U.S. media mergers always follow the same trajectory. Pre-merger, executives promise all manner of amazing synergies and deal benefits. Post-merger, not only do those benefits generally never arrive, the debt from the acquisition spree usually results in significant layoffs, lower quality product, and higher rates for consumers. The Time Warner Discovery disaster was the poster child for this phenomenon.
After paying Trump his $16 million bribe, CBS and Skydance (Trump’s friends in the Ellison family) recently finalized their $8 billion merger. It didn’t take long for the company to announce that the only way it could pay for the debt of the pointless deal is by firing a whole bunch of people in “painful” fashion.
Apparently “a lot of people” at CBS News are taking Weiss up on a January town hall promise of buyouts for those insufficiently deferential to Larry Ellison’s ambitions:
“They include at least six producers out of the show’s total of roughly 20, according to another source, who added: “Seems like people are jumping ship.”
“It’s a lot of people,” a CBS insider said.”
In her head, I really do think Weiss believes she’s reshaping CBS News into a better news organization. In reality, Weiss was specifically hired by billionaire Trump ally Larry Ellison to convert CBS into yet another autocrat-friendly safe space for the perpetually aggrieved.
Weiss’ problem to date has been that she’s not just bad at management, judgment, and journalism, she’s bad at ratings-grabbing agitprop — the real reason she was hired by billionaires in the first place.
Weiss’ weird ego trip is playing out alongside the old traditional failures of mindless media consolidation, the last refuge of executives who are all out of original ideas, but desperately want to goose quarterly earnings, generate temporary tax cuts, and get “savvy dealmaker” stamped on their LinkedIn profile.
Larry Ellison clearly wants to hoover up what’s left of corporate media (including CBS, CNN, HBO) — and fuse it with his co-ownership of TikTok to create a sort of Hungary-esque autocratic state media. The only thing saving us from this outcome to date is the fact that absolutely nobody in this weird assortment of nepobabies and brunchlords appears to have absolutely any idea what they’re doing.
After Warner Brothers balked at Larry’s competing bid and a hostile takeover attempt, Larry tried to sue Warner Brothers. With that not going anywhere, Larry and MAGA have since joined forces to try and attack the Netflix merger across right wing media, falsely claiming that “woke” Netflix is attempting a “cultural takeover” that must be stopped for the good of humanity.
With hearings on the Netflix merger looming, MAGA has ramped up those attacks with the help of some usual allies. That includes the right wing think tank the Heritage Foundation, which has apparently been circulating a bogus study around DC claiming that Netflix and Warner Brothers are “engineering millions of Americans into a predisposition to accept preferred leftwing ideological dogma”:
“Without ever saying Warner Bros or bid rival Paramount by name, the Oversight Project’s analysis, titled Fedflix: Netflix, The Federal Government, and the New Propaganda State, insists that “relevant federal agencies must scrutinize with extreme intensity any potential Netflix acquisitions of other media and entertainment companies to take into account the full ramifications of the impacts on American society and the health of the Constitutional Republic.”
Again, the goal here is to ensure that Larry Ellison can buy Netflix (and HBO and CNN). Larry, as we’ve seen vividly with his acquisitions of CBS and TikTok, is buying up new and old media to create a propaganda safe space for America’s increasingly unhinged and anti-democratic extraction class. Like Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, the goal is propaganda and information control.
And like any good propagandists, MAGA has tried to invert reality, and is increasingly trying to claim it’s Netflix that covertly wants to create a left-wing propaganda empire that spreads gayness and woke:
“With its subtitle of “The Weaponization of Entertainment for Partisan Propaganda,” the report is tailored for the MAGA base. Full of talking points and and mentions of Stranger Things, the Lena Dunham-produced Orgasm Inc: The Story of OneTaste, the controversial Cuties docu from 2020, and the Obamas-produced American Factory, the 47-page report takes repeated swipes at any expansion of the streamer and its library of “leftwing and progressive” content.”
Of course that’s nonsense. Netflix has demonstrated that they’re primarily an opportunist, and will show whatever grabs eyeballs and makes them money (from gay military dramas that upset the pentagon to washed up anti-trans comedian hacks). And they’re certain to debase themselves further to please the Trump administration in order to gain approval of their merger.
That’s not to say that the Netflix Warner Brothers merger will be good for anybody. Most media consolidation is generally terrible for labor and consumers as we’ve seen with the AT&T–>Warner Brothers–>Discovery mergers. They almost always result in massive debt loads, tons of layoffs, higher prices, and lower quality product.
Enter an old MAGA playbook: try to convince a bunch of useful idiots that the authoritarian corporatist MAGA coalition somehow really loves antitrust reform and is looking out for the little guy, despite a long track record of coddling corporate power and monopoly control.
That’s again the game plan here by Heritage and administration mouthpieces like Brendan Carr; pretend you’re obstructing the Netflix deal for ethical and antitrust reasons, when you’re really just trying to help Larry Ellison engage in the exact sort of competitive and ideological domination you’re whining about.
Among the folks helping this project along is former Trump DOJ “antitrust enforcer” Makan Delrahim, who is now Paramount’s Chief Legal Officer. Delrahim played a starring role during the first Trump term in rubber stamping the hugely problematic Sprint T-Mobile merger, and attempting to block the AT&T Time Warner deal (to the benefit of Rupert Murdoch, who opposed the tie up).
And now here we are again, with many of the same folks joining forces to try and scuttle Netflix’s latest merger, simply to ensure their preferred, anti-democratic billionaire wins the prize.
Ideally, again, you’d block all media consolidation.
Since that’s clearly not happening under the corporation-coddling Trump administration, activists — and the two or three Democratic lawmakers who actually care about media reform — are probably better served by aligning themselves with Netflix. It’s most definitely a lesser of two evils scenario, with, as the chaos at CBS shows, greater Larry Ellison control of media being the worst possible outcome.
In any case, expect right wing propagandists and right wing media to start really lighting into Netflix in the weeks and months to come. You know, because they just really love truth and freedom and hate consolidated corporate power.
Our shitty autocrats are nothing if not predictable.
As we just got done noting, the Trump administration and their right wing extremist billionaire friend have joined forces to wage war on Netflix’s attempted acquisition of Warner Brothers. Larry wants Warner Brothers (and CNN) as part of his obvious effort to build a new autocrat-friendly propaganda empire, and Trump has continually signaled his attempt to help him derail the Netflix deal.
“What you’ve seen Netflix do as a general matter, in terms of their organic growth, is fantastic,” the FCC chair said. “There are legitimate competition concerns that I’ve seen raised about their acquisition here and just the sheer amount of scale and consolidation you can see in the streaming market.”
Carr goes on to state he sees no competition issues with Larry Ellison, one of the wealthiest men on the planet and a key Trump donor and ally, hoovering up the entirety of new and old media.
So, a few things.
One, Carr’s FCC has absolutely zero authority over this transaction because it doesn’t involve any of the companies he actually regulates or the transfer of any broadcast licenses. Two, Carr has an absolutely abysmal record on competition issues, having rubber stamped no limit of harmful consolidation in telecom and, more recently, local broadcast media.
It would take a journalist covering Carr’s comments all of fifteen minutes to find a long, long list of examples where Carr rubber stamped a terrible merger and ignored literally all labor, competition, and market harms. He’s genuinely the last person anybody should be asking for their thoughts on market competition, but you’re going to be seeing a lot of him in the months to come.
It’s also worth noting that of the available paths forward from this point, a Netflix acquisition of Warner Brothers is probably the best of a bunch of bad options. Ideally you’d block all new consolidation in media, but that’s not happening with Trump’s disemboweled and captured regulators. As such, a Netflix acquisition is a better option than letting Larry Ellison create a right wing agitprop empire on the back of CNN, TikTok, and CBS.
Quick refresher: Warner Brothers rejected Ellison’s higher $108 billion offer for Netflix, citing Saudi money involvement and dodgy financial math as something that might make approval more difficult. When that failed, Ellison attempted a hostile takeover attempt with the help of the president’s son in law and the Saudis. When that didn’t work, Ellison tried to sue Warner Brothers.
When that didn’t work, Ellison and friends shifted their attention to trying to smear the “woke” Netflix deal in the media. Enter Carr, who is a useful idiot Trump and Ellison can use to prop the DOJ’s inevitable scuttling of the Netflix deal as a matter of serious policy in the defense of the public interest, before offloading Warner Brothers (and CNN, and HBO) to one of Trump’s top right wing billionaire donors.
Trumpism has long tried to pretend that it cares about populist antitrust reform and reining in corporate power, but it’s always been a lie propped up by a broad variety of useful idiots; some of whom are purported experts on the subject (see: Matt Stoller), and many of which are major corporate media institutions whose journalism has been eroded by the relentless pursuit of consolidation.
Neither Variety, nor Bloomberg, for example, can be bothered to mention Carr’s decade-long history of rubber stamping harmful consolidation across media and telecom. Kind of important if you’re going to profile a major government figure’s thoughts on competition, yes?
I’d be prepared for a fake Trump DOJ antitrust inquiry in the coming months, designed to transfer ownership of Warner Brothers to Larry Ellison and Skydance/CBS. Propped up, in turn, by the usual assortment of bad faith bullshitters pretending this is a public interest effort. Should that fail, Trump’s investing in Netflix and Warner Brothers so he’s certain to come out on top either way.
In all outcome the public, markets, and labor likely lose due to consolidation. But some of the paths are less harmful to the public interest, and democracy itself, than others.
Last year we noted repeatedly how the Trump administration and Larry Ellison (owner of CBS) would be joining forces to try and stop Netflix’s $82.7 billion acquisition of Warner Brothers. Larry, if you’re not aware, is attempting to buy up what’s left of America’s soggy-ass corporate media (and TikTok) to create a propaganda safe space for America’s increasingly unhinged and anti-democratic extraction class.
Warner Brothers rejected Ellison’s higher $108 billion offer for Netflix, citing Saudi money involvement and dodgy financial math as something that might make approval more difficult. When that failed, Ellison attempted a hostile takeover attempt with the help of the president’s son in law and the Saudis. When that didn’t work, Ellison tried to sue Warner Brothers.
With that going nowhere, Ellison has clearly turned to right wing propaganda to help portray the Netflix acquisition as somehow “woke” and dangerous:
The President has also taken to his personal right wing propaganda social media company to cry about woke Netflix (which had the audacity to air a military TV show featuring gay people that made right wing zealots cry not that long ago):
While Netflix’s acquisition of Warner Brothers likely won’t be great for labor, creatives, or consumers (and Netflix will be eager to debase itself further to get regulatory approval), letting Larry Ellison and his nepobaby son turn the remnants of U.S. corporate media into yet another right wing propaganda empire is arguably a far worse outcome for a country already on the brink of collapse.
When this lazy “woke Netflix” campaign fails, I suspect the Trump DOJ will ultimately launch a bogus antitrust inquiry into the Netflix Warner Brothers merger. This campaign will highlight all manner of real and manufactured horrible impacts of the Netflix deal, ignoring the fact that letting one of the nation’s richest right wing extremists own most of U.S. media would be decidedly worse.
Something of note: Netflix has made it clear it only wants the Warner Brothers studio assets. It doesn’t want the sagging-ratings albatrosses that are CNN or the Discovery TV networks. So even if the Netflix deal somehow survives DOJ challenge, it’s still likely those spun-off assets are acquired by Ellison anyway, at which point he’ll be sure to do the same thing to them he’s currently doing to CBS. Just without the money making IP (DC Comics, Harry Potter, etc.) Warner Brothers owns as a backstop.
Which would still result in a more powerful Larry Ellison agitprop empire, but one slightly more likely to collapse from mismanagement. These are all bad outcomes, but some (authoritarian dominance of the entirety of media of the kind we’ve seen in Orban’s Hungary) are decidedly worse than others. Competent Dem strategists or fans of Democracy looking to help need to make stopping that the top priority, since the ideal outcome (blocking all of these deals) simply isn’t realistically on the table.
“In the public letter, which is addressed directly to Ellison, the signatories declare that they “stand in solidarity” with the 60 Minutes team that worked on “Inside CECOT,” the story that was pulled by Weiss shortly before it was set to air on December 21. They also note that this signaled a “breakdown in editorial oversight” and risked “setting a dangerous precedent in a country that traditionally valued press freedom.”
Ellison, of course, won’t balk. Much like Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, the Ellisons bought CBS (and a part of TikTok) with the goal of information control. The goal is the same goal billionaires have had for generations: dominate mass media, soften its criticism of wealth and power, and befuddle, distract, confuse, and disorient an already pretty fucking dim electorate.
They’re not going to back off that agenda because you said “pretty please.”
It’s worth reiterating that CBS already wasn’t in great shape to begin with. Even before Ellison, the network’s very first response to rising U.S. authoritarianism was to hire more Trump-friendly Republicans. And if you haven’t read it already, this piece by longtime journalist Spencer Ackerman demonstrates how the network already had a very rich history of coddling U.S. wealth and power.
This is, as you might be noticing, a lot harder than billionaires tend to think. It’s very likely that the Ellison effort to dominate media simply drives people away from CBS and toward more ethical, interesting alternatives. There’s really no indication that this weird assortment of nepobabies and contrarian trolls have any idea what they’re doing. They’re not even good at agitprop.
That doesn’t mean it isn’t dangerous. If successful, Ellison could still turn CBS, TikTok, and potentially CNN into an even worse version of Fox News, which is arguably the last thing American media needs.
Ethical folks who care about an informed electorate should fund trustworthy independent and worker-owned media (like Techdirt) whenever possible in the new year.
Larry, as we’ve seen with CBS and his interest in TikTok, is trying to convert what’s left of U.S. media into a giant safe space for affluent right wing autocrats and the right wing culture war grievance and infotainment complex (as we just saw CBS and Bari Weiss demonstrate in vivid detail).
The Warner board generally had two major concerns: they were worried that this weird assortment of Saudi money wasn’t fully backed by Larry, and therefore wasn’t particularly reliable. And they were generally worried that the inclusions of the Saudis would trigger complicated national security regulatory review, slowing down the approval process.
“The guarantee, disclosed in a filing on Monday, seeks to allay the Warner Bros board’s doubts about Paramount’s financing and the lack of full Ellison family backing, which had pushed it toward the competing cash-and-stock offer from Netflix.”
Warner has given every indication they’re more comfortable with Netflix, and I suspect won’t be willing to soften their stance. If Warner refuses, it’s almost certain that Ellison will have Trump’s DOJ threaten fake-populist, phony antitrust action in the new year, featuring lots and lots of propaganda about how Netflix is a dire antitrust concern, but Larry Ellison’s ownership would be a gift from the heavens.
Arguably, a country with functional regulators (which we aren’t) would block all media consolidation, since these deals inevitably result in mass layoffs, higher consumer prices, less competition, and shittier overall product (example A: the last two Time Warner mergers with AT&T and Discovery).
But only one of these two options leads to the potential for Trump-allied authoritarian state television owned by a technofascist billionaire (see: Hungary), making it the bigger threat to folks who like things like Democracy. That’s not to soft sell the harms Netflix could cause, which will be ample (especially as they debase themselves to gain approval), but one path is clearly worse.
So in the absence of blocking all media consolidation (which, again, won’t happen because the U.S. is too corrupt to function), Democrats are most likely better served by finding ways to back Netflix’s play for Warner Brothers assets. I’m not sure they’re going to be strategically bright enough to realize that.
It’s worth noting that Netflix doesn’t want CNN and its sorry-ass ratings, and that CNN and Warner’s other cable channels are likely to be spun off and sold anyway, giving Larry Ellison yet another chance to acquire CNN, and like CBS, turn it into a right wing propaganda mill whose primary function will be to kiss the ass of increasingly unpopular autocrats.
We’ve noted repeatedly how right wing billionaire Larry Ellison hired Bari Weiss to run CBS for a very obvious set of reasons: to coddle wealth and power, validate and amplify right wing grievance bullshit, divide and distract the electorate, and undermine real journalism.
And she’s doing all of those things incredibly well.
Weiss’ first major move was to host a town hall with a right wing opportunist nobody was actually interested in. Her second major move? To effectively kill a major 60 Minutes story about the president’s concentration camps. More specifically, to derail a 60 Minutes story focusing on the stories of Venezuelan men deported by the Trump administration to a brutal prison in El Salvador (CECOT).
CBS announced they were “postponing” the story, which had already seen multiple layers of fact checking and legal review, just three hours before it was poised to broadcast. Veteran 60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi was understandably pissed off, and shared a must-read complaint with her colleagues about Weiss’ ham-fisted effort to undermine the network’s journalism:
Per NY Times’s Michael Grynbaum on X, this is Sharyn Alfonsi’s email to her “60 Minutes” colleagues in full:
It’s quite a letter, which leaked almost immediately:
News Team,
Thank you for the notes and texts. I apologize for not reaching out earlier.
I learned on Saturday that Bari Weiss spiked our story, INSIDE CECOT, which was supposed to air tonight. We (Ori and I) asked for a call to discuss her decision. She did not afford us that courtesy/opportunity.
Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices. It is factually correct. In my view, pulling it now-after every rigorous internal check has been met is not an editorial decision, it is a political one.
We requested responses to questions and/or interviews with DHS, the White House, and the State Department. Government silence is a statement, not a VETO. Their refusal to be interviewed is a tactical maneuver designed to kill the story.
If the administration’s refusal to participate becomes a valid reason to spike a story, we have effectively handed them a “kill switch” for any reporting they find inconvenient. If the standard for airing a story becomes “the government must agree to be interviewed,” then the government effectively gains control over the 60 Minutes broadcast.
We go from an investigative powerhouse to a stenographer for the state.
These men risked their lives to speak with us.
We have a moral and professional obligation to the sources who entrusted us with their stories. Abandoning them now is a betrayal of the most basic tenet of journalism: giving voice to the voiceless.
CBS spiked the Jeffrey Wigand interview due to legal concerns, nearly destroying the credibility of this broadcast. It took years to recover from that “low point.” By pulling this story to shield an administration, we are repeating that history, but for political optics rather than legal ones.
We have been promoting this story on social media for days. Our viewers are expecting it.
When it fails to air without a credible explanation, the public will correctly identify this as corporate censorship. We are trading 50 years of “Gold Standard” reputation for a single week of political quiet.
I care too much about this broadcast to watch it be dismantled without a fight. Sharyn
Before killing the segment, Weiss had recommended numerous changes, including adding a new interview with Trump’s unhinged racism-czar Stephen Miller, and replacing the term “migrants” more frequently with words like “illegals.” You know, to be fair and balanced:
“Ms. Weiss first saw the segment on Thursday and raised numerous concerns to “60 Minutes” producers about Ms. Alfonsi’s segment on Friday and Saturday, and she asked for a significant amount of new material to be added, according to three people familiar with the internal discussions.
One of Ms. Weiss’s suggestions was to include a fresh interview with Stephen Miller, a White House deputy chief of staff and the architect of Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown, or a similarly high-ranking Trump administration official, two of the people said. Ms. Weiss provided contact information for Mr. Miller to the “60 Minutes” staff.
Ms. Weiss also questioned the use of the term “migrants” to describe the Venezuelan men who were deported, noting that they were in the United States illegally, two of the people said.”
Alfonsi notes that the 60 Minutes team had already asked for comment from the White House, the State Department, and the Department of Homeland Security. She also noted that Weiss had basically implemented a “kill switch” for any journalism the Trump White House finds inconvenient.
One presumes they found this particular story extra problematic not just because it exposes the Trump administration’s brutal and unconstitutional industrialized racism machine, but because it humanized Venezuelans at a time when the administration is trying to inflame racial tensions to justify its illegal, militaristic pursuit of Venezuelan precious metal and oil resources.
CBS, of course, wasn’t exactly a bastion of independent, hard-nosed journalism before Weiss and Ellison came to town. The network’s very first response to authoritarianism was to hire more right wing voices. Like many media outlets, it had already been compromised by generational bullying by the U.S. right wing, designed to discredit all factual opposition of right wing ideology for having a “liberal bias.”
Weiss was just hired to finish the job.
The latest paper-edition of the Onion satirical newspaper put it pretty well:
This should not have surprised anybody who has been paying attention. As noted previously, Weiss doesn’t have any actual experience in journalism (certainly not enough to warrant the promotion). She’s an opportunistic, contrarian-for-contrarianism’s-sake troll who built a blog dedicated to culture war grievance and lazy engagement bait.
Billionaires hired Bari Weiss to inflame cultural divides, disorient the public, and undermine journalism. They fire real journalists and replace them with Weiss (and others like her) to divide and distract the electorate from the actual causes of most U.S. dysfunction: usually unchecked corporate power, extreme wealth disparity, corruption, and our increasingly sociopathic, technofascist billionaire class.
Weiss part of an army of fake journalists employed by U.S. billionaires for this purpose (aided in some instances by hostile foreign intelligence), and despite the agenda never being subtle, the consolidated corporate media (the remnants of which Ellison is steadily trying to buy up and dominate) is utterly incapable of being honest with itself about any of it. Quite by design.
I see a lot of commentary pointing out that “Bari Weiss isn’t very good at journalism,” which distracts from the point that she wasn’t hired for journalism. She was hired to blow smoke up the ass of establishment right wing power, whether that’s Trump’s concentration camps or Netanyahu’s industrialized murder of toddlers.
If Weiss gets fired sometime next year it won’t be because she’s a terrible journalist that undermined the outlet’s already sagging credibility, it will be because she’s a clumsy propagandist and a ratings bore.
The state of streaming is… bad. It’s very bad. The first step in wanting to watch anything is a web search: “Where can I stream X?” Then you have to scroll past an AI summary with no answers, and then scroll past the sponsored links. After that, you find out that the thing you want to watch was made by a studio that doesn’t exist anymore or doesn’t have a streaming service. So, even though you subscribe to more streaming services than you could actually name, you will have to buy a digital copy to watch. A copy that, despite paying for it specifically, you do not actually own and might vanish in a few years.
Then, after you paid to see something multiple times in multiple ways (theater ticket, VHS tape, DVD, etc.), the mega-corporations behind this nightmare will try to get Congress to pass laws to ensure you keep paying them. In the end, this is easier than making a product that works. Or, as someone put it on social media, these companies have forgotten “that their entire existence relies on being slightly more convenient than piracy.”
It’s important to recognize this as we see more and more media mergers. These mergers are not about quality, they’re about control.
In the old days, studios made a TV show. If the show was a hit, they increased how much they charged companies to place ads during the show. And if the show was a hit for long enough, they sold syndication rights to another channel. Then people could discover the show again, and maybe come back to watch it air live. In that model, the goal was to spread access to a program as much as possible to increase viewership and the number of revenue streams.
Now, in the digital age, studios have picked up a Silicon Valley trait: putting all their eggs into the basket of “increasing the number of users.” To do that, they have to create scarcity. There has to be only one destination for the thing you’re looking for, and it has to be their own. And you shouldn’t be able to control the experience at all. They should.
They’ve also moved away from creating buzzy new exclusives to get you to pay them. That requires risk and also, you know, paying creative people to make them. Instead, they’re consolidating.
Media companies keep announcing mergers and acquisitions. They’ve been doing it for a long time, but it’s really ramped up in the last few years. And these mergers are bad for all the obvious reasons. There are the speech and censorship reasons that came to a head in, of all places, late night television. There are the labor issues. There are the concentration of power issues. There are the obvious problems that the fewer studios that exist the fewer chances good art gets to escape Hollywood and make it to our eyes and ears. But when it comes specifically to digital life there are these: consumer experience and ownership.
First, the more content that comes under a single corporation’s control, the more they expect you to come to them for it. And the more they want to charge. And because there is less competition, the less they need to work to make their streaming app usable. They then enforce their hegemony by using the draconian copyright restrictions they’ve lobbied for to cripple smaller competitors, critics, and fair use.
When everything is either Disney or NBCUniversal or Warner Brothers-Discovery-Paramount-CBS and everything is totally siloed, what need will they have to spend money improving any part of their product? Making things is hard, stopping others from proving how bad you are is easy, thanks to how broken copyright law is.
Furthermore, because every company is chasing increasing subscriber numbers instead of multiple revenue streams, they have an interest in preventing you from ever again “owning” a copy of a work. This was always sort of part of the business plan, but it was on a scale of a) once every couple of years, b) at least it came, in theory, with some new features or enhanced quality and c) you actually owned the copy you paid for. Now they want you to pay them every month for access to same copy. And, hey, the price is going to keep going up the fewer options you have. Or you will see more ads. Or start seeing ads where there weren’t any before.
On the one hand, the increasing dependence on direct subscriber numbers does give users back some power. Jimmy Kimmel’s reinstatement by ABC was partly due to the fact that the company was about to announce a price hike for Disney+ and it couldn’t handle losing users due to the new price and due to popular outrage over Kimmel’s treatment.
On the other hand, well, there’s everything else.
The latest kerfuffle is over the sale of Warner Brothers-Discovery, a company that was already the subject of a sale and merger resulting in the hyphen. Netflix was competing against another recently merged media megazord of Paramount Skydance.
Warner Brothers-Discovery accepted a bid from Netflix, enraging Paramount Skydance, which has now launched a hostile takeover.
Now the optimum outcome is for neither of these takeovers to happen. There are already too few players in Hollywood. It does nothing for the health of the industry to allow either merger. A functioning antitrust regime would stop both the sale and the hostile takeover attempt, full stop. But Hollywood and the federal government are frequent collaborators, and the feds have little incentive to stop Hollywood’s behemoths from growing even further, as long as they continue to play their role pushing a specific view of American culture.
The promise of the digital era was in part convenience. You never again had to look at TV listings to find out when something would be airing. Virtually unlimited digital storage meant everything would be at your fingertips. But then the corporations went to work to make sure it never happened. And with each and every merger, that promise gets further and further away.
We’ve noted how Larry Ellison, as part of his attempt to control the entirety of media, had launched a $108 billion hostile takeover bid for Warner Brothers. Larry, as we’ve seen with CBS and his interest in TikTok, is trying to convert what’s left of U.S. media into a giant safe space for affluent right wing autocrats and the right wing culture war grievance and infotainment complex.
While the Ellison deal is higher, Warner’s board is concerned with a few things. One, that Larry Ellison isn’t fully using his own cash to fully back the bid, which could create chaos when it’s time to actually get the money together:
“Warner Bros has raised doubts about Paramount’s financial condition and creditworthiness. The offer relies on a seven-party, cross-conditional structure, with the Ellison Revocable Trust providing just 32% of the required equity commitment while capping its liability at $2.8 billion, Warner Bros said. It noted that the trust’s assets could be withdrawn at any time.”
The Warner board is also nervous that the involvement of Saudi money in the hostile takeover attempt could generate more national security regulatory heat than they’d like, further complicating a deal. In total, they see Netflix as the cleaner, easier, and more predictable path.
What happens next? Well, Netflix has already begun kissing Trump’s ass in the hopes of regulatory approval, and I suspect you’ll see Netflix executives debase themselves repeatedly and creatively in the new year to appease the President.
If that’s not enough to satiate Donald’s ego, then I suspect you’ll see his DOJ launch a fake antitrust, fake populist intervention sometime in the new year trying to scuttle the deal and redirect the assets back to Ellison so he can continue his goal of creating autocrat-friendly state television leveraging the combined assets of CNN, HBO, CBS, and TikTok (if the Chinese give their approval).
Again, none of this will be reported clearly or honestly by the corporate American press, whose ownership has zero interest in journalism that’s critical of mindless consolidation or their pathetic groveling in the face of authoritarianism. Ideally a functioning government (which we don’t have) would block all media consolidation, but Netflix remains the better of a slate of bad options moving forward.
Netflix has fewer redundancies that would possibly mean potentially fewer layoffs. And they’re slightly less lodged up Donald’s colon (though they’re going to test that thesis to gain approval). And while they’ll certainly fire people and generate plenty of homogenized slop post acquisition, that’s still somehow a better option than letting Donald Trump and his autocrat friends flesh out their dream of state television.
Apparently, Jared Kushner and his investment firm Affinity Partners didn’t like the attention the partnership was generating, and have announced their tactical retreat:
“The dynamics of the investment have changed significantly since we initially became involved in October,” the spokesperson said. “We continue to believe there is a strong strategic rationale for Paramount’s offer.”
And by “dynamics,” Affinity means that the the president’s son-in-law partnering with Saudis and the planet’s second-richest technofascist billionaire to gobble up the remnants of dying U.S. corporate media was generating a few too many negative headlines for their liking.
The $108 billion hostile takeover bid is still being backed (for now, apparently) by the Saudis. And, of course, it’s still the brainchild of right wing Trump billionaire ally Larry Ellison, who will assuredly receive favorable treatment should the dispute wind up being settled by the Trump DOJ or Trump-corrupted courts.
For his part, Trump is trying to pretend Ellison isn’t a close ally and massive campaign donor, because, one can only presume, he assumes you’re all very stupid:
“For those people that think I am close with the new owners of CBS, please understand that ’60 Minutes’ has treated me far worse since the so-called ‘takeover’ than they have ever treated me before,” Trump wrote. “If they are friends, I’d hate to see my enemies!”
The whole fracas puts Democrats in a bit of a bind. In an ideal world with functioning regulators, you’d advocate for the rejection of all additional media consolidation, because these deals — whether Netflix or Paramount — routinely result in mass layoffs and higher prices for consumers.
But because Congress and U.S. regulators no longer function due to corruption (despite a lot of pretense to the contrary), it’s unlikely that all deals will be blocked. And while Netflix is certainly no saint, keeping consolidated corporate media ownership out of the hands of extremist authoritarian zealots hell bent on dismantling democracy with propaganda is pretty clearly the better option.
Which means that Democrats and organizations keen on actually helping (and keeping U.S. Democracy semi-operational) are probably better off finding common cause with Netflix. There’s dogshit Netflix homogenized consolidation, which is definitely bad, and then there’s authoritarian state television dominated by the planet’s second richest techno-fascist asshole, which is significantly worse
