Israel's biggest US donor now owns CBS

Alan Macleod | MintPress News

After reaching an agreement with President Trump, David Ellison — the son of the second-richest man in the world, Larry Ellison — has acquired Paramount Global, the media giant that owns CBS News.

Larry Ellison, the largest private funder of the Israel Defense Forces, is deeply tied to the Israeli national security state and counts Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu among his closest friends.

David has already announced significant changes at CBS, promising "unbiased" news coverage and "varied ideological perspectives," which are widely understood to signal a shift toward right-wing, pro-Trump coverage. Worse still, Bari Weiss, a journalist with a long history of zealous pro-Israel advocacy, is being considered as the network's new ombudsman, shaping its political direction, precisely because of her "pro-Israel stance."

MintPress News examines Ellison's close ties to both Trump and Israel, Weiss's extensive career as Israel's most vocal supporter in the U.S., and what this means for the future of free and diverse speech in America.

Israel's Man In Silicon Valley

Although Skydance, Ellison's media empire, is officially headed by David, it is well understood that father Larry holds both the purse strings and the reins of power. With a net worth of $301 billion, placing him second on the Forbes Real-Time Billionaires Rankings, Larry made his fortune by founding tech giant Oracle.

Oracle started as a project for the Central Intelligence Agency. Indeed, it is named after Project Oracle, a 1970s CIA operation on which Ellison worked. For some time, the CIA was Oracle's only customer, until it began to win contracts with other agencies of the U.S. national security state. Today, although Oracle's customer base is much wider, it maintains its role as the privatized face of the CIA.

Yet if Oracle is close to Washington and Langley, it is perhaps even more intimately tied to the State of Israel. An avowed Zionist, Ellison has worked tirelessly to advance Israel's political project. Among his closest personal friends is Benjamin Netanyahu, with whom he vacationed on his private island in Hawaii. Ellison was so impressed and confident in the Israeli prime minister that he offered him a seat on his company's board, replete with a salary of $450,000.

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YouTube: A Digital Form of Occupation Designed to Silence Palestinian Voices

21st Century Wire

For years, with a net increase since Oct 7, YouTube has quietly engaged in what digital rights groups are calling a systematic erasure of Palestinian voices. Videos documenting Israeli war crimes in Gaza and the West Bank, footage of airstrikes, home demolitions, and civilian casualties, have been vanishing from the platform. Entire channels belonging to Palestinian human rights organisations such as Al-Haq, Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights were suspended, along with their archives and hundreds of videos that once served as vital evidence for international investigators.

YouTube has defended these removals by citing sanctions and trade compliance laws. The company claims that it must adhere to U.S. restrictions imposed during the Trump administration, which targeted several Palestinian organisations for cooperating with the International Criminal Court’s investigation into alleged Israeli war crimes. In other words, videos documenting potential atrocities were taken down not for violating YouTube’s community guidelines, but because of political designations rooted in Washington’s foreign policy.

Critics say this marks a chilling intersection of geopolitics and algorithmic power. A platform built on the promise of open expression is now intentionally enforcing the narratives of powerful states. Under pressure from both U.S. and Israeli officials, YouTube and other major tech companies have shown a willing readiness to remove content deemed critical of Israel, even when that content is factual, documentary, or journalistic in nature.

The result is a double standard that runs deep. Pro-Israel content, including inflammatory material and obvious propaganda, often remains online with minimal scrutiny. Hebrew-language videos glorifying military campaigns or mocking Palestinian suffering circulate freely, while Arabic and English-language uploads depicting the human cost of war are swiftly flagged, restricted, or deleted. One notorious example, an Israeli rap video containing explicit calls to violence, was allowed to stay up; YouTube argued it targeted “terrorists,” not Palestinians as a people. Meanwhile, Palestinian groups uploading evidence of civilian humiliation and deaths were accused of spreading “graphic violence” or “terrorist propaganda.”

This asymmetry reveals more than inconsistent moderation; it exposes a structural bias built into the very fabric of Silicon Valley’s global platforms. Algorithms designed in English, guided by Western definitions of “harm,” and informed by U.S. geopolitical priorities, inevitably weigh some lives, and some stories, more heavily than others. What is presented as a neutral enforcement of policy often amounts to a digital form of occupation: the silencing of a people’s testimony at the moment they most need to be heard.

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At The Frontiers Of Surveillance Capitalism

Katie Fitzpatrick
The Nation

Before they started their successful wildcat strike last year, West Virginia teachers railed against the introduction of a workplace wellness program called Go365. The program coerced employees into downloading an app that would monitor their health, rewarding points for exercise and good behavior. Employees who failed to accrue 3,000 points by the end of the year would be penalized with a $25 monthly fee and increased deductibles. 

Although the program was made voluntary before the strike began (and has since been eliminated), the outrage over Go365 helped ignite the strike. As one teacher told The New York Times, “People felt that was very invasive, to have to download that app and to be forced into turning over sensitive information.”

By resisting Go365, the West Virginia teachers waged two battles at once: They fought in the trenches of state austerity and on the front lines of private digital surveillance. The app presaged many of the worrying trends that Shoshana Zuboff describes in her new book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. She explains that Silicon Valley firms are looking to wearable technologies and other smart devices to gain an increasingly detailed view of our physical and emotional health. Go365 measured teachers’ daily steps with the help of a Fitbit; Sleep Number beds measure the hours we keep and the quality of our rest; a new company called Realeyes plans to surveil our facial expressions as we watch advertisements, interpreting our emotions in real time. 

Silicon Valley firms don’t want to simply monitor our behavior, however; they plan to shape it, too. Their influence over our actions might be indirect for now, effected through the prizes and penalties that Go365 weaponized against teachers. But by integrating these devices into our daily lives, these companies also set the stage for a future of more direct intervention. Zuboff quotes one software developer fantasizing aloud about the tech industry’s ability to push and prod us remotely: “We can know if you shouldn’t be driving, and we can just shut your car down…we tell the TV to shut off and make you get some sleep, or the chair to start shaking because you shouldn’t be sitting so long.”
Drawing on thorough research as well as alarming interviews like that one, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism offers an urgent warning about our possible future. Zuboff discusses the technological innovations and market mechanisms that make ubiquitous surveillance increasingly likely. Although her diagnosis is chilling, her solutions are few. 

Throughout the book, she decries the abuses perpetrated by Silicon Valley companies and argues that they represent a radical break from an earlier, kinder form of capitalism. But by refusing to acknowledge the continuities between past modes of exploitation and the latest horrors of surveillance capitalism, she ultimately leads readers away from the most promising paths of resistance.

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