At a highly politicized time, Paramount Skydance’s pending acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery has become the equivalent of a bunker buster.
The merger is drawing fire from individuals and groups beyond the usual opponents like IATSE or other Hollywood labor unions. They include antiwar, anticapitalist group Codepink, which has injected anti-Israel rhetoric into its merger protests. The New York Post reported last week that some of these groups are funded by the likes of George Soros’ Open Society Foundation in a coordinated effort, citing unnamed sources “close to the merger.” Paramount Chief Legal Officer Makan Delrahim, meanwhile, alleged in an interview this month that people are “trying to inflict harm on this transaction really because of their antisemitic views.”
Delrahim’s claim of antisemitism as a theme of the anti-merger movement — the Ellisons are Jewish — is a rare instance when such a politically loaded topic is openly tied to a public business transaction.
By convention, the acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery by Paramount Skydance should be scrutinized through the lens of anti-trust law. But from the start the stakes have been unusually high and politically charged. Merger opponents allege that the Ellison family’s acquisition of so many media properties — CBS News, CNN and Larry Ellison’s stake in TikTok — threaten free speech and democratic society itself.
Meanwhile, Paramount insists it’s trying to save Hollywood, and that there are untoward political and racial motivations to kill its deal from far-left wing forces.
This is a stark contrast from prior mergers — media or otherwise — where the complaints tend to fall squarely on the business fundamentals. The most notable examples were the security concerns around TikTok, opposition to the Kroger-Albertsons merger over fears the combined company would raise grocery prices and Pfizer’s “tax inversion” deal with Allergan that would have gotten the pharmaceutical giant out of paying U.S. corporate taxes. The latter two were rejected, but they were all examples where there was bipartisan opposition against the mergers. On the media front, there was mostly quiet resignation when Walt Disney Co. acquired 21st Century Fox in 2019, and AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner in 2018 mostly left some puzzled looks.
But in the era of Trump 2.0, things are drastically different. With the tech scion and his ultra-wealthy father Larry Ellison deeply entrenched in the Trump camp, this was always going to be a hot-button issue.
On Friday, the Justice Department approved the $110 billion acquisition with no conditions. The speed of the approval and the fact that there were no strings attached plays into the perception that the Trump administration had its thumb on the scale and that the deal was always going to get rubber stamped, and quickly elicited a strong reaction.
“This is terrible news for every American who doesn’t want Trump-aligned billionaires to control what they watch and how much they pay,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) posted on X following the news.
A Wall Street Journal report on Monday noted that the DoJ’s senior leadership closed the investigation before career staffers could object to the deal, and that a team of lawyers there had leaned towards recommending a lawsuit challenging the deal.
“When we said this is what corruption looks like, this is what we meant,” the Block the Merger coalition, which consists of more than three dozen groups including American Economic Liberties Project, Future Film Coalition and the Democracy Defenders Fund, said on Monday.
Paramount declined to comment.
Fueling the fires
David Ellison’s track record since taking over Paramount has only fueled the narrative that the merger would be devastating to free expression in the media world.
There was the firing of Stephen Colbert, which happened before Skydance closed its acquisition of Paramount, but still left many skeptical that it was done for “purely financial” reasons. While Colbert isn’t a journalist, he was among the most prominently vocal critics of Trump.
In October, Ellison installed Bari Weiss, a right-leaning commentator with no TV news experience to run CBS News. Her rocky eight-month tenure has resulted in mass layoffs and a retooling of “CBS Evening News” that led to a drop in ratings. This month saw the fallout from her shake-up of “60 Minutes,” in which fired correspondent Scott Pelley alleged that he was asked to include falsehoods and bias in a politically sensitive story.
That doesn’t give anyone confidence in the state of news under Paramount, and has critics spooked the same thing will happen to CNN.
A Guardian report that David’s father, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, promised Trump that he would fire the anchors at CNN after the deal closes only added to those fears. Neither Larry Ellison or Paramount has commented on the story. Last month, the Freedom of the Press Foundation and Reporters Without Borders sent a letter to Paramount requesting to see internal documents to see if its leadership had promised favorable coverage in exchange for favorable regulatory treatment.
“The Paramount merger represents an existential threat to the free press, independent media, and free speech in this country and beyond, and should not be allowed to move forward,” read a letter from nine press freedom advocacy groups issued earlier this month.
On Sunday, Jane Fonda once again spoke out against the deal, appearing onstage at The Town Hall in New York City with her Committee for the First Amendment.
“You’re going to get a very thinned-out kind of culture. It’ll be flattened freedom of expression, independence and diverse news,” said Fonda, who was married to late CNN founder Ted Turner. “I have a personal stake in CNN. I don’t want to see it go that way.”
Then there’s the Trump factor. Larry Ellison is a significant financial contributor to Republicans like Tim Scott and Marco Rubio. And while he has not directly contributed to Trump’s campaigns, Ellison has hosted campaign fundraiser in 2020 at his estate and met regularly with the president last year, according to OpenSecrets.org.
David Ellison threw a private dinner for Trump in April at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington, where the president sat at a table with Ellison and Weiss. And the Paramount Skydance CEO showed up this weekend to the UFC Freedom 250 fight night event at the White House. (Paramount+ was the exclusive streaming partner.)
TheWrap was unable to verify the funding sources of some of the various progressive groups opposing the merger and lobbying state AGs to sue. The New York Post reported last week that the Block the Merger movement is “organized by a cadre of anti-American groups funded by ultra-leftists including George Soros, Pierre Omidyar and Chinese communist ally Neville Singham,” citing “sources close to the merger” but provided no documentation.
Singham, who lives in Shanghai and, according to the New York Times, works with the Chinese government media machine to push progressive causes mixed with Chinese government talking points, is married to Jodie Evans, a political activist and co-founder of Codepink.
At a Block the Merger-hosted “Main Street. vs. The Merger” town hall at Lumiere Music Hall in Los Angeles earlier this month, applause erupted after “Free Palestine” was mentioned, Wall Street Journal reporter Joe Flint posted on X.
“There is a subtle and not-so-subtle anti-Israel undertone to some comments at Main Street vs. The Merger event aimed at rallying the industry and adjacent businesses to block the Paramount-Warner merger,” he tweeted.
But the accusations could also be an attempt by Paramount and its pro-merger allies to muddy the water for the opposition group and raise questions about its motivations.
Representatives for the Future Film Coalition, American Economic Liberties Project and Democracy Defenders Fund, all part of Block the Merger, did not respond to requests for comment.
On Saturday, the American Economic Liberties Project hosted another “Main Street vs. The Merger” roundtable at the WGA East headquarters in New York featuring speakers like Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), former Federal Trade Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya and WGAE Executive Director Sam Wheeler.
Many of the questions focused on the fundamentals of the deal. But the wild swings in how this deal is being debated further complicate an already messy situation. Either way, the result is the same: two sides dug in for what is shaping up to be an ugly and bitter fight over the next several months.
