News came today that Warner Bros Discovery decided that Paramount-Skydance’s acquisition bid ($111 billion) to acquire the company was superior to that from Netflix ($82.7 billion). WBD told Netflix it had four days to up its offer. Little more than an hour later Netflix said it didn’t need four days. They were bowing out. The deal was no longer economic at the price Paramount was offering. An additional fact is that Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos was at the White House today while these things were happening, apparently trying to see whether Netflix had the thing any company needs for a merger in 2026: the personal approval of Donald Trump. Apparently they didn’t have it. That’s the autocracy playbook. And at the federal level that’s the game we’re playing right now.
We’ve discussed this deal many times over the last year. As a site interested in the business of news and the future of democracy we’ve been mostly focused on the fate of CNN, which is owned by WBD. Today’s events make it highly, highly likely that CNN will come under the control of the Ellison family, ‘eldest son’ David specifically, who has already put Bari Weiss in charge of CBS News. This is an oligarch-owned effort to build a pro-Trump state media behemoth with the addition of money from the Gulf princes and other members of the global Team Autocracy.
It’s probably the end of CNN as we know it, though perhaps the denouement will take a while.
At the same time, if we set aside the anti-democracy parts of the deal, it doesn’t look like a great business deal. It’s basically a bet on the dying medium of cable. There’s more in WBD than that. But that’s a whole lot of it. And Paramount-Skydance is also paying quite a lot of money for it. I feel much more equipped to make a judgment about the democracy side of this than the business side. But my publishing and media knowledge, such as it is, makes me skeptical of the business logic. And to the extent markets are making a judgment they seem to agree. We also need to bear in mind that the Ellisons have no real experience in the media space at all. And this is all being quarterbacked by Larry Ellison’s doofus son, David. It really looks like Succession, only dumber. With the idea that Donald Trump’s backing, which is golden for forcing mergers on Trump’s terms, will make the whole thing work in business terms. They seem to be making big bets on Trumpism being forever. So I wouldn’t assume they know things you or I don’t.
Of course, we can’t actually set the democracy parts of this aside. CNN being delivered into the maw of the Trumpist/MAGA beast is a very bad thing for independent media and news. Very bad.
To me it’s sad inasmuch as CNN was a true pioneer in digital news, in its heyday it was a kind of updated version of a global news service as BBC had once been. But things change. Here’s a look at CNN brass trying to put the best face on things and not jump to conclusions. But there’s a good chance Bari Weiss, or someone working at her behest, will be running the place by the end of the year. And I would caution against thinking – as Trump and the Ellisons seem to – that you can simply Foxify CNN or other news organizations and have the same audience keep watching. We’re seeing what happens to CBS. Audience is leaving. It’s being run into the ground. Sad for the CBS News legacy. But that audience will go elsewhere.
We should have some confidence that billionaires’ and Gulf princes’ ability to simply buy up all the news organizations is not perhaps as rock solid a plan as people seem to think. Audience can move. In our current reality there’s MAGA that wants Fox and the various Trump/state news service channels and there’s the anti-Trump opposition that leans heavily on actual news sites and channels. I don’t think that will change. Audiences will migrate. So yes, this is a bad, bad development. A major reverse. But it’s far from the end of the story for free media in the United States. It’s part of the Late Trumpism corruption. That’s my take.
