States Cave to Illegal Paramount Megadeal – The Tuesday AM Quickie 9/22/26
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ON THE SHOW TODAY
9/22: Sam and Emma are in the studio today. Joining them in-person will be Matt Duss, executive vice president at the Center for International Policy and co-host of The Un-Diplomatic Podcast. Also on the show will be Alvaro Bedoya, senior adviser at the American Economic Liberties Project and former commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission, on to discuss the Paramount merger with Warner Brothers.
READ ALL ABOUT IT
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Today you’ll read about the deals Trump is making with dozens of countries to take deportees from the US; how the Federal Reserve wants more unemployment; and how frequently cops have gone to a Silicon Valley “hacker house.”
THE BIG NEWS
States Cave to Illegal Paramount Megadeal
A group of 12 state attorneys general gave up their fight to prevent the illegal $110 billion merger between Paramount and Warner Bros. and came to a settlement yesterday, according to NBC News and the Wall Street Journal.
The deal paves the way for 43-year-old Trump ally David Ellison to control a giant monopoly, something that is not supposed to exist under US antitrust laws. It would include Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros. Pictures, the streaming platforms Paramount+ and HBO Max, CBS and CNN. As Bob Kuttner pointed out in the Prospect yesterday, the deal “would slash jobs and reduce competition throughout several industries. David Ellison has already destroyed the independence of CBS News. This would allow him to destroy CNN as well.”
California AG Rob Bonta led the states in their challenge to the merger earlier this summer, when they argued in a July 13 complaint that it would “extinguish competition” in Hollywood. Just seven days later, a judge issued a temporary retraining order against the merger and set an antitrust trial for March, a sign that they had a strong case. But then the Ellison family threatened to relocate Paramount as soon as Oct. 1 to another state, possibly Tennessee, which was a scare tactic designed to force Bonta to make a deal.
Under the settlement terms, company executives pledged to release a minimum number of films each year or pay a penalty fee. They pledged to establish “independent editorial boards” to oversee CNN and CBS News operations. And they pledged to invest more than $1 billion in California. In a note to members, the Writers Guild of America, which also sued to stop the merger, said that the terms of the settlement fail to adequately protect workers: “The only way to fully mitigate the harms of this merger would be to preclude the combination of Paramount and Warner’s production entities and streaming services—in other words, the merger should not go through.”