Just as Larry Ellison and Paramount executives had worried, the state antitrust challenge to their $111 billion merger with Warner Brothers has resulted in significant delays that could prove terminal.
Two weeks ago California and eleven other states filed an antitrust lawsuit to block the merger, pointing out that the consolidation would undermine market competition, resulting in mass layoffs, higher consumer prices, and product quality hits as the merged company attempts to pay down a massive debt load. This isn’t hard to predict or prove given that every single merger that Warner Brothers has been involved with in the last quarter century has been a disastrous dud.
The judge overseeing the case granted a 14-day restraining order pausing the deal. But Paramount has now agreed to suspend the merger for far longer in the apparent belief that this could speed up the looming trial:
Paramount framed the agreement as a “significant win” that would help it close the deal. The company said the move would speed up the legal process by pushing the case to a trial sooner. It will also help avoid prolonged back-and-forth over some legal issues, like the merits of a court-ordered delay.
So as it stands, the Paramount merger will simply expire if they can’t win or dismantle the antitrust trial by June 4, 2027. That’s a problem for all sorts of reasons, the biggest being that the terms of the agreement involve Paramount being forced to pay a ticking fee of about $7 million per day (or $650 million per quarter) to investors starting in October until the deal closes (or doesn’t).
As mentioned previously, Larry Ellison and Oracle are also hugely over-leveraged on the AI bubble and data center investment; if that bubble pops during this window (which is broadly expected since nobody but Nvidia is making any money), that could heavily complicate his financial backing for the already very debt-heavy deal. At the same time, broadcast television isn’t magically getting more popular anytime soon.
And even if this deal does ultimately succeed, there’s been very little evidence that Paramount, much like the Trump administration that rubber-stamped the superunion, has any idea what they’re doing.
Earlier this year FCC boss Brendan Carr launched a series of fake investigations into ABC because the network (1) hosted Democratic Texas Senate hopeful James Talarico on The View, (2) aired comedians who made fun of the president and his wife, and (3) occasionally engaged in journalism critical of Trump corruption.
ABC and NBC wisely refused to air the speech live, knowing that helping to spread distrust in election integrity in real time would be the opposite of useful journalism. That made Trump mad, so he’s clearly urged Brendan Carr to levy some additional empty threats against ABC:
“I think when you have the President of the United States standing inside the White House delivering an important speech, I think that’s something that broadcasters should be carrying. And so, obviously, this is an issue,” Carr told reporters Wednesday. “There have been lots of concerns raised, including by members of Congress, about whether broadcasters and their decisions there comply with the public interest.”
Carr is somewhat vague here because he knows this is a bunch of bullshit.
Obviously it’s ABC’s First Amendment right to determine what it broadcasts and when. Carr has absolutely zero legal role in determining the scheduling lineup of a private company. Carr’s once again pretending that networks that refuse to pander to our mad idiot king will be subjected to FCC review of their public interest obligations affixed to ownership of public airwaves.
As we’ve mentioned countless times already, Carr doesn’t want any of this to actually head to court because he knows it’s an absolute loser on First Amendment grounds. The real goal remains to threaten U.S. media companies with costly and annoying legal headaches if they challenge Republicans or the unpopular president. It’s typical lazy autocrat stuff by weak men who are afraid of words.
Brendan Carr has openly stated in interviews he fancies himself a tough, pit bull enforcer; but as Trump’s health and political power wane, the threats will hold less and less weight. As a result you’ve already seen ABC execs start to show a backbone in their fight with Carr, openly pointing out how he colluded with local right wing broadcast affiliates to manufacture evidence suggesting ABC broke FCC rules (something I’m sure will play great in court).
Carr’s threats will become weaker and weaker until he’s ultimately booted from office by subsequent administrations, at which point he’ll fail upward to some mid-six figure job at a telecom or media think tank, where he’ll spend the rest of his life helping corporate America dismantle whatever’s left of competition, labor, and consumer protection standards.
One of the ironic things, for Carr, is that his authoritarian censorship and saber rattling often draws press and public attention away from all the other terrible things he’s doing, whether it’s destroying media consolidation limits, making life easier on robocallers, dismantling broadband consumer protection standards, or making it easier for giant shitty companies to run amok.
You’d like to think Carr ultimately faces some sort of meaningful accountability for being one of the most censorial, petty, captured, and authoritarian regulators in U.S. history, but I wouldn’t hold your breath.
Not long after twelve states sued Paramount claiming its $111 billion merger with Warner Brothers would harm market competition, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) filed their own lawsuit, warning that the massive debt load from the media industry’s latest megamerger will result in an ocean of layoffs for an already reeling U.S. entertainment industry.
The lawsuit notes that the current film industry is dominated by just five players: Disney (ABC), NBCUniversal (Comcast), Sony, Paramount (CBS), and Warner Brothers. Comcast recently restructured to make it easier to sell off its NBC and Universal properties, opening the door to a lot of very quick consolidation in addition to the speedy Skydance/Paramount/Warners merger.
“With fewer competitors, the merged Paramount-Warner Bros. entity would have both the incentive and the ability to lower costs by suppressing writers’ wages and reducing output. Writers will be paid less and have fewer employment opportunities,” the WGA complaint said.
Supreme Court precedent (for whatever that’s worth anymore) has long indicated that any merger yielding a post-merger market share exceeding 30% (which this deal does) is presumptively anticompetitive. The WGA notes that muted competition will result not just in fewer jobs, but lower wages and fewer opportunities for creatives overall across both film and television.
“With fewer competitors, the merged Paramount-Warner Bros. entity would have both the incentive and the ability to lower costs by suppressing writers’ wages and reducing output. Writers will be paid less and have fewer employment opportunities,” the lawsuit states.
While Paramount would like to pretend this is a debate, and most U.S. press outlets bury the lede, U.S. history is vividly clear on the harms created by media consolidation. That was most recently personified by AT&T’s disastrous acquisitions of DirecTV and Time Warner, which resulted in upward of 50,000 layoffs, higher prices, worse service, and no shortage of shuttered creative projects.
The rushed acquisitions of both CBS/Paramount and Warner Brothers — all so Larry Ellison’s son can play media mogul — have created a particularly heavy debt load of $79 billion. Such debt is always paid for by consumers and labor, often in more ways than one.
Paramount has promised to release 30 theatrical releases per year and to keep them in exclusively for theaters for 45 days, but as I’ve long made clear, pre-merger promises are utterly worthless. Especially in a country dead set on steadily lobotomizing its public interest regulators. As we’ve seen with consolidation in sectors like wireless, America’s favorite pastime is pretending to ignore the harms of pointless mergers.
This is a pretty clear example of the kind of consolidation that should be blocked for the benefit of labor, markets, and consumers, but despite a lot of rambling pretense about a love of free market competition and entrepreneurial spirit, America consistently fails to walk the talk on antitrust, the impact of which is abundant and getting exponentially worse under pay-to-play Trumpism.
This is pointless escalation, but pointless escalation is this administration’s brand.
We already know ICE officers have gone out of their way to aim their phones at protesters and others who try to derail their masked kidnapping squads. And we know — thanks to public records and leaked documents — ICE has access to facial recognition tech that makes it much easier for officers to identify protesters and harass/intimidate them for engaging in their First Amendment rights.
So, it’s hardly a surprise that ICE has upped the intimidation ante. What’s surprising about this is that ICE has mobilized its own propaganda/intimidation force that (just barely) attempts to disguise itself as something else. This has been noticed elsewhere — at least in terms of ICE officers wielding professional-grade video cameras to document arrests, etc. — but this is apparently the first time ICE has decided to pretend its masked camera people are members of the “media.”
This is happening in Danbury, Connecticut, where ICE has recently intensified its evil for exactly the reasons you’d expect: Kamala Harris carried the state in the last election, the state has sued the administration multiple times, and state legislators have been pushing Yale to fight back against Trump’s politically-motivated extortion attempts.
The Danbury cameraman was recorded by members of Greater Danbury Area Unites for Immigrants, standing near a crowd by a state courthouse. A person is crying off camera, mentioning to ICE agents the person they apprehended had a heart condition. The agents soon get into their cars and leave, the cameraman pointing the camera at the crowd as the agents drive away.
The woman from Ridgefield, part of a group observing and documenting ICE operations, rushed to Danbury on a June day, like so many times before in the 18 months of the second Trump administration.
This time, on June 4, she saw a different scene. ICE had more vehicles along Moss Avenue near the courthouse and a more open, less furtive presence. “Brazen,” she called it.
“There is a gentleman running furiously up the road towards my vehicle and there was about four or five agents chasing him,” the woman, a U.S. citizen who requested anonymity for fear of retribution by the government. “He had a look of fear, or like terror on his face.”
And she saw something else. Arriving in vehicles with the ICE agents, then working alongside the agents on the streets, a couple of men with professional video equipment wore black vests marked “MEDIA” in large, white, capital letters.
This is a dude dressed like lots of ICE officers — kevlar vest, face mask, and something that could be charitably called “tactical pants.” Except this vest says “MEDIA,” rather than ICE or ERO or DHS or nothing at all.
This might give people the impression that actual press members are embedded with ICE. But only for a moment. First, as is pointed out in Haar’s column, journalists never identify themselves as “media,” because that term is entirely incorrect:
Technically, anyone wielding the tools of communication is using media, as both Yousman and Crawford pointed out. Media is technology such as video or pen and paper, not a job.
That, to Crawford, is a hint that these are ICE employees or contractors, not independent news professionals.
“In war zones, journalists don’t wear jackets that say media. They wear jackets that say press,” she said, arguing that the distinction matters. Using the wrong word shows that these vest signs are not there to do the normal job of protecting members of the working press in dangerous situations.
Further distancing themselves from real members of any press entity are the actions of the people labeled “media” who trailed behind ICE officers. First, they were masked. Press members might wear masks occasionally, but only if they expect to encounter things like tear gas or pepper spray.
Second — and perhaps most importantly — embedded press members don’t pull this kind of shit:
A video shows him wheeling around to record observers at very close range, who were themselves making videos. In another video shot, he is shown quickly pulling up his mask as he rounds a corner and sees an observer’s camera.
All of this happened in the context of ICE’s general horrificness. What was captured here were the actions of ICE officers staking out a courthouse to make easy arrests of people just trying to adhere to the conditions of their parole, immigration-related or otherwise.
Dan Haar says what needs to be said: this isn’t America. This is something we’ve always considered ourselves to be above, right up until Trump decided to drag us all down with him.
Clearly, government agents, employees or contractors masquerading as members of the working press create confusion and erode the legitimacy of the independent media, while lending credence to government misinformation and propaganda. These are all hallmarks of President Donald Trump as we all know, but it’s still disturbing to see it paraded on the streets so flagrantly.
It’s just not what free countries do, certainly not ones with a constitution that assures freedom of the press.
Trump is degrading an entire nation. Unfortunately, he has a sizable fan base willing to jack off into the nearest flag while cheering on his authoritarian efforts. This is just ICE being extra fucking shitty because it knows everyone in the administration is similarly supportive of their hostile behavior.
A dozen states have filed an antitrust lawsuit to block Paramount/CBS’ $111 billion merger with Warner Brothers. The states argue the deal will undermine market competition, cause untold layoffs, result in higher prices and lower quality for consumers, and significantly harm a Hollywood entertainment industry that still hasn’t fully recovered from Covid, the streaming revolution, or previous shitty mergers.
The state lawsuit, led by California AG Rob Bonta and filed in the U.S. District for the Northern District of California, alleges that the merger violates Section 7 of the Clayton Act, which holds that mergers that lessen competition or endeavor to ultimately create monopoly are illegal.
Larry Ellison’s efforts to gift his nepobaby son with two Hollywood studios in a year might be fun for David and other aspiring if unqualified moguls, but it’s likely to result in more problems than ever given the deal’s significant debt load and the steady hints of incompetence among Ellisons’ chosen leadership.
“Consolidation here not only leads to higher prices — it also leads to fewer opportunities for important stories to come to life, and fewer ways for audiences to encounter stories, ideas, and perspectives beyond their own experiences. In this country, no one is above the law. With this lawsuit, California and our sister states are fighting for free and fair markets, not rigged markets. America has no kings in government or our economy.”
California’s AG notes the deal combines two of the nation’s five major film distributors, leaving four major film distributors controlling over 85 percent of all wide-release theatrical films in the United States. The deal also combines two of the five major owners of basic cable channels (three of which are technically Disney), leaving just two companies in control of 59 percent of all basic cable in the United States.
Other states that signed off on the lawsuit include Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, and Washington. You’ll notice a broad lack of Republican AGs, despite a lot of pretense last election season that the GOP really cared a lot about antitrust now. Apparently a top Trump donor clumsily trying to dominate American media (with Saudi, Qatari and Chinese help) doesn’t qualify.
We’ve discussed at great length how these sorts of major media deals almost uniformly result in mass layoffs and price hikes in order to pay off the massive new debt load. Every deal involving Warner Brothers in particular, which now goes back a quarter century to AOL, have always resulted in mass layoffs, higher prices, lower-quality, corner cutting, and a lot of shuttered creative projects.
Such deals generally only benefit the extraction class, who, every time they’re out of fresh ideas, look to mindless consolidation to shuffle the deck, obtain tax breaks, and nab a brief stock boost. Execs then inevitably cannibalize brand quality, cash out (see: AT&T), then float off to the next effort with “savvy dealmaker” emblazoned across their resumes, outsized executive compensation in hand.
The state lawsuit doesn’t really touch on the foreign influence peddling concerns created by the deal’s Saudi and Chinese funding. That would normally be a job for the FCC, were we to have one that functioned in the public interest. The state also lacks any authority to challenge Larry Ellison’s efforts to dominate what’s left of U.S. corporate media, supplanting already shaky journalism with lazy right wing agitprop.
Paramount issued a statement insisting that antitrust law somehow doesn’t apply to it, while arguing any delay in the deal would harm consumers:
“The lawsuit filed by the state attorneys general, in the most generous light, reflects a fundamentally flawed application of the antitrust laws and is wrong on both the facts and the law. Delaying this transaction will only harm entertainment workers who have already suffered over recent years as technology has disrupted their livelihood and cost California tens of thousands of entertainment jobs.”
As hints of a looming state lawsuit loomed, Paramount executives seemed to get more and more desperate, jumping between falsely claiming opposition to the deal was “antisemitic,” to empty threats leaked to news outlets this week that the company could leave California if state regulators interfered.
A delay caused by the new state lawsuit isn’t likely to hurt consumers or workers. It is, however, potentially harmful for a very debt-heavy acquisition backed by Ellison, who is extremely over-leveraged on the AI hype bubble. Should the AI bubble pop during regulatory review, Ellison could be looking at a far less forgiving financial reality that makes his aggressive media ambitions less tenable.
As we’ve long explored, Weiss wasn’t hired to do journalism. She was hired to do right wing agitprop. But given she’s not good at that either, CBS just saw its lowest ratings in a quarter century.
Undaunted, Weiss is continuing her efforts to “reshape” CBS into something Larry Ellison and other U.S. oligarchs approve of. As a result she’s apparently accelerated efforts to hire a bunch of right wing Brits, most of them with associations to Rupert Murdoch’s sprawling right wing tabloid empire. Said Brits will, curiously enough, tell you that hiring a bunch of white right wing Brits is a wonderful idea:
“According to several figures familiar with her thinking, however, the hires are no coincidence. “She’s been looking at various Brits that might add a bit of opinion/attitude diversity to US media, instead of the dominant, predictable Columbia Journalism School uniformity. Not a bad idea,” said Andrew Neil, the former editor of Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Times, who supported her hiring of Phillips.”
Hiring a bunch of white male right wing protectors of the extraction class (and global autocrats) as the pinnacle of “opinion diversity” is a theme you’ll see constantly throughout Weiss’ demolition and repurposing of CBS. Because said British tabloiders sometimes break gossip on politicians and celebrities (often illegally) they’re framed as tough journalists:
“A CBS News source, describing Weiss’s interest in British journalists, said: “They do the kind of things that Bari is looking for; it’s not puff pieces and kid gloves.”
Rupert Murdoch’s longstanding skill wasn’t just to make right wing propaganda, but right wing propaganda that entertained and drew ratings and subscriptions. A soup of agitprop infotainment. To date there’s absolutely zero indication that Weiss and Ellison have any knack for that whatsoever, so they’re attempting to hire Rupert Murdoch adjacent folks who do.
Even then, it’s no longer the same world Rupert Murdoch thrived in. Broadcast TV is dying, social media is ever evolving, and (as we’ve seen at outlets like the Jeff Bezos Washington Post), people aren’t really in the mood for right wing billionaire simping agitprop. With any luck, the “new” CBS will collapse under the load of Warner Bros debt long before Weiss and company figure out the right formula.
For a while there, you might remember how giant telecom monopolies, running out of new subscribers, all decided to get into the media business. But because terrible telecom monopoly executives can’t innovate and generally don’t know how competition works, it never really goes that well.
The various Yahoo/Tumblr/Verizon/AOL exploits were a legendary mess, only outshined by AT&T’s disastrous mergers with DirecTV and Warner Brothers. Then there’s the Comcast NBC Universal tie up (Peacock saw a $432 million loss in the first quarter), which now appears on the cusp of being unwound after seeing its stock drop 54% in the past five years.
Last week, Comcast execs stated they’re now formally unwinding NBC Universal from the Comcast telecom properties. Comcast CEO Mike Cavanagh says the company simply “changed its mind” about being a monolithic giant that dominates both media and physical internet access:
“We’ve simply now changed our mind. We’ve now concluded that future success for each of our businesses will depend on focus, speed and strategic flexibility that this separation will unlock. This is the right move to put each company in the strongest position to create value, fully monetize its assets, and aggressively pursue its own organic growth strategies.”
Yadda yadda yadda.
Comcast had already spun off its cable TV network portfolio (except for Bravo) into a new company named Versant Media earlier this year. Comcast executives insist that they’re “definitely not” looking to sell NBC Universal off as part of the broader U.S. media merger madness, but amusingly nobody inside or outside of Kabletown believes them:
“The collective eye roll [on management’s denial] was almost audible,” former NBC Studios president Tom Nunan told TheWrap. “I thought that their recent effort to go after Warner’s was a sign that there was still gas in the tank, that they really still wanted to be among the big media players left standing. When that didn’t work out, they suddenly go, in my view, from a buyer to a seller.”
Unsaid by the trade mag coverage is that telecom giants routinely demonstrate they have absolutely no idea what they’re doing when it comes to Hollywood and content. They’re endlessly just chasing their own tail and shuffling the cards around in the hunt for the next merger, tax break, or giant executive compensation package. None of these deals work out, because the kind of execs birthed in the bowels of telecom monopolization aren’t really competent or competitively/innovatively battle tested.
Normally Wall Street rewards this kind of mindless consolidation chasing by men out of original ideas, but both ends of Comcast’s business are facing headwinds. On one side traditional broadcast TV is dying and Peacock requires a ton of money to remain competitive; on the other Comcast’s steadily losing broadband subscribers due to increased competition from cheaper 5G wireless or community-owned fiber.
Selling the whole thing was likely too much for any suitor to chew. Splitting off NBC Universal makes it a more digestible target for Netflix, Amazon, Disney, or Apple, leaving traditional Comcast time to focus on its core agenda: buying up smaller telecom companies and dismantling U.S. broadband competition.
Comcast’s problem is NBC’s journalism has historically made our mad idiot king cry, so they’ll have to be extra fawning and subservient to gain favor from the administration’s fake antitrust regulators.
When right wing billionaire Larry Ellison hired trolling blogger Bari Weiss to run CBS News, Weiss arrived with the promise of “balanced, fact-based news,” “independent, principled journalism,” and a unique “entrepreneurial drive and editorial vision” that would completely modernize the network and reach the “everyday Americans” she claimed were being “ignored by mainstream media.”
In reality, she was hired by the billionaire to take what she did at her weird little troll blog (troll people for clicks, coddle the extraction class, punch left) and weave it into CBS News in a way that would get ratings and go viral on social media. She wasn’t hired to do journalism, she was hired to do attention-grabbing class and race agitprop to entertain and befuddle the electorate for a billionaire.
“Damage was particularly bad at CBS Mornings, hosted by Gayle King, which has long held the third-place ratings spot among network morning shows. But that recently changed: CBS Mornings averaged 1.8 million total viewers earlier this month, then dropped to 1.59 million on June 3, the day after executives fired Scott Pelley, the de facto face of CBS News.
That amounted to an 11 percent slip in audience following what was already the “worst-rated May on record” in CBS Mornings history, according to the ratings data.”
It’s not that you can’t make right wing and oligarch friendly propaganda entertaining. There’s no shortage of those sorts of options across AM radio, broadcast TV, Fox news on cable, and the internet. Bari Weiss just isn’t good at anything. Not running a major newsroom. Not converting a longstanding network into an oligarch apologist-machine, not managing human beings, and not even entertaining people.
She’s a fairly prototypical media industry brunchlord, the type that just keeps failing upward in a way that’s in no way reflective of her competency or what she’s actually accomplished.
Reports from within CBS News have been uniformly negative, and there continues to be rumblings that Weiss will be replaced or at least see her responsibilities scaled down. There’s potential here for Larry Ellison to fuse CBS News, his looming acquisition of CNN, and his co-ownership of TikTok into a very effective propaganda machine. Fortunately for democracy, Larry doesn’t seem all that competent either.
You might recall that one of the conditions of the FCC’s approval of The Ellison family’s $8 billion acquisition of CBS was that the agency would install a “ombudsman” at the network to ensure CBS journalism was appropriately feckless and deferential to our mad, idiot king.
This was particularly ironic given decades of whining by Republicans about stuff like the “fairness doctrine,” and other short-lived government attempts to set acceptable contours for journalistic speech. The appointment didn’t even really appear necessary, given Bari Weiss’ pretty obvious loyalty to oligarchs and autocrats like Trump and Netanyahu.
The guy they appointed, Kenneth Weinstein, unsurprisingly had no qualifications for the role. Weinstein had been the head of the faux-academic right wing Hudson Institute “think tank,” and has absolutely no experience in journalism or television whatsoever.
Similarly unsurprisingly, a new New York Times report indicates that Weinstein has largely been invisible and pointless since his appointment. He doesn’t issue statements, he doesn’t appear to help anybody dealing with internal chaos being caused by Weiss, he doesn’t respond to direct questions from politicians, and he barely shows up at the office:
“In the nine months since he was hired, Mr. Weinstein has issued no public statements about CBS News’s coverage or its controversies. He has not issued any guidance or feedback in staffwide emails or memos, three employees said. He has told some employees that he is scheduled to work only one day per month, two people said, though one said he responded to queries outside his monthly workday.”
As I predicted, there’s just not much for him to actually do at a company that’s innately so dutifully loyal to the nation’s richest assholes. The New York Times at one point seems confused by the idea this “watchdog” does do any useful watchdogging:
“As CBS News has been shaken by infighting between management and its star correspondents this year, Mr. Weinstein’s silence is being criticized by media experts. They say Paramount, the parent company of CBS News, has essentially hired a watchdog who doesn’t bark.”
Of course Weinstein wasn’t appointed to be a “watchdog” or to help the network or its employees. He was hired so that the Trump administration could be ensured a direct line to the leadership of a media company being converted into a propaganda mill, something that’s likely not even necessary due to the ample close connections between the Ellisons, CBS leadership, and the administration.
Weinstein’s other job was to simply ensure that CBS was remaining dutifully loyal to the president, a role that’s also not really necessary since folks like Bari Weiss have no integrity.
The New York Times doesn’t mention how much Weinstein is being paid for his single day of “work” a month, and how many shitcanned CBS journalist salaries it would have paid for.
Earlier this week we noted how ABC has been asking its audience to give the Trump FCC an earful about its clumsy efforts to censor journalists, comedians, and daytime talk show hosts:
The ad only hints at the fact that FCC boss Brendan Carr has launched a fake “investigation” of ABC because The View hosted Texas Senate hopeful James Talarico last February. As we’ve explored repeatedly, Carr is pretending that this appearance violates a dated and irrelevant FCC “equal time rule,” despite the fact the show has had a formal exemption since 2002.
It’s all weird, performative bullshit designed to chill speech and punish ABC because President Trump is a thin-skinned autocrat. It’s also intended to send a message to all major media outlets that if they platform people openly critical of our dim kakistocracy, they’ll be inundated with endless costly legal headaches and bad “press” (read: lots of hostility aimed at them by right wing propaganda outlets).
Despite the ABC ad being relatively timid, it clearly upset the similarly-thin-skinned Carr, who took to Elon Musk’s right wing propaganda website to whine about it:
Again, The View was already exempt from this rule, for more than two decades. Even if it wasn’t, the rule hasn’t been enforced in 26 years because it’s a relic that doesn’t matter. It was crafted for an era where a TV appearance could make or break a political candidacy, requiring that a politician of the opposite party ideology get “equal time” on broadcast airwaves.
But broadcast is increasingly irrelevant, as is the rule, which you’ll notice Carr doesn’t enforce for right wing radio (because this is an ideological crusade by a weak zealot). This is also a giant loser of a case on First Amendment grounds. But it could be a particularly problematic case for Carr during discovery, given the indications that Carr covertly worked with right wing broadcasters to falsely make it look like ABC’s affiliate actively broke the law by not filling out some paperwork.
Carr knows all of this but his audience of bots and MAGA zealots over at ex-Twitter obviously don’t. They will simply see women daytime TV hosts and “news” in the same line of sight and immediately suffer embolisms of hate.
“Some may dislike certain — or even most — of the viewpoints expressed on ‘The View’ or similar shows,” ABC said in one recent filing. “Such dislike, however, cannot justify using regulatory processes to restrict those views.”
Carr doesn’t want this to ever see an actual courtroom. He just wants to intimidate corporate media giants, censor valid speech, and then bask in the adoration of the misinformed and deluded.
But it’s genuinely bad news for Carr and Trump that Disney Corporation is fighting back. If they can openly and legally demonstrate that Carr is a toothless extremist hack, other corporations are likely to be encouraged. And as Trump’s health and political power starts to buckle and fail, that sort of uncharacteristic corporate media courage could prove contagious.
