Warner Bros. to sell to Paramount, putting pro-Trump oligarch Ellison in charge of much of what America watches

There it is, then. On Thursday, Netflix bowed out of the bidding war for Warner Bros. Discovery, announcing they wouldn't try to match a sweetened deal for the company put forward by the David and Larry Ellison-controlled Paramount.

If the Paramount bid is finalized, the pro-Trump, pro-fascist Ellisons will control a gargantuan slice of all U.S. media. The consolidated company would include Paramount, Warner Bros., CBS, CNN, HBO, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, and social media site TikTok. The Ellison's plans for the empire can be most visibly be seen in their retooling of CBS News into a Bari Weiss-headed Trumpian outlet; it can now be assumed that CNN will be similarly transformed.

It's also likely John Oliver's HBO-based news and comedy program, Last Week Tonight, will meet the fate of CBS's Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Late night talk show hosts have long been a particular thorn in Donald Trump's side, because Trump is notoriously thin-skinned and anyone who makes a joke at his expense immediately jumps to the top of his personal enemies list.

That is the bad news, and it's plenty bad. The massive new Ellison company will likely first focus on removing any voices that the forever-whining Trump doesn't like, whether it be hosts like John Oliver or Hollywood actors that have spoken out against Trump, his corruption, his rank criminality, his Epstein ties, his violent deportation regime, or take-your-pick. After that, the company is likely to attempt to rebuild itself, CBS-style, with a stable of people who praise Trump and defend him from controversy.

If there is good news to be had, it's that the Ellisons have proven spectacularly bad at managing even the existing Paramount, and they're not going to be able to come up with a way to compel America to actually watch their new, carefully censored offerings. CBS News has seen its ratings crater since Weiss' changes were put into effect, both due to audience distrust and the groaning vapidity of its new anchor and news foci. Flagship Paramount property Star Trek has been driven so far into the ground that there's questions as to whether the brand will remain viable.

And the debt of the Ellison family's new, merged company will be massive, so there's a very good chance that Ellison primarily succeeds not in crafting a new, ostentatiously pro-Trump behemoth, but in wrecking the whole enterprise in even more spectacular fashion than the struggling companies have managed to date.

Another wildcard here: Larry Ellison's wealth comes from software giant Oracle, and is highly dependent on the "A.I." bubble not collapsing. But the A.I. bubble is, with certainty, going to pop. There's simply no way around it, because the companies involved have overcommitted to new infrastructure even though the economics of actually serving A.I. continue to get worse and worse. So both Ellisons, in addition to being spectacularly bad at running the companies they've got, may soon need to focus more on penny-pinching than Trumpian vanity projects.

There is some very good news here indeed, though, and it's that despite the massive, antitrust-thwarting media giant's desired reach, there is nothing here that American consumers really, truly need.

Do you need to watch Paramount movies and series? Do you need to watch Warner Bros. offerings? Can you not stomach the thought of having to pass up CNN?

Of course not. ParaWarnerHBOTok will hold the distinction of being a massive company that offers only products Americans can easily do without. Turning off its offerings is absurdly easy. When CBS News began getting noticeably worse, viewers simply went elsewhere. The channelization of media companies into subscription services means it is easier than ever before to know, for example, which shows are Paramount-made: They're the ones you have to pay money to Paramount Plus to see.

Trump's allied oligarchs want very much to dominate American life. They may instead only be focusing American attention on the extent to which we've already allowed them to dominate it. And that, in turn, may set the stage for the near-universal American business cycle of companies rising to seeming invincibility, turning on the consumers that built them, and collapsing as new competitors scoop up the customers that the once-giant presumed would never leave.

Ellison's new mega-company wants to be a new American juggernaut. It's just as likely to end up a new America Online.