken individually, look like ordinary procedural news.

What the new owners do with their editorial control is the question for the next 12 months. The question for this month is whether the public is being told, in plain terms, what has just happened to the ownership of US broadcast news, who owns it, and what their public-record commitments are. The answer, on the evidence of any newspaper homepage as of this writing, is no.

What this looks like when it's happened before

The case for ownership rules and against foreign-state-aligned media control is not abstract. It is recent, well-documented, and — for those of us with roots in the Philippines — personal. The country's largest broadcaster, ABS-CBN, was forced off the air on May 5, 2020 — exactly six years ago today — through a coordinated regulatory assault by the Duterte administration that combined licensing pressure, foreign-ownership accusations, and franchise-renewal denial. Reading the case study in detail, against the backdrop of the five US tracks above, is one of the more clarifying things a US-based media analyst can do this month.

The Duterte playbook had four moves. They are worth listing in the same five-track format used above, because the parallels are sharp.

Compare that against the US case as it stands today. Move 1 — public license threats over critical coverage — Carr is doing exactly this, openly, multiple times, over Iran-war coverage and over Kimmel jokes. The legal experts call it "hollow" but the chilling effect lands; ABC pulled Kimmel's show within hours when Carr was publicly displeased in September 2025, just as ABS-CBN's Lopez family was forced into a public apology. Move 2 — weaponizing the regulator — is the substance of all five tracks, particularly the timing of consolidation approvals (Skydance/Paramount, Nexstar/Tegna) alongside license threats. Move 3 — foreign-ownership rules as regulatory cover — is the inverse mechanic in the US case. Duterte used foreign-ownership rules to shut down a critical broadcaster; the US FCC is streamlining foreign-ownership rules to enable a 49.5% foreign-owned merger of a friendlier one. The tool is the same. The polarity is reversed. Move 4 — franchise denial through allied legislators — has not yet happened in the US case and may not need to, because the consolidation toward administration-friendly owners is achieving the editorial outcome through purchase rather than denial.

The comparison is uncomfortable but the comparison is real. In both cases the regulator is a presidential appointee. In both cases the legal-political coverage frames the threats as either toothless theater or as an isolated First Amendment dispute. In both cases the *cumulative* effect is what changes the press environment — not any single act, but the totality of acts arriving together over a ~12-month window. The ABS-CBN shutdown was not a single moment. It was four years of pressure that finally became one moment.

The differences also matter, and they cut both ways. The US case is happening on a much larger scale (hundreds of broadcasters, vs. one Philippine network); through more sophisticated mechanisms (corporate consolidation rather than franchise denial); with a more complicated foreign-policy alignment (a US ally rather than a foreign adversary); and within a much stronger constitutional press-freedom tradition. None of those differences make the US case less serious. They arguably make it more so. Duterte needed to shut a broadcaster down because he could not buy it. The mechanism on offer in the United States in 2026 — buying it, with regulator-streamlined foreign capital, while the regulator threatens any remaining critical broadcasters into self-censorship — is more elegant. It is also harder to reverse.

The closest parallel in the US case is not, in fact, ABS-CBN. It is what happened to ABS-CBN's predecessor in 1972, when Ferdinand Marcos Sr. shut it down at the start of martial law. ABS-CBN was off the air from 1972 to 1986 — fourteen years — and only returned because the Marcos regime fell to a popular uprising. The 2020 shutdown was a partial reprise of the 1972 one. Both happened because the network's coverage threatened a sitting president, and both happened with the same regulatory tools (licensing, franchise) used as the formal pretext. What recovered ABS-CBN both times was not legal process. It was political change. The lesson is not that the law protected the press. The lesson is that the law did not.

For Filipinos who lived through 2020, the muscle memory of seeing this mechanism deployed against US broadcasters in 2026 is unsettling in a specific way. The order of operations is recognizable. The regulator's tone is recognizable. The way ordinary corporate-merger news pages and political-First Amendment columnists report each move as a separate story — without the synthesis — is recognizable. The synthesis was missing in Manila in 2019 too. By the time the synthesis was obvious to mainstream Philippine outlets, ABS-CBN was off the air. There is a window, and the window closes.

Why foreign-aligned media ownership is, in fact, bad

The piece has so far been careful to frame Track 5 as a structural observation rather than a values claim. That framing earned the right to be made; but it should not be confused with neutrality on the underlying question. Foreign-state-aligned ownership of broadcast news is something democracies are supposed to prevent, and have generally tried to prevent, for reasons that have nothing to do with xenophobia and everything to do with self-government.

The argument is not complicated. A democracy's news media performs a specific function: it allows citizens to make informed decisions about who governs them and how. That function depends on news organizations whose editorial direction is responsive to the public they serve, not to outside parties whose priorities run on different incentive structures. When the editorial direction of major news organizations is set by parties whose loyalties run primarily to a foreign state — particularly a foreign state engaged in active wars whose coverage is a domestic political issue — the function breaks down in a specific way. Citizens cannot reliably tell when they are reading the news and when they are reading the foreign-policy preferences of the owners' patron.

This is precisely why the US has, since the Communications Act of 1934, restricted foreign ownership of broadcast licensees to 25% absent FCC approval (Section 310(b)(4)). It is why most functioning democracies have analogous restrictions. The Philippines' constitutional bar on foreign investment in domestic media — the bar Calida tried to weaponize against ABS-CBN in 2020 — exists for the same reason. The rules are not perfect, and they are easy to skirt with corporate structuring, but the principle they encode is sound: the people who tell a country's people what is happening should not be primarily accountable to a different country's government.

The Ellison case is delicate because Ellison is a US citizen, his foreign ties are philanthropic and political rather than ownership-equity-based, and his political alignment with the current US administration is itself a domestic matter. None of that makes the structural observation go away. The Trump administration is itself, on the public record, more aligned with the Netanyahu government than any prior US administration in modern history. The Israel-aligned ownership consolidation of US broadcast news during a US-Israel war on Iran is therefore not a foreign-vs-domestic question in the simple sense — it is a question about which US administration's foreign-policy alignments are being baked into the editorial direction of domestic broadcast news, and on what timescale. That question deserves an honest answer rather than a procedural shrug.

The honest answer the piece can give is: the consolidation is happening, the alignment is documented, the regulator is enabling rather than checking it, and the resulting editorial environment will be — predictably, structurally — less critical of Israel-aligned US foreign policy than the prior environment was. Whether that predictable outcome is acceptable to American voters is a question they cannot answer if the synthesis is not made available to them in plain language. That is what this piece is trying to do.

What's getting under-covered

Each track has been reported in the US press. The full synthesis has not been — at least not by the legacy outlets that most Americans rely on. The Skydance/Paramount deal got business-page treatment. The Nexstar/Tegna deal got business-page treatment. The Carr threats got political/First Amendment treatment. The foreign-ownership rule streamlining got trade-press treatment. Ellison's IDF donations, when mentioned at all, get philanthropy-page treatment. The piece that puts all five together has mostly been written abroad — by +972 Magazine in Israel/Palestine, by Al Jazeera, by MintPress and Just International, by Drop Site News. One important US-based exception is worth naming: The Young Turks (TYT), the progressive online outlet co-hosted by Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian, has been doing the synthesis work in real time — connecting the Ellison-Paramount-Bari-Weiss-Dokoupil dots on air the same week each move happened, calling out the "wild coincidence" of pro-Israel editorial appointments at exactly the moment a major IDF donor takes corporate control. TYT's structural advantage is exactly that they hate mainstream media — they have no commercial dependence on the consolidating networks, no licensing exposure to the FCC, no incentive to soften the framing for the sake of access. The same applies to Drop Site News (founded by former Intercept journalists), Breaking Points (Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti), Status (Oliver Darcy's media-criticism newsletter), and a handful of independent Substacks. The synthesis exists in US-based outlets. It just doesn't exist in the outlets that own the broadcast spectrum.

This is itself a press-freedom data point. It is also the precise gap that the structural transformation of broadcast ownership is positioned to widen, not close. The mechanism is uncomplicated: the small number of major US outlets that could write this synthesis are mostly themselves either (a) currently or imminently owned by the Ellison family, or (b) under regulatory pressure from the same FCC, or (c) under commercial pressure to maintain access to the merged entities. The independent outlets that are doing the work — TYT, Drop Site, Breaking Points, +972, Al Jazeera, MintPress, Status — are smaller, harder-to-find, and easier for legacy outlets to dismiss as ideologically marginal. Coverage gaps of this kind are not random. They are the predicted output of the structural conditions described above. And the conditions are now structural, not contingent.

What a careful reader can do with this piece is not to draw any specific conclusion about what CBS News will or won't cover next month. What a careful reader can do is read the next three months of CBS News coverage of Israel, of Iran, of Palestine, of the IDF, and of related topics, with an awareness of the public-record commitments of the people who now own it. The same applies to CNN as the merger closes. That kind of awareness is the only available substitute for ownership rules. The ownership rules are gone.