Lawyers for Warner Bros. Discovery recently briefed top executives on the risks of an antitrust suit getting filed by some lefty state attorneys general to upend the $80 billion WBD sale to Paramount Skydance — and the operative word is “politics,” The Post has learned.
The case is a dud on antitrust grounds, they said. There’s very little overlap when you combine these companies. Where overlap exists (in terms of two big studios, streaming services), consumer-pricing concerns are negligible given the vast changes going on in the media business.
“So why the hell do we have to worry about this?” came the obvious question from one senior executive during the sit-down.
The answer, the lawyers said, is “politics.”
Indeed, that should be the headline when the lawsuit is filed by a coterie of ambitious Democrats, as is expected sometime in the coming days. But it won’t be front and center of the coverage, of course, because most reporters genuflect to the left even when it’s absurd to do so.
Also the politics in this case will be too hard to resist — for the media and for the pols behind it — since it involves President Trump, who is friends with the money behind the deal, Paramount’s David Ellison and his longtime, Trump-backing father, Larry Ellison.
Months of Trump bashing, conjuring images of the president controlling news reporting from CBS (a Paramount property) and CNN (WBD’s cable news network) is too much to resist for that ambitious pol, California AG Rob Bonta, who will likely be leading the charge alongside another equally lefty ambitious pol, New York AG Tish James.
It’s certainly not the merits of an antitrust case, which according to every lawyer I speak to is weak on so many legal metrics that it’s almost hard to imagine how a court just won’t throw it out.
Where it’s strong is in the sense that it helps whip up the Democratic base as the midterms approach. Bonta might just get his name in the papers enough to make him governor some day. Who knows what James has in mind, though she’s never missed a chance to screw with Trump to score cheap political points.
Bonta, meanwhile, will be channeling the Hollywood community, morons like actor Mark Ruffalo who think the merger might somehow stifle left-wing voices; if it doesn’t go through somehow they will get more work at higher pay from two companies caught in big media’s erosion. Yes, they’re dumb. But Ruffalo & Co. have a voice where it matters in this drama, and that’s Hollywood, which Bonta needs to finance his political future.
Hollywood hate for Don
And Hollywood, like the media, loves bashing Trump, and three months of it (the approximate time lawyers for WBD believe it will take for this thing to wind its way through the legal process) is the gift that keeps on giving.
As we all know, Trump dominates in places where his presence is real and not so real. Paramount Skydance is run by the Ellison family. For partisan Dems used to controlling the nation’s cultural institutions, having a Trump supporter at the helm of such a swath of media and entertainment (news plus the Paramount and Warner Bros. studios) must be like holding a cross to a vampire.
The president also likes to throw his weight around when it comes to the media that has long enjoyed skewing its coverage against him, and are now getting payback. It’s why so many caved to those lawsuits he brought (e.g., over the “60 Minutes” interview of Kamala Harris) in order to get his regulatory blessing on various corporate financings. Recall how Trump’s DOJ Antitrust Division seemed to check all the boxes to approve Ellison’s purchase of WBD in record time.
But the last I checked, Trump — who has about 2½ years left in his presidency — isn’t whom the Ellisons will ultimately be answering to if and when these two companies are merged. They have a legal, “fiduciary” responsibility to shareholders, and that is to make money. If you’re worried that they will take “60 Minutes” to the right, suppose that’s what consumers want? If they do and fail, they will have to move its programming back to the left, if that’s what helps them make money and create that all-important “shareholder value.”
In many ways, the political argument fails even worse than the antitrust argument, but that’s only if you’re being intellectually honest. I’m not counting on Bonta or James on that last point.
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