Media

Media Consolidation Cage Match: The People vs. Paramount

The fix was in at Trump’s DoJ. But this fight isn’t over yet.

Photo by Vivien Killilea/Getty Images for Free Press

If you were pitching a movie about the fall of the American empire, the scenes from last weekend in Washington, D.C., would be too on the nose. It’s Idiocracy-meets-Caligula, complete with a literal cage-match fight on the White House lawn beneath a giant canopy nicknamed “The Claw.”

The whole vile spectacle would be laughable if it weren’t our reality, streaming live on — where else? — Paramount+.

Various members of the Trump family, multiple cabinet secretaries, assorted MAGA lickspittles and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg showed up on Sunday night to take in the bloodsport, slap backs and chuckle at vulgar and racist smears made ringside. (Elon Musk was apparently too busy fomenting real-world pogroms to be there.)

The main event was on Trump’s birthday, but the media billionaire with the most to celebrate on fight night was Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison, son of the fifth-richest person on the planet, Oracle founder Larry Ellison.

On Friday, Trump’s Justice Department greenlit Paramount’s merger with Warner Bros. Discovery. The $110 billion deal would put CBS, CNN, HBO, Paramount+, numerous cable channels and two major movie studios under one debt-laden corporate umbrella.

The Trump DoJ claimed that “based on the evidence received in its investigation that the transaction is not likely to result in harm to competition or American consumers.”

Translation: The fix was in from the start.

A less-than-thorough ‘investigation’

“What we saw happen on Friday was the Justice Department saying they could find no reason to block this merger, and that’s because they didn’t look for one,” I told Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! on Monday morning. “This has been one of the most shallow and corrupt merger-review processes we’ve ever seen.”

By Monday afternoon, we got a further glimpse at just how corrupt the whole affair actually was. The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump political appointees at the Justice Department overruled career staff to approve the deal — and ignored evidence the antitrust experts had collected against the merger.

“A team of career lawyers who had spent months scrutinizing the deal were leaning toward recommending a lawsuit challenging it on the grounds that the combination of the two movie studios would be anticompetitive and violate antitrust law,” The Journal wrote. But their superiors — pretty much all former personal defense attorneys for Trump — shut down the investigation.

An orgy of corruption

The Ellisons acquired Paramount in the first place after the company bribed Trump to settle a preposterous lawsuit over editing of an interview with then-Vice President and presidential candidate Kamala Harris.

Once in control, they set about ruining CBS, spiking stories exposing Trump-administration crimes, appointing The Bari Weiss to distort news coverage, and driving someone as stoic as Scott Pelley to compare the whole Ellison experience to “your spouse being murdered.” (The Ellisons have promised Trump the same kind of “sweeping changes” if they get their hands on CNN.)

CBS has been running a seemingly endless number of soft-focus profiles of administration officials, and the network used its news shows to air infomercials for the UFC’s White House spectacular.

Off the air, the Ellisons fêted and flattered Trump incessantly. This brazen venality included a private soiree — truly a “Corruption Gala” — honoring Trump before the White House Correspondents Association Dinner. And Status reported that Ellison hosted a champagne brunch this Sunday with Trump officials before the UFC fights to toast their accomplishments.

It’s not time to tap out

The blatant corruption and degeneration of the DoJ are dispiriting. But this fight is far from over. State attorneys general can still go to court to stop this deal. And according to press reports, California, New York and other states are preparing to file suit.

They will have a strong case for blocking this merger, and — as we’ve seen in challenges to Live Nation-Ticketmaster (and maybe soon Nexstar-Tegna) — the states can still win when the federal government gives up.

The overwhelming evidence against this deal continues to pile up. Elected leaders need to listen to those working in the entertainment industry — and many other parts of the economy — who are speaking out against the dangers of this merger, despite threats to their livelihoods. They should pay attention to people like screenwriter Danny Tolli, who says, “If this merger goes through, this will be the death of our industry.”

The Block the Merger campaign and packed town halls in Los Angeles and New York (another is happening in Atlanta today) have surfaced so many more stories like this one. Actors, archivists, crew members, filmmakers, journalists, show runners, theater owners and writers are testifying about the destruction runaway media consolidation has already caused — and are sharing their well-informed fears of what will happen if it’s allowed to get so much worse.

This is a call to action. No weak concessions will solve these problems. Backroom deals won’t safeguard competition, creativity or our increasingly fragile democracy. We need leaders who are willing to challenge corruption, coercion and capitulation. We need them to throw punches to the final bell.

Stay for the alternate endings

I’m pitching a new movie idea: It’s Spotlight meets Dark Waters meets Foxcatcher meets The Avengers. (Yes, all of these films also star Mark Ruffalo.)

It’s the story of a broad and diverse coalition of activists, growing popular opposition, and a few public servants and smart attorneys willing to fight for them. There’s a great twist at the end where they pull out an unexpected victory.

My working title: The People vs. Paramount. Or maybe better yet: The Claw Back.

Teamwork

Shining a light. Vanessa Maria Graber was on this week’s Counterspin, hosted by Janine Jackson of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), to talk about the storytellers covering Delaney Hall and other ICE detention centers, which she wrote about recently for Pressing Issues.

“Times like these make you wish for brave reporters who go to where the darkness is and shine a light,” Jackson says at the top of the show. “And we have them. They just aren’t at the traditional media you may have learned to look to.”

Golden opportunity. This week, we also got some encouraging news out of California, which released details about the state’s new $20 million Civic Media Program to support local newsrooms. The program includes a dedicated needs-based funding pool — representing roughly 13 percent of total funding — intended to support smaller newsrooms and outlets serving communities with the largest civic-information gaps.

That’s an improvement over previous proposals, but it’s still too small a slice to support emerging outlets and the newsrooms that reach the racially diverse, multilingual California communities that legacy media outlets have long underserved.

“The progress reflected in this program is significant, but so is the unfinished work ahead,” says Free Press Action’s Alex Frandsen. “As policymakers consider the future of public investment in local media, they need to both sustain existing news organizations and ensure that every community has access to the civic information it needs to thrive. Future efforts should continue shifting from a narrow focus on industry stabilization toward a broader commitment to meeting community-information needs.”