Gavin Newsom sells out to the Ellisons

The now all-but-certain merger between Paramount and Warner Brothers is going to be a disaster, that's for certain. And it probably should be noted that the reason it's going to happen seems primarily to be because California's Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, inserted himself into "negotiations" between Paramount and the state attorneys general trying to block the merger.

Golden State Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has been advocating for a settlement publicly over the past month, was in “constant contact” with the parties as talks ebbed and flowed over the weekend. Newsom, a likely 2028 presidential candidate, is very much aware of the harsh backlash to a potential settlement that erupted among Congressional Democrats, A-listers like Mark Ruffalo and others as deal talks accelerated. In light of that, the governor is said to have cautioned both sides to find terms that addressed “core concerns” for Hollywood and the state.

“It’s jobs, job, jobs, that’s what this all about,” a source close to power players in Sacramento told Deadline.

Newsom seems to be the reason the very strong antitrust case for blocking the merger between the two media giants fizzled into a "settlement" that addresses none of the expected damage. Paramount CEO David Ellison, the Trump-backing son of Trump-backing Oracle owner Larry Ellison, threatened to move Paramount and its moviemaking out of California if the state didn't drop its antitrust concerns like the Trump administration so eagerly did; this was a very scary threat to someone like Newsom, who began courting the far-right after Democrats ignored his previous presidential campaign.

You'll recognize the "well then maybe I'll take mah jobs and leave" ploy as the go-to of every rich sports team owner when they want a city to build a new stadium with more luxurious luxury boxes. You'll also recognize it as the ploy Elon Musk used when Elon Musk tried to keep his California factories open during the peak of the Covid-19 crisis only to have California tell him no.

Whether Newsom truly believed that the Ellison oligarchy would close down their Hollywood operations to move to the kingdom of South Musk, Texas is unclear. It's perhaps more likely that Newsom, who has been courting the Silicon Valley oligarchs with every fiber of his being in the hopes that if normie Dems don't want him to be president, he can make up the difference with mountains of "libertarian" techbro money, saw an opportunity to do a super-big and super-expensive favor for Larry and David Ellison with the hopes that they would return the favor later.

Just to make things clear, Gavin Newsom will never be president. It will never happen. The man has proved himself a snake, his attempts to cozy up to the right immediately after Democratic voters told him to pound sand were Very Damn Noticeable, and whenever he attempts to cater to a national crowd he projects that same unsettling vibe that Marco Rubio, Ron DeSantis, Ted Cruz and Matt Gaetz became infamous for, the one that candidates can't shake once they become known for it.

You know the one. The one that makes you think, just based on the way the person talks and smiles and responds to conflict: "This person would sell out their own mother to rise up the political ranks." Or: "This person has no beliefs of their own, only a constantly-changing list of beliefs that they think they need to have for the current election cycle." Or: "This person may keep kidnapped orphans in their basement, I know I have no reason to think so but if any elected politicians secretly keep kidnapped orphans in their basements he is one of the ten people that immediately come to mind as a suspect."

No, I don't think he'll switch parties. I do consider him a likely partner in whatever new fresh hells the techbro crowd next wants to unleash on the rest of us, thought, because the man needs a financial base of support and is far too flighty to be able to rely on small donors.

Oh, for the record: Very few California homes have basements. The ground out here is too hard, the housing stock is too new, and we're all really averse to digging. Out here the rich bastards who need to stash kidnapped orphans somewhere, possibly for the purpose of harvesting their blood, have to stash them on their yachts.

Notice how the ultrarich have been building bigger and bigger yachts, these last two decades? Yeah. I know. I'm suspicious too.

Back to the Paramount "settlement" now being foisted on us: It's so weak as to be humiliating for all involved. Rather than having to sell off CNN, the deal calls only for a quasi-independent "board" that will supposedly guard the news outlet against Ellison family partisanship. But we've seen previous "boards" established for similar reasons and they've all been abject failures because, surprise, companies know that they can simply ignore the watchdogs and nobody will do a damn thing about it.

To combat the fear that a combined Paramount-Warner behemoth will institute mass layoffs and end up producing far less actual media, the deal makes Paramount promise to release at least 30 films per year to theaters or face multimillion dollar fines.

At least four of the films must be independent films and 20% must be blockbusters. (The former was left undefined, while the latter was specified as films costing at least $50 million.)

Oh, thank goodness. That'll fix everything. I thought creating yet another megacorporation capable of manipulating its entire market space, bullying government into doing anything it wants, and seemingly hand-crafted to be a tool for promoting the propaganda of its anti-democratic controlling owners was going to be a bad thing, but promising to release four blockbusters every year? Well now I'm too damn excited to care about what happens to America as a result.

No, wait, I just remembered my concerns again. Each of the promises laid out in this agreement is precisely the sort of promises that we've seen companies violate time and time again. Gleefully, in fact. The "board" protecting CNN from propagandistic meddling will be staffed up with company cronies; when critics object they will be politely told to Get Bent. The promises to protect jobs are utterly irrelevant; the whole point of mega-mergers like this one is to produce greater "efficiencies" by merging two teams into one team and laying off everyone in now-"duplicated" positions. Promises about how many movies are made are irrelevant if it costs less to pay the fines than produce the movies, or if the "movies" consist mostly of pumped-out AI-heavy dreck that cost even less than the fines would have.

And companies can and always do get out of their promises within a few years by announcing that "the market has changed" or "our finances require it" and nothing ever, ever, ever happens to prevent them from doing it.

When the deal is finalized, one company—no, one family—will control Paramount Pictures, Warner Brothers, HBO, CBS, CNN, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, DC Studios, New Line, Miramax, and a panoply of other channels. A good chunk of everything you might watch will be in the hands of one fabulously rich pro-Trump jackass who has already both backed and benefited from Trump's grotesque corruptions.

And even given all that, there's also another very special problem with this particular media merger: It's being bankrolled by world dictatorships.

The FCC said Middle Eastern investors could own about 85% of the equity in Paramount after the deal closed, including 15.1% for the Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund. Paramount said sovereign wealth funds would own 38.5% after the deal closed.

Democratic FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez said on Thursday, "The FCC just let some of the most repressive governments in the world indirectly control nearly all of a combined ​Paramount-Warner Bros. An investment this large in one of America's biggest media companies doesn't just buy equity, it secures influence over what gets said and what gets made."

Oh. Goodie. You might recall an enormous recent brouhaha when the U.S. government accused the Chinese government of using TikTok to maybe possibly spy on Americans(?), a showy fight that in the end seemed to be designed to push TikTok ownership into the hands of, yes, Larry Ellison.

Now the Trump administration is waiving the designated limits for foreign ownership of major media companies rather than enforce them. It's a complete reversal, and one that once again just happens to benefit ... the Ellisons.

Yes, it's crooked. Of course it's crooked. It's always crooked. Trump's FCC hacks waved away foreign ownership limits with assurances that the foreign investors would not be "voting" shareholders, but that hardly makes a difference. If Larry and David Ellison are deeply in hoc to foreign dictatorships in their new media venture, does anyone seriously believe those foreign investors will not be leaning on every Paramount-owned property to restrict reporting on and bend media depictions of those kingdoms?

C'mon now.

The thing of it is, we know that the Paramount-Warner merger is going to end in failure. We know it. That's the point of modern mergers like this one; they're a way for two companies helmed by incompetent feckless screwups to refinance themselves out of the messes they've gotten themselves into, allowing the prime incompetents to bow out with golden parachutes while creating an even more debt-riddled and unstable monster for the next crew to deal with. Both CBS and CNN are already in shambles due to mismanagement; the mismanagement of Warner under David Zaslav was the talk of the industry before he even doled out half of the screw-ups he's now responsible for.

Zaslav will be walking away with a half a billion dollars for his part in this disaster, you'll be happy to know. That was the game plan from the beginning.

From Karl Bode:

As somebody who has covered media and telecom mergers professionally for a quarter century I know all too well what happens next.

For the next year Paramount will try and pretend that the deal is busy delivering amazing synergies for Hollywood. But it won't be long before you see people fired by the thousands in order to "improve the consumer experience" and create "operational efficiencies."

Whatever their streaming video service looks like (Paramount Plus HBO Max Extreme!) will see endless price hikes for content that slowly devolves into a sad platter of lowest-common-denominator Batman and Harry Potter AI slop, hosted on an app that steadily and curiously loses features and ramps up annoying restrictions (see: enshittification).

At which point all of the folks that pushed for the merger – and demanded that the AGs strike a settlement, will be absolutely nowhere to be found.

So the cycle continues. Republicans and their corporate allies push hungrily to dominate the entirely of media in order to wage a propaganda war on the public, while feckless establishment Democrats, also in dutiful sway to their corporate overlords, demonstrate that they're purely a decorative political party that is in no way structurally load bearing or interested in fighting the hard battles.

I can't argue against any of that. The major problem here is that this nation's largest companies have already crossed the lines that allow them to be more powerful than their government regulators; they can dictate what laws they do or don't have to follow by threatening the politicians that oversee them with election-rigging quantities of cash, can threaten state legislatures by promising to move if they can't keep their factories open during a national health crisis, and can simply buy, outright, whatever media coverage of their own actions they want to put out.

To bow down and let those companies get even larger than that is insanity, and yet here we are. Until we start eating these people for sustenance it's not likely to get much better.

The good news of this Paramount merger, if there is any, is that it is unusual among big-company mergers in that the combined entity still produces nothing that anyone actually needs.

Is it a crisis if CNN collapses? A shame, maybe, but not a crisis; the network is already kayfabe for fascists as it is.

The world will not crumble if Star Trek ceases to be; there is no new Batman movie that needs to be made, not really, and certainly not if the new moral message of Batman movies is that democracies are bad and wealth-based oligarchies are good. Which was always one of the themes of Batman, to be honest, so touché I guess.

But there sincerely is nothing here that America needs to have, not at the prices the new Paramount will have to charge for them, and not when it means propping up the very oligarchs trying to crush democracy to spite us, so it's not a crisis in the same sense that diesel prices are now a crisis. You can keep your Batman and your SpongeBob, Paramount; the rest of us will wait for the day when you go belly-up and the police find them tied up in one of your megayachts.

Another silver lining here is that Larry and David Ellison suck at their jobs. Horribly so, in fact. The Ellison family plan to turn CBS News into a pro-fascist propaganda outlet was quickly crushed by the ineptitude with which they did it; now the brand is a mockery of itself, and the people who were supposed to be brainwashed into the Ellison way of things instead got creeped out and simply left.

Propaganda is hard. It's not rocket science hard, but it's at least "keep your indoor plants alive" hard. Not everyone is cut out for it, and the modern billionaire class, which thrives on controlling everything themselves and not allowing anyone under them to get a word in edgewise, is not.

Pair that with the nearly inevitable collapse of Larry Ellison's Oracle in the coming few years—Larry made an all-in bet on A.I. that threatens to bring his whole empire down if A.I. doesn't start getting profitable real, real soon now—and we'll at least have something on TV to watch, right?

None of us need to watch Star Trek, or Batman, or SpongeBob, or whatever the hell Ross Douthat will be doing on the Bari Weiss Trump Fluff-o-Rama Variety Show. If you're truly starved for entertainment, check in on the new show I call "Will The Ellison Family Lose Their Shirts?" It's a reality show. It stars the worst people you can imagine, they get up to hijinks, and at the end of it there's a good chance one or both of them flee to Argentina.