Jen Psaki

You get rewarded.

If you don't do that stuff.

Well, Ted Cruz explains what happens.

He threatens it.

He says, we can do this the easy way or we could do this the hard way.

Yeah.

And I got to say, that's right out of Goodfellas.

That's right out of a mafioso coming into a bar going, nice bar you have here.

It'd be a shame if something happened to it.

Now, as wild as Ted Cruz's fake attempt at an Italian accent was just there, the dynamic he's describing is right on the money.

This isn't just a threat to local news.

Today, we learned that Paramount Skydance, a company owned by the billionaire Trump ally Larry Ellison, has officially inked a deal to purchase Warner Brothers Discovery, which, among a ton of other things, owns CNN.

Now, if that's giving you deja vu, it may be because last year, Larry Ellison's Skydance bought Paramount, which owns CBS News.

And last year, the New York Times reported that Trump has said privately that Larry Ellison assured him that he would turn CBS News into a more conservative outlet.

And Ellison has done exactly that.

After buying the company and putting his son in charge, his son David Ellison handpicked Barry Weiss, an avowed enemy of so-called wokeness in the media, to be the network's new editor-in-chief.

And Weiss got right to work, laying off old staff, hiring a slew of new conservative commentators, tilting the network's coverage in a direction more favorable to Trump, making content that Brendan Carr might call more patriotic.

In fact, just this week, Brendan Carr himself, the regulator of the networks, praised the direction of CBS under the leadership of Barry Weiss and David Ellison, specifically saying, I think they're doing a great job.

Last year, The Guardian reported that in conversations with the White House about getting this new merger approved, Larry Ellison discussed firing specific CNN hosts that Trump does not like if he and his family take control of the network.

Now, the Ellison family's inked a deal that would let his family take control of the network, and they now need the approval of Brendan Carr.