MAGA Suddenly Quiet About Overseas Influence Now That Larry Ellison’s Warner Bros Bid Has Saudi, Chinese Backing
from the 100%-bad-faith dept
You might recall that during the great mass TikTok hyperventilation of 2021-2025, there was no limit of face fanning by Republicans like Brendan Carr about overseas involvement in social media. Carr was so particular on this subject, he scuttled an FCC program aimed at shoring up “smart” home device security standards because one of the testing labs (unsurprisingly) did business in China where this stuff is made.
Fast forward to this year, and Carr curiously has zero problems with significant Saudi and Chinese investments in Larry Ellison and Paramount’s efforts to acquire Warner Brothers. Though Carr’s actual regulatory oversight of the deal is limited given the lack of public broadcast licenses involved, he took to CNBC anyway to insist the massive $111 billion deal should likely fly through regulatory approval:
“If there’s any FCC role at all, it’ll be a pretty minimal role. And I think this is a good deal, and I think it should get through pretty quickly,” Carr added.
Carr told CNBC that Netflix “would have a very difficult path” getting regulatory approval, adding that Paramount’s was “a lot cleaner, does not raise at all the same types of concerns.”
“I think there’s some real consumer benefits that can emerge from it,” he added.
Carr’s (and Republicans’ more generally) gushing excitement comes despite the fact that significant structural overlap between Paramount and Warner Brothers will mean significantly more layoffs than we would have seen during the originally proposed Netflix Warner Brothers tie up. Layoffs that will likely be much worse than past Warner deals due to the absolutely massive debt involved.
This is before you even get to Larry Ellison’s obvious quest to built autocratic-friendly state television, the likes of which coddles authoritarianism and, in countries like Russia and Hungary, ultimately led to the total decimation of serious truth-to-power journalism.
Then there’s the $24 billion in combined funding for the Paramount deal from Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds, including Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF). As well as the recent announcement that Chinese company Tencent is weighing a significant investment. Before his deal was scuttled, Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos was pretty pointed about this being a problem:
“Before pulling out of the deal, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos – speaking to the BBC in London on the morning after the recent BAFTA Film Awards – called the Gulf sovereign funds backing Paramount’s bid a “bad idea,” noting that they are from “a part of the world that is not very big on the First Amendment.”
“It seems very odd to me with the level of investment that we’re talking about that they’d have no influence or editorial control over media in another country,” Sarandos added.
If you recall the multi-year right wing hysteria campaign about TikTok, it was fixated on the idea that having any overseas involvement in U.S. media was a doomsday scenario (they were not subtle or flexible on this point). Of course Trumpism immediately proceeded (with bumbling Democrat help) to “fix” this problem by offloading the company to Trump’s technofascist friends, while still maintaining a significant investment presence by the Chinese.
When Netflix was planning to buy Warner Brothers, Republicans engaged in no limit of face-fanning, featuring threats of “investigations” by Republican Attorneys General, and a phony Trump DOJ “investigation” into the antitrust concerns raised by the deal. But when a technofascist ally oligarch wants to own a major media property, with Saudi and Chinese help, all of that mysteriously disappears.
It’s almost as if Trump Republicans have no coherent ideology beyond their own power and unchecked wealth accumulation, and all of their posturing on issues like antitrust and national security, routinely propped up by a lazy press, is as hollow as a Dollar Store fake chocolate Easter bunny.
Filed Under: brendan carr, china, consolidation, journalism, larry ellison, media, mergers, national security, saudi, saudi arabia, soft power
Companies: netflix, paramount, warner bros. discovery
Comments on “MAGA Suddenly Quiet About Overseas Influence Now That Larry Ellison’s Warner Bros Bid Has Saudi, Chinese Backing”
It’s almost like a group of pedophiles and nazis has no morales.
Is this shocking to anyone?
They’re also anti-porn and anti-hooker, until they have a need.
Re:
I wonder how many anti-trans lawmakers actually look at porn that has transgender women in it.
Re:
They have Epstein’s girls to satisfy that need.
Are you a cishet white man or a porn category? No wonder Republicans are bending over backwards to paint us as inherently pornographic for simply existing.
And it also stops them from taking a long hard look in the mirror and answering difficult questions about themselves. After all who would want to be a woman in a Republicans’ world?
“it does not raise at all the same types of concerns”.
That’s some massive argument you’ve got here Brendan.
But maybe “it does not make things exactly the same as it would has been if wouldn’t be the actual outcome” would be even clearer.
Re:
i will note that i have never seen any specifics, ever, as to why one merger has problems and the other not, with respect to the Trump regime.
i may have not looked hard enough, but they certainly do not appear in the vast majority of reportage.
This myth about the Democrats needs to die already. They are not, and never have been, poor confused patsies being lead around by the nose as their pure and honest intentions are undermined by unintended consequences. The Democrats fully understood exactly what they wanted to do and acted expediently to achieve it.
That they are less evil than the Republicans in no way allows their evil to be passed off as a silly little oopsie.