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
Last week Netflix announced a $82.7 billion acquisition of Warner Brothers, after elbowing out rival acquisition bids (for now) by Comcast/NBC and Paramount/CBS. But as we noted then, the deal still needs regulatory approval from Trump, who has already stated several times that he’d prefer it if his billionaire bestie new owner of CBS, Larry Ellison, comes away victorious. And the Ellison family, via Paramount (with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Saudi money), have made a hostile takeover bid.
Over the weekend, Trump was again asked about the deal, and again hinted at the fact that he’ll be the one who decides who can buy Warner Brothers (this is, in case it’s not clear, not how regulatory autonomy is supposed to work):
“speaking with reporters on the red carpet of the Kennedy Center Honors event in Washington, D.C., said Netflix’s deal to acquire Warner Bros. studios and streaming business will require a review, and said, “I’ll be involved in that decision.”
Despite the fact the Paramount hostile takeover bid features his own son in law, the Saudis, and a billionaire bestie who shares his authoritarian policies, Trump and right wing media outlets like the Wall Street Journal are desperately trying to pretend this is going to be a neutral process:
“According to Trump, Sarandos visited the Oval Office last week. The Netflix exec is “a fantastic man,” the president said. “I have a lot of respect for him, but it’s a lot of market share.”
Trump also said of Sarandos, “He’s a great person… He’s got a lot of interesting things happening aside from what you’re talking about, but it is a big market share. There’s no question about it. It could be a problem.”
But despite the claims by useful idiots like Matt Stoller, that was never true; the administration has caused generational harm to consumer protection and corporate oversight. And the efforts to “rein in big tech” wound up with tech executives putting their full support behind an authoritarian government and behaving worse than ever.
Of course, here the only thing Trump is interested in is in helping his billionaire ally further dominate media. And if he can’t have that, he’ll be satisfied with Netflix executives debasing themselves repeatedly if they want DOJ approval of the pending merger. Trump’s FCC and DOJ have repeatedly violated the law and abused the merger process to curry favor from feckless companies (see: Verizon, CBS).
As noted, Paramount is now angling to appeal directly to investors with a a hostile takeover bid. With Netflix’s deep pockets and a $5.8 billion breakup fee on the line, that fight is certain to be an extended one, even with the personal help of Trump and his corrupted courts. It could, potentially, even outlast the Trump administration itself.
While the Netflix acquisition likely will be bad for markets or consumers (consolidation typically is), the alternatives (Comcast and Larry Ellison) would be significantly worse, with likely significantly more layoffs. Still, there’s absolutely nothing the Trump administration does that’s in good faith, and the administration’s sudden concern with “market power” are as hollow as a dollars store chocolate Easter bunny.
That, of course, won’t be detailed by the consolidated media outlets covering this deal journalistically, who’ll play along with Trump happily if it means getting their own shitty mergers approved.
Last week Netflix announced a $82.7 billion acquisition of Warner Brothers, elbowing out rival acquisition bids (for now) by Comcast/NBC and Paramount/CBS. But the deal still needs regulatory approval from Trump, who has already stated several times that he’d prefer it if his bestie new owner of CBS, right wing billionaire Larry Ellison, comes away victorious.
“The tender offer is for $30 per share, all in cash, a contrast to Netflix’s offer, which is a $27.75 mix of cash and some stock, with shareholders also getting a stake in the linear TV spinout. Netflix is also only buying WBD’s streaming and studios business, while Paramount is pursuing the whole company, making for a complicated comparison, depending on how you value the linear TV business.”
Curiously omitted from Paramount’s press release is the fact that the $108 billion bid includes money from Jared Kushner’s private equity firm Affinity Partners, as well as funding from Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi and Qatar. This is pretty clearly part of the Ellison family bid to dominate the entirety of U.S. media after their successful acquisition of CBS and Paramount.
If that’s not clear enough: one of the president’s top billionaire donors and son in law are working alongside Saudi Arabia and other foreign autocrats in a bid to dominate the shitty remnants of U.S. mainstream media. It sounds hyperbolic and alarmist when you say it out loud, but it’s no less true.
To be clear, any media consolidation, including a Netflix acquisition of Warner Brothers, is likely bad for the sector, consumers, and labor. The huge debt accumulated from these deals always involves a ton of layoffs, corner cutting, quality erosion, and price hikes as the remaining company tries to dig out from under the debt while still providing Wall Street its demand for impossible quarterly growth.
The correct antitrust play here, which wouldn’t happen under either U.S. political party (but is even less likely under Trump), is to put an end entirely to harmful, pointless consolidation to protect labor, consumers, and market competition, and to viciously protect independent, diverse media ownership.
But in a country too corrupt to engage with serious antitrust enforcement, of the three bidders for Warner Brothers, Netflix is likely the least bad option.
They’ve historically been the least lodged up the Trump administration’s colon (though that will change as they curry favor for regulatory approval), and their lack of as many redundant business units means there theoretically should be fewer layoffs.
Ellison ownership of CBS, CNN, HBO, Warner Brothers, Paramount, and a part of TikTok could prove to be significantly more problematic. And not just because of consolidation. The Trump administration and Ellison clearly want to build an authoritarian-friendly propaganda machine propped up by its infotainment arm. Think Fox News and Fox, but somehow worse and even less ethical.
They’re following the media domination playbook seen in other authoritarian-led countries like Hungary. Consolidate and acquire everything, and steadily replace already shaky journalism with gibberish and agitprop ahead of efforts to permanently retain power. The only upside here is that many of these zealots and nepobabies may not have the competency to pull it off.
The Netflix Warner Brothers bid includes a $5.8 billion breakup fee, suggesting that Netflix is likely to fight tooth and nail against any hostile takeover bids or any sort of strange, pro-Ellison shenanigans by the Trump administration and its Saudi allies (which as we noted last week, were going to be all but guaranteed in the months and weeks to come).
The hostile takeover bid guarantees months or years of legal fighting. But it also guarantees months of performative bullshit by Trump, Ellison, Kushner and right wing media about how Netflix ownership would be a woke antitrust nightmare, but letting the Saudis, Larry Ellison and his nepobaby son David dominate U.S. media would be a delightful, populist spritzer.
Expect a lot of shitty establishment corporate journalism on this that normalizes and helps prop up the phony gambit by Ellison and Trump. And a lot of kayfabe from all of these authoritarian-enabling assholes, suddenly pretending they appreciate “robust regulatory scrutiny” and a “healthy debate on market impacts based on the merits,” despite having a violent disdain for both.
But if Netflix truly digs in and doubles down (again probably the best of a bunch of bad options), it’s a fight that could outlast an unhealthy Trump and his increasingly unpopular administration entirely.
“Senior White House officials recently discussed antitrust concerns surrounding Netflix’s interest in acquiring the Warner Bros. studio and the HBO Max streaming service – raising doubts whether such a deal would give Netflix too much power over Hollywood, The Post has learned.
The high-level meeting that took place about 10 days ago hasn’t been previously reported. Several White House officials also suggested during the sitdown that a broader investigation is necessary focusing on Netflix’s market power, a government official who attended the confab said.”
Most media coverage of these rival bids won’t have the backbone to make it clear that while Netflix ownership of Warner Brothers would most certainly probably be bad for the market, the Trump administration doesn’t actually care about that. It cares about helping billionaire allies and punishing “woke” companies that platform too many minorities and gay people for their liking.
Netflix ownership of HBO likely wouldn’t be good for the brand, but it’s not like Warner Brothers Discovery or AT&T were good for the brand (or market health) either. David Zaslav has been notorious for mismanaging the home of CNN and HBO. And Netflix, as the New York Times noted last September, is possibly the least overtly compromised of the three companies when it comes to kissing MAGA ass (which isn’t saying much, and certainly isn’t guaranteed to last).
In this case, the options here are all bad. The other bidders for Warner Brothers, HBO, and CNN include Comcast (NBC Universal) and Larry Ellison (CBS). Neither would be good stewards of the HBO brand, clearly don’t give much of a shit about healthy market competition, and have shown they’re more than willing to throw any remaining principles in the trash to curry favor with the administration.
The best and correct play for a government that actually cared about antitrust reform, consumer protection, and healthy markets would be no additional consolidation at all. But good faith media reform is not, and has never been, what the Trump administration is after.
Trump’s right wing billionaire friend Larry Ellison (and his nepobaby son, David) recently acquired CBS and likely co-ownership of TikTok. Like Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, the goal isn’t really subtle: rich, thin-skinned right wingers want to own the entirety of U.S. new and old media, then convert it into a giant propaganda and lazy infotainment bullhorn that blows smoke up their asses.
While Ellison has some competing suitors with names like Comcast NBC Universal and Netflix, the winning bidder will need approval from the Trump DOJ and FCC. Knowing that they likely have a distinct tactical advantage via corruption, Ellison and Trump appear to be already measuring the drapes, discussing programming changes (and CNN hirings and firings) that will please the president:
“Ellison often speaks to connections at the White House and in at least one phone call engaged in a dialogue about possibly axing some of the CNN hosts whom Donald Trump is said to loathe, including Erin Burnett and Brianna Keilar, the people said.”
The great irony is these networks that offend Trump weren’t exactly what you’d call bastions of hard-nosed journalism to begin with. Under the ownership of Trump fan David Zaslav, CNN is already know for flinging softball questions at Trump authoritarians, failing to challenge obvious lies on air, and generally airing a sort of safe, infotainment-centered pseudo-journalism.
But even that’s too much critical thinking for America’s thinnest skinned billionaires.
Ellison is already hard at work turning whatever was left of CNN into a right wing propaganda mill. If he acquires ownership of TikTok and CNN as well; the potential exists to create a propaganda empire that’s arguably larger and much worse than Fox News.
But given the recent failures of efforts to dominate U.S. media through consolidation (again, see AT&T) it’s also equally likely that this weird assortment of trolls and nepobabies simply creates a mountain of unsustainable debt and hubris crushed by the weight of its own incompetent ambition.
That has involved chasing pointless “growth for growth’s sake” megamergers, imposing bottomless price hikes and new annoying restrictions on customers, undermining labor, and cutting corners on product quality in a bid to give Wall Street that sweet, impossible, unlimited, quarterly growth it demands.
And the price hikes show absolutely no sign of slowing down. All of the major streaming companies have been raising prices like it’s going out of fashion. Techspot broke it down nicely in visual form:
Extremely innovative.
Paramount was the latest to boost streaming prices this month as the company tries to recoup debt created by its massive recent acquisition of CBS and Bari Weiss’ weird, overvalued right wing troll blog. In addition to price hikes, companies are intent on just generally being more annoying and making their services less enjoyable to use, including crackdowns on family member password sharing.
And there’s a weird, ignorant tone deafness that’s growing among media executives, as we saw back in September when Warner Brothers CEO David Zaslov complained about how modern TV often provides a “a terrible consumer experience,” while with the very next breath lamenting that there’s too much competition and his companies haven’t imposed enough new price hikes on customers.
King Trump’s destruction of whatever is left of regulatory oversight and media consolidation limits means there’s going to be another huge new wave of pointless shitty mergers across media (likely involving Comcast/NBC, Warner Brothers, and Paramount). That means more debt from pointless deals that companies try to recoup via price hikes imposed on already annoyed customers.
As we saw with traditional cable, eventually this consolidation scheme falls apart as consumers flee to alternative, cheaper (or free) entertainment options, including piracy.
At that point, executives inevitably blame absolutely everything but their own behavior (generational entitlement! inflation! a stagnant housing market!) and the cycle begins anew, with nobody in any position of power having any financial incentive to learn absolutely anything from experience.
