Ellison and the Lie
Earlier this week, Tony Dokoupil, the newly installed anchor of the “CBS Evening News,” took a brief moment to mark the five-year anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
“President Trump today accused Democrats of failing to prevent the attack on the Capitol, while House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries accused the president of ‘whitewashing it,’” Dokoupil said while images of Trump supporters carrying banners thanking him for their pardons splashed on screen.
Dokoupil’s breathtaking both-sides framing of an attack carried out by a mob of ardent Trump followers sparked swift and widespread criticism, both inside and outside CBS News. As Status previously reported, the network has been roiled in recent days by Dokoupil’s rocky early tenure, with journalists privately and publicly questioning how an attempted coup could be reduced to a partisan dispute on the network’s air.
The coverage, however, was not only surely welcome at the Trump White House, but also highlighted a reality hovering over CBS News itself. Indeed, Dokoupil’s disgraceful framing served as a reminder that Larry Ellison, the billionaire Oracle co-founder who bankrolled his son’s takeover of CBS News’ parent company, Paramount, assisted Trump’s efforts to try to overturn the 2020 election.
In the days after Trump decisively lost to Joe Biden, Ellison joined a private call with the president’s allies—including Fox News host Sean Hannity and Sen. Lindsey Graham—that was “focused on strategies for contesting the legitimacy of the vote,” The Washington Post reported at the time. The call, organized by the pro-Trump group True the Vote, which promoted election disinformation, centered on whether Congress should intervene to force a “change in election results,” according to an attorney for the group.
Ellison has never publicly stated his views on the election. But his actions speak loudly. After 2020, he went on to spend millions of dollars backing Republican candidates who promoted election denialism in the 2022 midterms, helping entrench the false narrative that the vote had been stolen from Trump.
Status asked Oracle this week whether Ellison believes the 2020 election was stolen and what his views are on the Jan. 6 attack. The company did not respond. That silence is telling. The question posed to Oracle was not a difficult one, nor was it groundless, given the True the Vote call the billionaire participated in back in 2020.
Of course, it goes without saying that the election was not stolen. Courts rejected Trump’s claims. State officials certified the results. Biden won. And yet Ellison, now one of the most powerful figures in American media, has repeatedly declined to say so publicly. Why? Why won’t one of the country’s wealthiest and most influential executives answer a basic question about democratic reality?
Perhaps it is because Ellison really does believe the 2020 election was stolen in some preposterous grand conspiracy involving foreign voting machines, fake ballots, and secret Democrat schemes to put Biden in office. If so, he’d be something of a unicorn for Trump in media. Even Rupert Murdoch—the most powerful conservative mogul on the planet and arguably the single figure responsible for Trump’s political victories—didn’t believe that absurd nonsense.
The 81-year-old Ellison has long been a close ally of Trump. He visited the White House last year and has repeatedly drawn praise from the president. “Larry Ellison is great and his son David is great,” Trump said in October. “They’re friends of mine. They’re big supporters of mine. And they’ll do the right thing.”
That praise is key because election denialism has effectively become a loyalty test for Trump. And he has continued to push bogus claims about the 2020 vote, including during a fall interview with Norah O’Donnell on “60 Minutes”—after the Ellisons acquired the network—where he again insisted the vote was “rigged and stolen.”
Now, as Ellison and his son aggressively court Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders with a hostile takeover bid, and as TikTok prepares to spin off its U.S. operations to a group of investors that includes Oracle, questions about Ellison’s beliefs are taking on new importance. The billionaire, who owns his own Hawaiian island, now also sits atop an expanding media and technology empire, with extraordinary power to shape narratives and influence millions of Americans across some of the country’s most powerful platforms.
Those questions grow even more pressing looking ahead. Trump has already floated the idea of staying in power beyond a second term. If 2028 becomes another test of democratic norms, the role played by media owners will matter enormously. Will they confront lies, or enable them? Will they defend reality, or help rewrite it?
At a moment when truth itself is under assault by political authorities seeking to rewrite history, the values of those who control America’s largest media platforms will help determine whether journalism serves as a check on power, or quietly accommodates it.