The Hulk Hates Fascist Media Consolidation

Let's be clear about something.

Large media consolidation is always harmful. There is no real debate. There's 50 years of indisputable evidence that massive U.S. media mergers always result in mass layoffs, higher consumer prices, and shittier overall product as freshly-fused companies force workers and customers to pay off deal debt.

That's been particularly true of Time Warner and Warner Brothers, which has been bought and sold numerous times over the last quarter century, with every deal more pointless and harmful than the last. AT&T's acquisition of the company was a particularly-turdish master class in dysfunction, resulting in tens of thousands of layoffs and no shortage of bad blood and cancelled projects.

These are uniformly-awful deals that benefit nobody, orchestrated by terrible rich men who aren't interested in building anything useful, creative, or real. They're elaborate illusory-growth shell games designed to nab tax breaks, goose stock value, and justify the comically-outsized compensation of terrible people.

Yet because this same media consolidation also erodes and destabilizes journalism, most of our remaining U.S. corporate media outlets are incapable of being honest about any of this for fear of losing regulatory favor.

So when the vast majority of the U.S. press covers big media deals, a rich history of uniformly-ugly outcomes is usually either downplayed or ignored. You can play along at home: any time you read a mainstream story on a major merger in any industry, see if the disaster-rate of similar past mergers is even mentioned.

While these sorts of deals are almost always uniformly bad, Paramount/CBS' $111 billion acquisition of Warner Brothers is extra problematic thanks to Paramount owner Larry Ellison's open embrace of historically-corrupt authoritarianism.

To his ongoing credit, actor Mark Ruffalo, of Hulk smash fame, has spent a good chunk of the last year pointing out how Ellison's efforts to dominate U.S. mass media (including TikTok) should be stopped if people actually care about things like jobs, functional democracy and an informed electorate.

Last April, Ruffalo was instrumental in facilitating an open letter by 5,000+ Hollywood creatives opposing the merger. In a New York Times editorial last May, he made it clear many more creatives refused to sign the letter for fear of reprisal by the ever-growing media giant.

“The oligarchs are still in charge," Ruffalo wrote. "But they are starting to lose their grip on power. We’ve seen what happens when monopoly-leaning companies benefit from a fear that silences dissent. But our growing coalition is demonstrating that when we don’t get stuck on the sidelines, don’t bow down to inevitability and join together to fight, we can win.”

A recent study by Los Angeles county found that 10,000 or more direct or indirect jobs could be at risk from the deal. The deal also puts already-shaky CNN under the control of Ellison, an anti-democratic billionaire right wing Trump ally hard at work turning CBS News into a Trump-friendly right-wing agitprop machine.

Another issue: 49.5 percent of the deal is backed by foreign governments, including Saudi Arabia (you remember, the folks who dismembered a journalist). So in addition to Ellison being a big fan of domestic authoritarianism, there's foreign influence concerns Trump regulators unsurprisingly don't plan to review.

Last week, Ruffalo made headlines again by correctly pointing out that not only is Larry Ellison a key ally to Benjamin Netanyahu, Ellison's company Oracle is a key supplier of the tech infrastructure necessary to fund Netanyahu's genocide of the Palestinian people. Not really the kind of man you want calling the shots at CNN, HBO, Warner Brothers, Skydance, TikTok, 60 Minutes, Comedy Central, CBS News....

In response, Paramount falsely accused Ruffalo of being "antisemitic," resulting in a massive news cycle that unsurprisingly buried the merger harms:

Ruffalo posted this response to social media trying to redirect attention back to the deal impact:

Ruffalo is documentably and provably correct in everything he's saying, though the "view from nowhere" "both sides" U.S. corporate press struggled to make that clear, framing everything as a matter of some debate. Is Ruffalo antisemitic? Are giant U.S. media mergers bad? Who can be sure, really.

This wasn't the first time Paramount had leveraged empty smears to change the subject. Trump's first term DOJ "antitrust enforcer" (I use that term very loosely) Makan Delrahim, now the top lawyer at Paramount, had also previously tried to claim that anybody that criticized the deal was somehow being antisemitic.

The false claims are fueled by desperation at Paramount, where executives are increasingly worried that a new antitrust lawsuit recently filed by a dozen states – led by California AG Rob Bonta – could derail Ellison's play for media domination.

The delays caused by the lawsuit create all manner of new financial headaches for Ellison, who is way out over his skis on AI hype. The court battle isn't slated to begin until next March, opening Ellison to all manner of investor "ticking fees" and other incremental financing costs they had been hoping to avoid.

Trump Republicans, it should go without saying, adore this kind of consolidation because it puts major media companies under the control of right wing zealots, turns the screw on labor, and adds fuel to their ongoing propaganda campaign against the "woke Hollywood elite" (often driven by actual antisemitism).

You'd think that would provide Democrats a perfect opportunity to step in, stand up for labor, consumers, and antitrust reform, and clearly oppose shitty media consolidation in a way that differentiates them ahead of the midterms.

You'd be wrong.

Most key California Democrats have been buckling to Paramount demands that the state AGs strike a settlement instead of taking the case to trial.

That includes California Governor Gavin Newsom, gubernatorial nominee Xavier Becerra, and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who all appear to think that affixing some flimsy conditions to the gigantic deal will somehow protect Hollywood from billionaire predation that's getting worse regardless of the lawsuit outcome:

“While there are varying perspectives on the proposed transaction, today we are united around one clear message: It is time for all parties to come to the table. The continued uncertainty is not good for workers, not good for productions and not good for the future of this industry,” Bass said during a press conference.

She added, “Too many productions are at a standstill, which means Angelenos are out of a job and they’re not getting paid. As mayor, I cannot stand by as the job security of thousands of hardworking union members is being put at risk. That is why we are calling on Paramount, Attorney General Rob Bonta and all relevant parties to come together, engage directly and in good faith and work urgently to find common ground and keep our vital industry in Los Angeles.”

Here's the problem: as a 20+ year telecom and media reporter, I can tell you first hand that settlements and conditions affixed to deals like this don't actually fix anything for labor, markets, or consumers over the long term. They're almost always badly-crafted, temporary, and rarely meaningfully enforced.

They're usually designed to pretend something is being done.

The only thing that actually slows long-term harmful consolidation is fully blocking terrible mergers, which campaign-contribution-slathered politicians lack the backbone or willpower to do. Especially as Paramount threatens to leave California if it doesn't get what it wants (which could happen anyway).

In the meantime, California's AG and Paramount have been engaged in weird a game of pattycake in the press, with Bonta cancelling a planned meeting with the company scheduled for today after he claimed Paramount leaks broadly misrepresented what was being discussed (some stories claimed Bonta was hoping to get Paramount to sell CNN, but there's been no confirmation).

If Bonta settles I can tell you what happens next based on the dozens of other major deals I've written about. The company will raise prices, fire oodles of people, and cut corners resulting in shittier product. And when that happens all of the people involved – including the press – will pretend none of it ever happened.

With any luck, the uncharacteristic public attention to media consolidation issues – much of it directly thanks to Ruffalo – could disrupt that trajectory.

There is a bright side (more so for democracy and the public than Hollywood employment). There's generally been very little indication that anybody at Paramount – ranging from recently-ousted President Jeff Shell to CBS News boss Bari Wess – have absolutely any earthly idea what they're doing.

So far the evidence suggests that nobody really wants the lazy-ass, lowest-common denominator oligarch-friendly agitprop the Ellisons are selling, nor is there any indication any of these folks are capable of modernization and adaptation in a traditional film and TV sector already being dismantled by disruption.

So deal or no deal, there remains a very good chance that all the debt and incompetence culminates in the company collapsing under its own weight anyway, with or without the destructive aid of giant green monsters.

In that wreckage should be opportunity.