The Justice Department closed its investigation into the proposed $110 billion merger of Paramount and Warner Brothers Discovery, saying it found no threat to competition or consumers.
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Hollywood giant Paramount is poised to get a whole lot bigger, like a tuna that swallowed a whale. The company’s proposed $111 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery just got a green light from the U.S. Justice Department. Now, this deal would put all under the same roof – Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros. Studios, HBO and Paramount Plus and CBS and CNN. To lay everything out for us, we’re joined now by NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik. Hi, David.
DAVID FOLKENFLIK, BYLINE: Hey, Ailsa.
CHANG: OK, so it seems like there’s a lot of combining of similar properties here. Like, what exactly did the Justice Department say in announcing this decision?
FOLKENFLIK: Well, the Justice Department put out a statement late this afternoon that NPR obtained and reviewed, and it said that it had conducted an intensive eight-month review of this, looking at this from all angles, in fact saying that it was helped by looking at a proposed earlier deal that Warner Bros. had struck to sell itself off to Netflix, or most of itself off to Netflix.
It said, look, we’ve looked at this, and there is no reason to consider this bad for people who have a stake in this business – that is, producers and writers and actors and the like – because there are so many other players in this field now. You’ve got – even though you’re combining these two titans of studios – Paramount Warner Bros., et cetera – you’ve got Netflix, and you’ve got Apple, and you’ve got Amazon Prime, and you got a bunch of smaller players who are streamers in this case. And they say that the streaming market has so expanded the competition for conventional Hollywood studios, it’s not anticompetitive. Similarly, they’re making the same case, they argue, for consumers. They’re saying consumers are not being sold out here because they’ve got a lot of other places to get entertainment.
CHANG: OK, so lots of choices for everybody, they say. That’s what federal regulators are saying, but I know that you’ve been reporting on the political dynamics around this whole deal. Explain what’s been at play here.
FOLKENFLIK: Well, it’s all in play here, in part because President Trump is such a player in such decisions in a way that’s not been seen as appropriate or even present – anything like the same degree in previous administrations. The family that is about poised to take over Warner Bros. Discovery and add it to Paramount is the Ellisons. That’s Larry Ellison, the co-founder of Oracle, and his son David Ellison, the founder of Skydance Media. They only took over Paramount and CBS last summer.
They’re now doing this much bigger deal this year, and they have intertwined their business interests with the president’s political interests – Larry Ellison, a financial backer and adviser to the president on AI and other political matters. And the president, just in January, essentially turned over control of TikTok U.S. to the Ellisons as a sign of, you know, their connection there.
CHANG: Right.
FOLKENFLIK: The president has said that he wants the Ellisons to help take over CBS to help – excuse me, CNN to help make it a little bit more like CBS.
CHANG: OK, you just named two entities, CNN and CBS. I mean, I can’t help but I wonder, how are journalists at both CNN and CBS feeling right now? Tell us what you’ve been hearing.
FOLKENFLIK: Well, there’s great consternation, and that’s for two reasons. One is that, you know, in any such merger, what you almost inevitably see is extraordinary degree of layoffs and compression of jobs. There’s a lot of overlap at these two proud – 2 of the 5 most important TV networks in the country. There’d be a lot of layoffs. But also, there’s concern that essentially they would seek to make CNN more friendly to President Trump – that’s certainly what he believes – as critics of CBS say, they’ve done in controlling CBS News. That’s unlikely to be the final word on this.
CHANG: Right.
FOLKENFLIK: You’re going to see some state AGs probably weigh in, but we don’t know how this is going to play out.
CHANG: That is NPR’s David Folkenflik. Thank you so much, David.
FOLKENFLIK: You bet.
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