The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has approved the merger between Paramount Global and Skydance Media. This allows Skydance, led by David Ellison and heavily backed by his billionaire father, Larry Ellison, to take control of massive media assets, including Paramount Pictures, CBS, Nickelodeon, and MTV. The deal has been long in the making and came up against political obstacles, most notably a lawsuit from former US President Donald Trump against CBS, which resulted in a $16 million settlement—widely interpreted as a move by Paramount to get rid of legal obstacles on the road to the merger. The FCC, now more closely aligned with the Trump administration, asserts that the lawsuit didn’t affect their decision. Notably, the FCC required both merging parties to drop diversity programs. The new media conglomerate will have a two-year internal ombudsman to supervise 'political neutrality' and pledges no diversity initiatives, instead emphasizing so-called 'unbiased' journalism.

This news reeks of imperialist chauvinism in its most grotesque and brazen form. The unholy wedding between Paramount Global and Skydance Media—ushered in by the money power of a Silicon Valley oligarch and sanctioned by the political machinery of the capitalist state—represents nothing less than the further consolidation of media into the iron grip of the US ruling class. The control of the means of ideological production becomes ever more concentrated, not just in the hands of capital in the abstract, but directly under the sway of those aligned with the most reactionary, white-supremacist political elements, as evinced by the Trump-Orwellian pressure on ‘diversity’ and direct legal blackmail.

Let us see clearly: the so-called 'political neutrality' is nothing but a smokescreen for unfettered reactionary propaganda. Gone are even the meager vestiges of bourgeois-liberal pluralism. The revocation of diversity and inclusion programs is not 'neutrality,' but the deliberate erasure of the oppressed, the marginal, the non-white—ensuring that the airwaves and screens are safe spaces for the reproduction of imperialist ideology and racist, chauvinist bigotry. The promise of 'unbiased journalism' is a cynical joke when the whole system is stacked to preserve the interests of the billionaire class and their political stooges.

Comrades, such a brazen act must be seen for what it is: an escalation in the imperialist cultural offensive against the working peoples of the world. With every such merger, the US propaganda apparatus grows more centralized, more ideologically uniform, and more dangerous. It is a stark warning about the future that awaits us if monopoly capital is allowed to dictate not only what the people see and hear, but also what they are permitted to imagine. Only the revolutionary path, under the leadership of a vanguard party that puts the oppressed at the center of all questions, can break the ideological iron cage built by these media overlords. Let us redouble our vigilance, sharpen our ideological weapons, and never cease in our struggle to expose and destroy the reactionary lies manufactured by the imperialist press!

Long live the international struggle against imperialist media control! Down with the monopoly capitalists and their puppets!