As Ellison Buys Out TikTok, US Moves Toward One-Party MediaLarry Ellison, founder of the software firm Oracle, is the second-richest billionaire in both the US and the world, and for a brief moment was No. 1 in the world (AP, 9/11/25). But for a long time, unlike many of his peers, he was unable to boast that he controlled a chunk of the news and opinion reaching the American public. On Forbes‘ US list, he is sandwiched between Elon Musk, No. 1, who bought the social media network Twitter and rebranded it as X, and Mark Zuckerberg, who runs Meta, which operates Facebook and Instagram. Jeff Bezos, at No. 4, has the Washington Post. Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google, Nos. 5 and 6, operate the leading search engine as well as one of the most important news aggregators, Google News. Michael Bloomberg, at No. 13, the former New York City mayor, has Bloomberg and its various outlets. Ellison seems to have joined the club, as TikTok, under US government coercion (FAIR.org, 1/23/25), is selling 80% of its US operations to an investor consortium that includes Oracle, along with investment firms Silver Lake and Andreessen Horowitz (Reuters, 9/16/25). Ellison is a big Trumper, joining in the reactionary denial of the 2020 presidential elections (Washington Post, 5/20/22). Like some of the others in the deal, he is part of the inner circle of Trump’s favorite corporate ideologues. This TikTok deal is not just about money. It’s about control of the political narrative.
https://fair.org/home/as-ellison-buys-out-tiktok-us-moves-toward-one-party-media/Censorship Is a Structural Problem: If We’re Blaming Presidents for Muzzling Comedians, Let’s Include Clinton Along with TrumpAs corporate media accelerate their censorship of comedians and journalists, we must realize that we got to this dire situation because of old-fashioned, bipartisan corruption in Washington. The problem didn’t begin with Donald Trump. It began long ago, especially in the 1980s and ‘90s when presidents of both parties and Congress decided to put the nation’s media system in the hands of a small number of ever-larger corporations. And, of course, those corporations were big political donors to both parties. Enormous mergers were approved. Anti-trust laws were ignored. Federal Communications Commission rules were changed, and caps on mega-ownership relaxed or eliminated. Today, a handful of amoral conglomerates control our information and media system – conglomerates that care a lot about profit-maximization and very little about free expression and the right to dissent, especially when expression and dissent interfere with their profits. There was nothing natural or inevitable about the process of conglomeration. It was sheer corruption – and Trumpian censorship is the result. This week’s “indefinite” suspension of comedian and Trump critic Jimmy Kimmel by ABC/Disney over remarks about right-wing exploitation of Charlie Kirk’s murder might seem abrupt. It wasn’t. It came after an unprecedented threat from Trump FCC Chair Brendan Carr to go after ABC stations and, perhaps more importantly, because of two powerful companies that blossomed over the years thanks to political decisions made in Washington. Those two companies – Nexstar Media and Sinclair Broadcast Group – each own or operate roughly 200 TV stations across the country, including many ABC affiliates, and they acted before Disney by saying they’d be removing Kimmel’s program from their ABC stations.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/09/19/censorship-is-a-structural-problem-if-were-blaming-presidents-for-muzzling-comedians-lets-include-clinton-along-with-trump/ON PRACTICE: On the Relation Between Knowledge and Practice, Between Knowing and Doing by Mao Zedong Before Marx, materialism examined the problem of knowledge apart from the social nature of man and apart from his historical development, and was therefore incapable of understanding the dependence of knowledge on social practice, that is, the dependence of knowledge on production and the class struggle. Above all, Marxists regard man's activity in production as the most fundamental practical activity, the determinant of all his other activities. Man's knowledge depends mainly on his activity in material production, through which he comes gradually to understand the phenomena, the properties and the laws of nature, and the relations between himself and nature; and through his activity in production he also gradually comes to understand, in varying degrees, certain relations that exist between man and man. None of this knowledge can be acquired apart from activity in production. In a classless society every person, as a member of society, joins in common effort with the other members, enters into definite relations of production with them and engages in production to meet man's material needs. In all class societies, the members of the different social classes also enter, in different ways, into definite relations of production and engage in production to meet their material needs. This is the primary source from which human knowledge develops. Man's social practice is not confined to activity in production, but takes many other forms–class struggle, political life, scientific and artistic pursuits; in short, as a social being, man participates in all spheres of the practical life of society. Thus man, in varying degrees, comes to know the different relations between man and man, not only through his material life but also through his political and cultural life (both of which are intimately bound up with material life). Of these other types of social practice, class struggle in particular, in all its various forms, exerts a profound influence on the development of man's knowledge. In class society everyone lives as a member of a particular class, and every kind of thinking, without exception, is stamped with the brand of a class.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_16.htm