Antitrust suits aren’t supposed to be about politics, and yet that’s what’s happening of late, whether it’s Trump’s attempt during his first term to block AT&T from buying Time Warner, or California AG Rob Bonta looking to thwart Paramount’s purchase of TW’s successor, Warner Bros. Discovery.
It’s an odd way to run an economy and doesn’t do anyone any good.
That includes the pols themselves who end up looking foolish and weak when they ultimately lose.
It’s also a clunker for the supposed beneficiaries of these lawsuits, the American people.
The reasons that Warner has landed in the middle of this bipartisan folly are instructive.
The company simply isn’t cutting it on its profit-and-loss statement.
Never has.
That’s why AT&T — after beating back Trump’s attempt to kill its deal to buy the Hollywood studio that also owns HBO and CNN — unloaded the whole thing in a transaction that created Warner Bros. Discovery.
That’s also why WBD CEO David Zaslav, for all his managerial excellence in cutting overhead and achieving major success in motion pictures, was forced to unload the whole thing to Paramount Skydance, another new conglomerate run by indie producer David Ellison and his father, tech tycoon and Trump pal Larry Ellison.
Recall: Trump tried to argue that AT&T coupled with Warner Media — HBO, CNN, various cable channels and a streaming service — would be a monopoly that hurt consumers, ignoring that it was barely competitive against Big Tech and streaming giant Netflix. His real enemy was CNN, which is why the courts saw through his antitrust arguments and approved the deal.
Odd that Bonta, a lefty pol no one had ever heard of until now, tried to spin that he had uncovered a monopoly when in reality he was just rehashing the nonsense that Trump 1 tried to pass off.
AT&T couldn’t make a business with Warner Media and the latest iteration of Warner Bros. Discovery didn’t work, either.
Scoring a few points
Bonta enjoyed a few months of nonstop publicity arguing that these two middling companies were going to rule the media world with a monopoly.
Meanwhile, EU and UK regulators are approving the merger as swiftly as the Trump administration, despite their distaste for the latter.
Bonta’s bigger goal, of course, was to score points with the far left — an ever growing contingent of his party — by pointing out how Larry Ellison is besties with Trump and crowing that he wasn’t about to let the Ellisons’ media giant rule the airwaves with Trump.
But politics has its limits, as Trump and now Bonta have discovered.
As my old man would say, Bonta’s fatal mistake was believing his own bulls–t.
For weeks he celebrated on X how lefty activist actor Mark Ruffalo inspired the lawsuit, scrambling to earn more points with his progressive base.
Ruffalo, it should be noted, spends more time these days opining about antitrust law than doing movies.
Like Bonta, he couldn’t keep his mouth shut.
This may have been the deciding factor, my sources say, in the AG’s decision to agree to settlement terms so favorable to Ellison that it’s hard to believe that Bonta brought the case in the first place.
Ruffalo spewed lots of garbage about these companies having the power to upend the media ecosystem and eclipse Netflix and Big Tech.
But his bizarre and unsubstantiated assertions that Larry Ellison, who is Jewish, aided “genocide” in Gaza because Larry’s software giant Oracle provides technology to Israel was a bridge too far.
Note that California’s Democratic establishment began demanding that Bonta settle as soon as David Ellison began threatening to leave the state and take 50,000 jobs with him.
Also notice the tide turning after Ruffalo’s noxious Ellison-Israel comment.
Jewish groups condemned the blather publicly, but behind the scenes Hollywood’s significant pro-Israel contingent told Gov. Gavin Newsom, his likely successor Xavier Becerra and LA Mayor Karen Bass that they weren’t happy with a rising star in the party taking cues from the likes of Ruffalo.
Money talks in this instance, and the Hollywood establishment was threatening to withhold it.
For the state’s political apparatus, it was a no brainer.
Did they really want a state AG with weird, half-baked ideas about antitrust, Israel and who knows what else upending the media business?
As one person involved in AG’s deliberations put it: “I can’t tell you how much that Ruffalo statement hurt Bonta’s effort.”
Bonta, meanwhile, got his 15 minutes of fame but little more.
He walked away with a settlement that included none of the structural changes he was demanding, and a truce underscoring his legal and political fecklessness that won’t play well if and when he tries to run for governor.
A victory for common sense, you might say.
Let’s hope it’s also a wakeup call for the antitrust enforcers while our monthly bills for Netflix, Amazon Prime and YouTube continue to go through the roof.
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