By Robert Weiner and Andrew Beauchamp
The Ellison family and Paramount have beaten out Netflix to be the heir-apparent in a takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery- securing a loss for consumers and betraying Trump's true message to big business: if you scratch his back, he'll scratch yours.
The Ellisons already control major shares of CBS, Paramount-Skydance, DC, Oracle, Tesla, and TikTok. If the takeover goes through, they will add CNN, HBO, Discovery, and more to their portfolio. It will give them control of about 26% of the North American domestic box office market share and 20% of the on-demand streaming market.
Meanwhile, Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr threatens to revoke broadcast licences over stories critical of the conflict in Iran. "The same day that Carr made that threat, he was at Mar-a-Lago meeting with Trump," said former White House spokesman Jennifer Psaki on MSNOW.
The FCC issues licenses to individual broadcast stations, many of which are owned and operated by television networks, which allows Carr to hold licenses hostage. Carr threatened to "rebalance" the media to feature "great pro-America stories, pro-America content," in an interview with the New York Post.
Carr also launched investigations into NPR, PBS and more. Carr famously told Jimmy Kimmel, "We can do this the easy way or the hard way," when Donald Trump criticized Kimmel's response to the death of Charlie Kirk on his show, Jimmy Kimmel Live!. Soon after, ABC "indefinitely" suspended Kimmel's show.
Under the Ellison family's control, the Trump administration was handed a $16 million settlement over a meritless lawsuit in 2025, leading U.S. regulators to rubber-stamp the merger of Paramount Global and Skydance Media soon after, creating the entity that is now seeking to envelop Warner Brothers Discovery.
CBS, which has been under the Paramount umbrella since 2019, has been accused of postponing 60 Minutes reports, canceling The Late Show with Steven Colbert, and more, all in an effort to appease the Trump administration. With the addition of CNN, the Ellison family will have control of another major news network. David Ellison, son of Patriarch Larry Ellison, "offered assurances to Trump administration officials that if he bought Warner, he'd make sweeping changes to CNN," per a Wall Street Journal investigation.
Even before this, David Ellison met with Trump twice amid Paramount's bid. Soon after, the Department of Justice announced an investigation into whether Netflix, but not Paramount, was engaged in "anticompetitive practices." No one who regulates media should be partisan in an official capacity or biased to a particular person.
This alone should be enough to rouse suspicions in regulators to investigate Ellison's dealings. However, President Trump has shown that he will not pursue antitrust action against allies through the DOJ or any independent regulatory agency, such as the Federal Trade Commission and the FCC. Trump has dismissed two Democratic commissioners who sit on the FTC board, Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Kelly Slaughter. Trump also removed aggressive Biden-era FTC Chair Lisa Khan, installing a more big-business-friendly Chair, Andrew N. Ferguson.
Trump's rhetoric about keeping business competitive has stalled since his first term, even though he promised to slash "more job-killing regulations than any administration has ever done before," but the number of regulations actually increased.
The administration also settled the Biden-era lawsuit attempting to break up Live Nation Entertainment, which owns Ticketmaster, for a settlement of around $200 million, costing Live Nation less than a week's income.
States have taken up both the Live Nation and the Paramount legal cases, while the European Union has signalled that it would likely pass the deal through with minor divestments.
The FCC, too, announced on March 19 that it had approved a 6.2 billion dollar merger of two massive broadcast station owners, Nexstar and Tegna, reaching 80% of households. The FCC said it waived the National Television Ownership Rule barring station owners from reaching more than 39% of the US television audience.
Carr's approval blew right through the limit in hopes of- what- not being noticed as doing so? Eight states and DirecTV filed lawsuits seeking to kill the deal, citing the potential for less local journalism and higher prices, arguing that the FCC has no right to waive a rule set by Congress.
Consumers shouldn't have to lean on states and other countries to do the work of supposedly "independent" regulatory agencies, and should be confident in their media's independence. Actions like the Pentagon closing its external media offices and banning anti-Trump journalists only sap the public's confidence.
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