Feckless Dems Fold, Back Off Effort To Kill Paramount Merger

Democrats just ensured that billionaire Trump ally Larry Ellison (a right wing oligarch who doesn't really believe in democracy) will be allowed to own the lion's share of whatever's left of U.S. corporate media.

After months of growing lobbying, media, and political pressure, 12 state attorneys general have agreed to settle their antitrust lawsuit against Paramount/CBS with what sounds like flimsy conditions, allowing the company's unpopular $111 billion merger with Warner Brothers (CNN, HBO) to proceed.

It's a slap in the face to creatives and workers who vehemently opposed more media consolidation, and it's going to result in a lot of avoidable layoffs, price hikes, propaganda, and chaos in the years to come. From The American Prospect:

The thousands of film and television professionals who put themselves on the line to oppose the merger of two major studios in their industry demanded that [California AG Rob] Bonta work in their interest, to no avail. Paramount was desperate to settle before October 1, when Paramount must start paying a $7 million-per-day “ticking fee” to Warner Bros. shareholders.

After the Trump DOJ rubber stamped the merger last June, the state antitrust lawsuit was the last obstacle for Ellison, who had been applying relentless pressure on the AGs to settle. Most notably via a threat to move the entirety of Paramount's operations out of state if the lawsuit was allowed to proceed.

In recent weeks Paramount had also taken to claiming that anybody that opposed their merger was somehow "antisemitic;" even resorting to creating a fake consumer group that created fake support for the merger using AI.

The threat that Paramount would leave California frightened California Governor Gavin Newsom, who apparently played a major role in pressuring the AGs to cave to Paramount demands:

Golden State Governor Gavin Newsom, who has been advocating for a settlement publicly over the past month, was in “constant contact” with the parties as talks ebbed and flowed over the weekend. Newsom, a likely 2028 presidential candidate, is very much aware of the harsh backlash to a potential settlement that erupted among Congressional Democrats, A-listers like Mark Ruffalo and others as deal talks accelerated. In light of that, the governor is said to have cautioned both sides to find terms that addressed “core concerns” for Hollywood and the state.

Here's the thing: while the corporate press struggles to communicate this to the public with any consistency (a direct ironic byproduct of consolidation), these deals always end badly. There's fifty years of hard evidence. It's not really up for debate. Denying the reality is like trying to have a boxing match with a river.

The massive merger always results in the bigger company firing thousands of employees to pay down debt. Then raising prices and cutting corners, resulting in lower-quality, more expensive product. The real-world cost of consolidation is always borne by consumers and labor (see: AT&T's bungled acquisition of this same company, which resulted in 50,000 people losing their jobs).

Yet Paramount's pressure campaign drove Democratic LA Mayor Karen Bass to push for a settlement. Ditto with California Gubernatorial hopeful Xavier Becerra. They also managed to get Tom Cruise and James Cameron to cheerlead for the merger in the press. American antitrust fecklessness is truly a bipartisan and highly-collaborative affair.

Newsom might believe he "saved jobs in California," but that's simply not going to be the real-world outcome. The real world outcome is going to be mass layoffs, higher prices, shittier film and television, and a mass media apparatus under the even greater direct control of authoritarian-allied oligarchs.

That's the fun thing about antitrust reform: if you actually enforce antitrust law (which the U.S. government doesn't do because it's too corrupt to function), you get markets stocked with a more diverse array of small and mid-sized companies that lack the scale to threaten government oversight and accountability.

Settlements conditions rarely work to meaningfully combat media consolidation, and they're almost never consistently, evenly, or competently enforced. Early reporting from Bloomberg (paywall) suggests the deal conditions generally involve a lot of empty gestures Paramount itself had proposed to pretend there are meaningful public interest guardrails.

That includes an "independent CNN oversight board" designed to prevent the network from the propagandizing we're now seeing at CBS under Bari Weiss (an idea Paramount itself suggested last month), something I strongly suspect won't have any real teeth and will be staffed by useless brunchlords.

There's also some language holding Paramount's feet to the fire on its promise to release 30 traditional big films a year. That promise excited Cruise, Cameron, and big theater chains for obvious reasons, but will largely be dictated by evolutionary market realities well outside of Paramount's control.

It doesn't sound like there's anything in the settlement to protect labor. Or anything requiring that Paramount divest any assets. Consumer media watchdog groups like Free Press had nothing good to say about California AG Rob Bonta's decision to fold like a pile of damp street-corner cardboard:

“Behavioral conditions do not work. They won’t save jobs, preserve choice, or prevent price hikes. As we learned from the failed and widely-panned Facebook Oversight Board, a fake bipartisan oversight committee won’t save CNN. We have all the evidence we need from the Ellisons’ destruction of CBS about what they do to warp journalism at Donald Trump’s request. This latest capitulation comes as the Trump administration barred CNN and other reporters who dare ask hard questions from the White House press pool.

“Consolidating the media in the hands of friendly oligarchs is right out of the authoritarian playbook. Americans across the political spectrum are fed up with corruption and consolidation, and billionaires calling all the shots while everyone else struggles. People won’t forget who stood up for them and who capitulated.

These deals are always bad, but this deal is somehow even worse: nearly half of the acquisition price is being funded by Qatar, Saudi Arabia (you know, the bone saw guys), and China. Who'll inevitably want news and media coverage that directly reflects their global autocratic financial interests.

The FCC would normally block this sort of thing due to foreign influence concerns, but the Trump FCC rubber stamped the transaction because, as I've been mentioning, our regulators no longer function in the public interest, and a consolidated corporate press doesn't think that's worth covering.

Democrats arguably haven't had a meaningful media reform agenda in the better part of a generation, despite no shortage of guidance from media academics.

This isn't just a failure for Democrats on antitrust. It's a failure to take direct aim at the right wing effort to supplant all journalism with oligarch-friendly propaganda. Larry Ellison is hoovering up CBS, CNN, and TikTok not because he thought it would be fun to be in the media business, but as a matter of control.

Authoritarians are waging an unsubtle, concerted, and globally-coordinated war on journalism and informed consensus. They're working tirelessly to marginalize journalists, creatives, and academics and replace them with half-cooked automation, dull propagandists, and purposeless blowhards.

And every time Democrats have a chance to demonstrate they understand the threat and are capable of engaging in some meaningful media reform, they quickly trip over their collective assholes.

As somebody who has covered media and telecom mergers professionally for a quarter century I know all too well what happens next.

For the next year Paramount will try and pretend that the deal is busy delivering amazing synergies for Hollywood. But it won't be long before you see people fired by the thousands in order to "improve the consumer experience" and create "operational efficiencies."

The resulting streaming video service (Paramount Plus HBO Max Extreme!) will see endless price hikes for a sad platter of lowest-common-denominator Batman and Harry Potter AI slop, hosted on an app that steadily and curiously loses features and ramps up annoying restrictions (see: enshittification).

At which point all of the folks that pushed for the merger – and demanded that the AGs strike a settlement, will be absolutely nowhere to be found.

So the cycle continues. Republicans and their corporate allies push hungrily to dominate the entirely of media in order to wage a propaganda war on the public, while feckless establishment Democrats, also in dutiful sway to their corporate overlords, demonstrate that they're purely a decorative political party that is in no way structurally load bearing or interested in fighting the hard battles.

But hey, it's not all gloom and doom.

Based on what we've seen out of Bari Weiss at CBS (and the early messy exit of executives like Jeff Shell), there's very little indication that Paramount brass has any earthly idea what it's actually doing. The public doesn't really want what these folks are selling, and executive leadership is so drunk on the authoritarian Kool Aid, they're incapable of seeing the field clearly.

Sure that's going to result in mass layoffs. But it's also going to result in a flood of extremely silly, pointless, and increasingly desperate pivots that make no coherent sense (remember when AT&T execs asked Game of Thrones creators to shoot the show vertically so it would be more easily viewed on phones?). Culminating in the inevitable debt-fueled collapse of yet another attempt to dominate mainstream media by the least qualified people America has to offer.

The failed company will then be bundled up and resold to whoever's next in line (Netflix? Disney? Amazon?) and the dance of dysfunction will march ever onward, like a sad parade of the freshly lobotomized.