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Very Innovative: Here Come Thousands In CBS Paramount Merger Layoffs
from the enshittify-ALL-the-things! dept
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 to 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.
Our good friend Cory Doctorow wrote a whole new book about it.
After paying Trump his $16 million bribe, Trump’s billionaire friends, the Ellisons, recently finalized their $8 billion merger of CBS and Paramount over the summer. And, like clockwork, the new, bigger, shittier company is getting close to laying off thousands of employees:
“Major job cuts have been expected even before the Skydance Media-Paramount Global deal closed, as part of Ellison and his team’s goal of slashing upwards of $2 billion in costs. Previously, the company had been targeting layoffs by early November. The new round of cuts is expected to eliminate around 2,000 jobs in the U.S., with additional layoffs internationally.
This new round of layoffs comes after CBS/Paramount fired around 3.5% of its staff back in June in preparation for the merger. And it comes as the Ellisons are throwing around money in media like never before, including $7.7 billion to grab MMA rights, a whopping $150 million for Bari Weiss’ shitty right wing blog, and billions more to nab partial control of TikTok.
I’m sure the longstanding employees at CBS and Paramount are particularly thrilled about the Ellisons overpaying for Bari Weiss’ blog, then promoting a woman with no real experience in journalism to be the new head of CBS News. As we’ve noted, that effort to bring even more right wing trolling and billionaire-ass kissing to a fairly saturated media market is likely to be a major headache.
The Ellisons, in their bid to dominate U.S. media, also have their eye on acquiring whatever is left of Time Warner, which is expected to cost them somewhere around $60 billion. Historically these kinds of media domination plays never end well (just ask AT&T), so you can expect significantly more layoffs as this weird combination of fail-upward brunchlords and nepobabies try to navigate a tumultuous market they don’t really understand.
It used to be that companies planning for harmful, pointless mergers had to at least make a fleeting effort to justify the pointless consolidation. But during the Trump era all you have to do is kiss the idiot king’s ring and any and all pointless consolidation gets the green light. All of the costs of those harms will, of course, be borne by consumers and employees in the months and years to come.
And because we’ve let our journalism and media consolidate in the hands of just a few billionaires — the media’s coverage of itself generally doesn’t honestly reflect any of this, propping up billionaire efforts to keep making the same mistakes over and over again for some tax cuts and a temporary stock boost.
Filed Under: consolidation, debt, enshittification, journalism, layoffs, media, mergers, prices, trump
Companies: cbs, cbs news, paramount
Comments on “Very Innovative: Here Come Thousands In CBS Paramount Merger Layoffs”
The layoffs? It’s the fault of the raising unemployment rate.
The unemployment? It’s the fault of raising tariffs.
The tariffs? It’s the fault of the shutdown.
The shutdown? It’s the fault of Democrats.
Damn Democrats.
Looks like I’m about to start saving a lot of money by not bothering with YouTube TV and other TV streaming services pushing out nothing but right wing Ellison required trash. I’ll just stick to streaming past TV shows and movies that I enjoy and not give my money to companies propping up the enshittification of TV and media in this country.
Late-stage capitalism is gonna late-stage capitalism. Trump is just adding kerosene to the fire.
I suspect the intended headline was “Very Innovative: Here Come Thousands OF CBS Paramount Merger Layoffs”?
Look, I have no problem with the idea of you using “AI” to help with writing articles. But if that’s what you’re going to do, then you need to change something, because there are more and more issues showing up.
It’s not that bad to have the occasional bizarre wording in an article, but when “hallucinations” show up in articles, and in this one you can’t even keep the headline in order, it’s a problem. Changing how you use “AI”, or changing how you edit when you use it, is probably necessary if you want to keep using it.
Re:
Nice try; no cigar.