Larry Ellison gave Israel's army charity $26m and hosted Netanyahu on his island. His family now owns CBS News, a slice of TikTok, and has a signed $111bn deal for CNN.

Start with the audience. FAIR grouped the top 50 US news websites by controlling owner over the twelve months to November 2025 and found that seven owners took 52.7% of the 45.6bn visits (FAIR, 3 February 2026). Two of the seven are families: the Ochs-Sulzbergers, who own the New York Times, and the Murdochs. The third, CNN, is what the Ellisons are buying. If that closes, three families will own the three largest online news audiences in the country.

Television is still where a third of Americans get their news often (Pew, 25 September 2025). On cable, Fox News held 64% of the primetime audience in 2025, its highest share since it launched: 2,652,000 viewers a night against 915,000 at MS NOW and 573,000 at CNN (Adweek, 2 January 2026).

Local television, which Americans trust more than either, is concentrating faster than cable. Nexstar's purchase of Tegna, approved in March, puts one company in front of about 80 per cent of US households, against a legal cap of 39 per cent that the Federal Communications Commission waived (FCC order, 19 March 2026).

The map changed in the last year, and the changes all ran one way. Rupert Murdoch spent 2024 in a Nevada probate court trying to strip his three older children of their votes so that Lachlan, the son who shares his politics, would run Fox and News Corp alone. The court found the Murdochs had acted in bad faith. In September 2025 he simply bought the children out, for a reported $3.3bn, and Lachlan now holds sole voting control of Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, The Times and The Sun through 36.2% of Fox's voting stock and 33.1% of News Corp's (Fox Corporation, 8 September 2025; News Corp, 8 September 2025).

Brian Roberts keeps a non-dilutable third of the vote at Comcast, and therefore NBC News, with about one per cent of the equity (proxy statement, 25 April 2025), and kept the same third at Versant when MSNBC was spun off and renamed in January. The Ochs-Sulzberger trust holds 94.6% of the Times's voting class (proxy statement, 3 March 2026). Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post outright. Politico and Business Insider belong to Axel Springer of Berlin, which is owned almost entirely by Mathias Döpfner and Friede Springer since KKR took the classifieds business last year.

A ledger, not a theory. Each entry below is one of five things and is labelled as such: the owner's own words, money that changed hands, a written company policy, an action documented by named reporting, or a report we could not take back to a primary source. The reader can weigh each kind differently. None of it is inferred from anybody's name.

The Ellisons

The IDF charity gifts and the Lanai holiday are above. Add Oracle's underground cloud region in Jerusalem, opened in 2021 after Oracle lost the Israeli government's cloud tender to Google and Amazon (Data Center Dynamics, October 2021), and the Haaretz report, denied by Netanyahu, that Ellison offered him a seat on Oracle's board worth about $450,000 a year (Haaretz, 16 September 2021).

David Ellison said in October, at the conference where he announced the Weiss deal, that he would never make political statements, and in the same conversation called Trump's Gaza plan "a historic accomplishment" (+972 Magazine, October 2025). His editor-in-chief is on the record.

Called an “unhinged Zionist”, she wrote that she “happily plead[ed] guilty as charged.”

Bari Weiss, replying to Andrew Sullivan, New York Times, 10 October 2018

The Times of Israel, on the day of her appointment, called her "proudly pro-Israel" and noted she had visited the country more than fifteen times (Times of Israel, 6 October 2025). The same article names the investors who backed The Free Press before Paramount bought it: Marc Andreessen, David Sacks, Howard Schultz and the British hedge fund owner Paul Marshall, of whom more below (Times of Israel, 6 October 2025).

The woman who sold CBS to the Ellisons is on the record too. In October 2024, when CBS News rebuked its anchor Tony Dokoupil for interrogating Ta-Nehisi Coates about Israel on air, Shari Redstone said the network had "made a bad mistake" (CNN, 9 October 2024). In January 2025, after a 60 Minutes report on Gaza drew accusations of anti-Israel bias, CBS installed an interim executive editor and Redstone said she was "pleased that CBS News recognized the need to take action to deliver consistently balanced and fair coverage" (Jewish Insider, 14 January 2025). In an interview with the New York Times this August, as carried by secondary outlets, she said of 7 October 2023: "Once that happened, I wanted out. I wanted to support Israel" (VIN News, 19 August 2025).

Bezos

Jeff Bezos has said nothing on the record about Israel. His link is a contract. In April 2021 Amazon and Google won Project Nimbus, Israel's $1.2bn cloud contract for the government and the defence establishment, on terms that bar the companies from withdrawing under boycott pressure or refusing service to any state body, the military included (Times of Israel, April 2021). Amazon has since committed about $7.2bn to its Israel data centres through 2037 (Business Wire, 31 July 2023).

The man who owns the Washington Post is, through the company he chairs, one of the two Western firms whose servers the Israeli state and its military run on, under a contract that forbids him to switch them off.

Murdoch

Rupert Murdoch's position is in his own words. Accepting the Anti-Defamation League's International Leadership Award in October 2010 he told the room what he believed, and what he believed about Washington.

“We live in a world where there is an ongoing war against the Jews.” Its third front was “the soft war that seeks to isolate Israel by delegitimizing it. The battleground is everywhere: the media, multinational organizations, NGOs.” On putting distance between Washington and Israel: “My view is the opposite.”

Rupert Murdoch, ADL award dinner, New York, full text, 13 October 2010

The ADL gave him the award, in its words, "for his stalwart support of Israel" (ADL, 13 October 2010). A month later he bought a stake in Genie Oil and Gas and joined its parent's Strategic Advisory Board beside Dick Cheney and Jacob Rothschild; the parent company's own SEC filing records the purchase, 0.5 per cent for $1m, paid with a promissory note (SEC filing, 15 November 2010). In February 2013 Israel gave Genie's subsidiary an exclusive licence to explore for oil across 153 square miles of the occupied Golan Heights, which the United Nations recognises as Syrian territory (Business Insider, 22 February 2013).

Murdoch also once reached, in public, for the antisemitic version of this story. In November 2012 he tweeted: "Why is Jewish owned press so consistently anti-Israel in every crisis?" He apologised the next day and wrote to the ADL that he "should have stuck to the substance of the issue and not bring in irrelevant and incorrect ethnic matters" (France 24, 17 November 2012). Keep that phrase, irrelevant and incorrect ethnic matters. It is the right description, and it comes from the man who owns Fox News.

Axel Springer

This is the one owner whose commitment is written into the terms of employment. Axel Springer's corporate "Essentials", which German staff commit to in writing, include support for Israel's right to exist. When the company bought Politico in 2021 Döpfner said that anyone who disagreed "should not work for Axel Springer, very clearly" (Haaretz, 17 October 2021).

In April this year Politico's journalists wrote to their incoming editor that Döpfner's "repeated use of POLITICO to promote his political agenda", in pieces arguing that Europe was "failing Israel" and backing American and Israeli strikes on Iran, was damaging the outlet (Semafor, 27 April 2026). He answered them on a staff call.

“Nobody should work for Axel Springer despite the essentials or in disagreement with one of the essentials.” For those who found them unattractive: “I can only recommend working for other companies.”

Mathias Döpfner to Axel Springer staff, Jewish News, 29 April 2026

He describes himself as a "non-Jewish Zionist", and Israel's president gave him the Presidential Medal of Honor in October 2025 (record, October 2025). On 30 June 2026 Axel Springer completed its purchase of the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Telegraph for £575m, after the Culture Secretary said she was not minded to intervene on either public interest or foreign state grounds (RTE, 30 June 2026). One of the two British papers that produced the largest number of severely biased articles about Muslims last year now belongs to a company that makes support for Israel a condition of working there. We come back to that.

Adelson, and the rest

Miriam Adelson gave $100m to the pro-Trump Preserve America PAC in four instalments in 2024 and about $106m across the cycle, the third largest donor in the country (Times of Israel, 15 October 2024). She gave $25m to a medical school at Ariel University, in a West Bank settlement, and said the gift would help "to strengthen the settlers in Judea and Samaria" (New York Magazine, May 2024).

Disney and Comcast each gave $2m to humanitarian charities after 7 October 2023, Magen David Adom among them, with statements from Bob Iger and Brian Roberts condemning the attack; those are relief donations and the ledger labels them as such. Michael Bloomberg was the first laureate of the Genesis Prize, handed to him in Jerusalem by Netanyahu. Patrick Soon-Shiong, who owns the Los Angeles Times, is the exception that proves the ledger is a ledger: his one documented intervention on Gaza was an email to his editor asking how the paper could endorse a candidate while the country supplied the arms "to kill children, women, innocent people". He is not in the table because the record does not put him there.

Ownership would be a curiosity if it stayed in the boardroom. It did not. Take the outlets in the order of the ledger.

Fox

The New York Times read every episode of Tucker Carlson's show from 2016 to 2021 and found more than 400, over 50 hours of airtime, in which he told viewers that Democrats wanted to change the population of the country through immigration. "Replace the population," he said in August 2021 (New York Times, 30 April 2022). The ADL asked Fox to fire him; Lachlan Murdoch refused.

In April 2023 Fox paid Dominion Voting Systems $787.5m as the jury was being seated, after Rupert Murdoch acknowledged under oath that some of his hosts had endorsed election fraud claims they knew to be false. Carlson had texted a colleague: "Sidney Powell is lying by the way. I caught her. It's insane" (NBC News, 18 April 2023). The network that told its viewers they were being replaced knew, in writing, that the other thing it was telling them was untrue.

The station groups

On 17 September 2025 the FCC chair, Brendan Carr, said of Jimmy Kimmel's remarks about Charlie Kirk's killing: "We can do this the easy way or the hard way." Within hours Nexstar, whose $6.2bn purchase of Tegna sat on Carr's desk, pulled Kimmel from its ABC stations, and Sinclair followed, demanding an apology to Kirk's family and a donation to Turning Point USA (Deadline, 17 September 2025). Carr approved the Tegna deal in March.

Comcast

Six days after 7 October 2023, Semafor reported that MSNBC had pulled its three Muslim anchors, Mehdi Hasan, Ayman Mohyeldin and Ali Velshi, its most experienced Middle East hands, from anchoring. The network called it a coincidence. It cancelled Hasan's show seven weeks later (Semafor, 13 October 2023).

CNN

Every story CNN publishes on Israel and Palestine, from any bureau in the world, is cleared by the Jerusalem bureau first. In the first weeks of the genocide a standards memo told staff to label the Gaza Ministry of Health "Hamas-controlled" and to "remind our audiences of the immediate cause of this current conflict, namely the Hamas attack" (The Intercept, 4 January 2024).

“Real distress with SecondEyes, changing copy, double standards, and all the rest.”

Christiane Amanpour to CNN's chief executive, internal meeting, The Intercept, 13 February 2024

That is the newsroom the Ellisons are buying.

The papers

The Intercept counted the words the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times used in the first six weeks, across more than 1,100 articles, when 1,139 Israelis and 14,800 Palestinians had been killed. "Slaughter" described Israeli deaths 60 times and Palestinian deaths once. "Massacre": 125 to 2. "Horrific": 36 to 4. Israelis were mentioned 8 times per Israeli death and Palestinians once per two Palestinian deaths. Two headlines out of 1,100 mentioned children in Gaza, in a period when some six thousand of them died (The Intercept, 9 January 2024).

The Times's leaked standards memo tells its reporters why: use "genocide" only within its legal definition, "avoid" the term "occupied territory", do not write "Palestine" except "in very rare cases", and call refugee camps "neighborhoods" (The Intercept, 15 April 2024). Its most consequential story of the period was co-reported by an Israeli former air force intelligence official with no reporting experience who had liked a post calling for Israel to "turn the strip into a slaughterhouse"; the paper called the likes unacceptable, stood by the story, and ran a leak inquiry that the union said singled out staff of Middle Eastern background (The Intercept, 28 February 2024).

Bezos and the Post

Eleven days before the 2024 election he killed the Post's drafted endorsement of Kamala Harris and more than 250,000 subscribers cancelled (Bezos, in the Post, 28 October 2024). In February 2025 he told the opinion pages to write "every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets", with opposing views "left to be published by others"; the opinion editor resigned and 75,000 more readers left in two days (NPR, 26 February 2025). This February he laid off about 300 of an 800-strong newsroom (NPR, 4 February 2026).

CBS under the Ellisons

Five days before the deadline on the Skydance merger, with the FCC's approval pending, Paramount paid $16m towards Trump's presidential library to settle his suit over a 60 Minutes edit (NPR, 2 July 2025). Skydance then wrote to Carr promising an ombudsman for "complaints of bias" and confirming it had eliminated the company's diversity programmes; the FCC approved the merger two days later (Fox Business, 22 July 2025).

Weiss arrived in October. In December she pulled a 60 Minutes investigation into El Salvador's CECOT prison hours before broadcast; its correspondent called that "not an editorial decision, it is a political one" (NPR, 22 December 2025). In January about a hundred staff went; a former producer said the cuts fell on racial minorities while white colleagues were reassigned, and all eight on-air hosts dismissed were women (NPR, 27 January 2026).

In May the Netanyahu interview was taken from Lesley Stahl and handed to Major Garrett, the executive producer of 60 Minutes was replaced by a technology columnist who had never run a broadcast, and Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega were dismissed (CNBC, 28 May 2026). In June Scott Pelley was fired after saying the new leadership had told him "to insert falsehoods into a political story": to write that Renée Good, a protester shot dead by an immigration officer in Minnesota, had driven her car at him, which Pelley says the video contradicts (his statement, 2 June 2026).

In August 60 Minutes hired, as a producer, the Free Press journalist who had written that the twelve Gazan children the world had watched starving "all suffer from other health problems" (The Intercept, 4 August 2026). And this month Weiss directed that a CBS story on Abdul El-Sayed, a Muslim candidate for the United States Senate, carry his deleted posts about 11 September (Mediaite, September 2026).

None of this needed a conspiracy. It needed an owner with a position and an editor who shares it. The ledger above shows the position. This section shows the editor.

The British papers that set the agenda on Muslims and migrants have one thing in common that is rarely said out loud. They are not, in any sense that matters for tax or law, British.

Last year the Centre for Media Monitoring read 40,913 articles about Muslims or Islam across 30 outlets and found that 70% associated Muslims with negative behaviour and about half carried a measurable bias (CfMM, 9 March 2026). Rank the outlets by how often they generalise about Muslims and the top six are GB News (39%), Daily Telegraph (32%), Daily Express (24%), The Times (22%), The Sun (21%) and Daily Mail (20%). The BBC is at 6%. Now put beside each one where its owner sits.

The Sun and The Times belong to a Delaware corporation run from New York by a man who renounced his own citizenship to become American. The Daily Mail is held through Rothermere Continuation Limited, described in the 2021 take-private offer as "a Bermuda registered company owned by a trust held for the benefit of Lord Rothermere", and Lord Rothermere is a non-dom by a French domicile of birth inherited from a father who was a tax exile in Paris (offer document, 3 November 2021). The Telegraph, since June, belongs to Berlin. GB News is owned about two fifths by Paul Marshall and two fifths by Legatum, an investment firm headquartered in Dubai and founded by a New Zealander (record, May 2025). The Independent is 30% Saudi, through a Cayman Islands vehicle the Culture Secretary said in 2019 could hide an investor with "strong links to the Saudi Arabian state" (Al Jazeera, 14 June 2019).

Of the six outlets at the top of the generalisation table, five are owned or part-owned from abroad or by a non-dom. The sixth, the Daily Express, belongs to Reach plc, a London-listed company, and its record shows that home ownership is no guarantee of anything: the UN's human rights chief named its 2003 run of 22 negative asylum front pages in 31 days, and its own editor told MPs in 2018 that those pages were "downright offensive" (record, April 2018).

The record they bought

The Sun printed Katie Hopkins calling migrants "cockroaches" and "feral humans". A week later the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said what that language was.

“Very similar to that employed by Rwanda's Kangura newspaper and Radio Mille Collines during the run up to the 1994 genocide.”

Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Al Jazeera, 24 April 2015

The Sun's front page "1 in 5 Brit Muslims' sympathy for jihadis" was found "significantly misleading" by IPSO (Press Gazette, 26 March 2016). Kelvin MacKenzie asked in its pages why Channel 4 had "a presenter in a hijab fronting coverage of Muslim terror in Nice", and IPSO called the column "undoubtedly offensive" and let it stand (Press Gazette, 19 October 2016). Trevor Kavanagh, then a sitting member of IPSO's own board, asked "What will we do about The Muslim Problem then?"; 107 MPs protested; IPSO accepted the phrase "could be interpreted as a reference to the rhetoric preceding the Holocaust" and did not uphold the complaint, because its code protects individuals and not groups (Board of Deputies, 23 November 2017).

The Times's "Christian child forced into Muslim foster care" was found a "distortion" and the paper was made to print the ruling on its front page (Press Gazette, 26 April 2018). The Mail's founding proprietor wrote "Hurrah for the Blackshirts" (record, 15 January 1934); Leveson found discriminatory reporting on migrants and minorities to be "a feature of journalistic practice in parts of the press, rather than an aberration" (Leveson, 29 November 2012); the paper called three judges "Enemies of the People" (record, 4 November 2016).

The Telegraph, now German, produced the largest volume of severely biased articles about Muslims in the 2025 census and was found by IPSO to have falsely written that Michael Gove had "declared" the Muslim Association of Britain extremist (ruling, 3 October 2024). Its new owner's leaked messages, published by Die Zeit, include: "Free west, fuck the intolerant Muslims and all the other riff-raff" (Middle East Eye, April 2023).

Marshall

GB News, which tops the generalisation table at 39%, is co-owned by Paul Marshall. In February 2024 Hope not Hate found what he had been liking from a private account.

“We need to not just close the borders but start mass expulsions immediately.” “Once the Muslims get to 15-20% of the population the current cold civil war will turn hot.”

Posts liked by Paul Marshall, per Hope not Hate, report, 22 February 2024

His spokesman called it an unrepresentative sample. During the August 2024 riots the channel carried 62% of every UK news-channel clip that associated Muslims with the disorder (CfMM, 10 December 2024); Ofcom fined it £100,000 that autumn for a "serious and repeated" impartiality breach (Ofcom, 31 October 2024). Marshall also owns The Spectator, 57.4% of whose 3,733 articles about Muslims over eight years CfMM rated biased or very biased (CfMM, 14 July 2026), and whose associate editor wrote in 2006 that "Conditions for Muslims in Europe must be made harder across the board" (record, 3 March 2006).

Marshall, a self-described "committed Church of England Christian", is British and lives here; his co-owner is in Dubai; and he was, the Times of Israel reports, an investor in Bari Weiss's Free Press before it became the property of the Ellisons. Britain's loudest anti-Muslim channel and America's newest pro-Israel newsroom share a backer.

The consequence is counted by the Home Office. Religious hate crime against Muslims in England and Wales rose 19% in the year to March 2025, to 3,199 offences, 45% of all religious hate crime, and August 2024, the month of the riots, was the worst on record (Home Office, 9 October 2025). A reader in Britain who wants to take that up with the owners will be writing to Delaware, Berlin, Dubai or Bermuda. That is the side point, and it is the whole of it.

Now the part that has to be said plainly, because a piece with this headline will be read by people looking for a different story. This is a story about money and a political project. It is not a story about a religion or a people, and it cannot be made into one, because the facts refuse.

Rupert Murdoch is "a practising Christian", a papal Knight Commander of St Gregory since 1998, who says he goes to Catholic church with his wife and has "not formally converted" (record, 3 January 1998). Paul Marshall is in his own words "a committed Church of England Christian", a congregant of Holy Trinity Brompton since 1997 (record, 2009). Mathias Döpfner is a "non-Jewish Zionist", in his own phrase, who says the company's position stems from German history (record, 2006). Larry Ellison is a "religious skeptic" whose fondness for Israel, he has said, is about "Israelis' innovative spirit in the technology sector" rather than religion (record, 2004).

Bezos's tie is a contract. The largest single act on the ledger, $45.7bn to buy CNN, is a business decision by a man who says his interest in Israel is technological. The most explicit policy on it is a German company's, written as a matter of German history. The men who hold the megaphone are, most of them, not Jewish, and nothing on the ledger records anybody acting because they are: Miriam Adelson's $100m went to an American election, and Shari Redstone's stated reason for selling was a position on coverage, which the buyers share.

The thread that runs through the ledger is alignment with the State of Israel and, since 2025, with the Trump administration, across owners of every background. Zionism is a political movement. It has Christian adherents, secular adherents and, in Döpfner's own phrase, non-Jewish ones, and it has Jewish opponents by the tens of thousands. Treating it as a synonym for Jews is a category error that the antisemite and the owner both find convenient.

The false version of this story, "the Jews own the media", is wrong on the facts and it does the owners a service. It stops the reader before the money. It lets a Fox anchor say that criticism of his network is bigotry, a claim Murdoch himself reached for in 2012 and then withdrew as "irrelevant and incorrect ethnic matters". Follow the money instead and you arrive somewhere specific and answerable: a charity gala, a cloud contract, a corporate handbook, an oil licence in the Golan, a $16m cheque to a presidential library, a Nevada probate court. Those have dates and documents. A people does not.

Read the byline and then read the masthead, and then read the filing. When CBS tells you what happened in Gaza, you now know who owns CBS, what he gave to the Israeli army's charity, and what his editor said when she was called a Zionist. When the Telegraph tells you about Muslims in Britain, you know it belongs to a company in Berlin that requires its staff to support Israel and whose chief executive wrote what he wrote about "the intolerant Muslims". When the Post tells you about the war, you know its owner cannot, by contract, turn off the servers the Israeli military runs on.

None of that makes any single story false. It tells you what to check, and it tells you why the checking has to be done by somebody who is not on the ledger.

Method. Ownership positions are from SEC filings, FCC orders, company press releases and the UK government's own case pages, dated as of 20 September 2026; the CNN sale is agreed, approved and enjoined, not closed. Every entry in the Israel ledger and the megaphone table carries its own date and link, and the ledger labels each entry as the owner's own words, money, a written policy, a documented action, or a report we could not take back to a primary source. Where a widely repeated claim could not be sourced it is not on the page: no primary source shows Murdoch calling himself a Zionist, none records a statement on Israel by Lord Rothermere, Paul Marshall or Legatum, and none shows a CBS memo on Gaza coverage under Weiss. The UK generalisation rates are the Centre for Media Monitoring's; the US word counts are The Intercept's; the traffic shares are FAIR's reading of Press Gazette and Similarweb, and where FAIR's text says the seven owners took "nearly 25.5 billion" visits while its own itemised figures sum to 24.05 billion, this page uses the itemised sum. NewsCord's own Watchdog scores are not used here, because they do not sort by owner and a follow-the-money piece should rest on records the reader can audit. Photographs are from Wikimedia Commons under the licences credited beneath each.