David Ellison’s Paramount Skydance is hoping to close its megamerger with Warner Bros. Discovery within the next several months — but there are still a few roadblocks remaining.
One of those is a potential lawsuit from Democratic attorneys general, with California Attorney General Rob Bonta specifically having said his office is investigation the proposed Paramount-WBD deal for antitrust concerns.
Bonta, in a recent interview with MS NOW, said he and his team are engaged in a “straight-up antitrust analysis” of the proposed Paramount-Warner Bros. merger, which is “our lane.” And he appeared to dismiss a report that the California AG was looking to require Paramount to divest CNN as a condition for otherwise letting the deal go through as “opining.”
Bonta was asked by MS NOW’s Jacob Soboroff in an interview Sunday about a report by Puck that said, “Rob Bonta wants Paramount to sell CNN” and that “the widespread belief among people close to Bonta is that a divestiture of the news network would be the best way for Democrats to feel not terrible about the Trump-friendly Paramount’s pending $110 billion deal for Warner Bros. Discovery.” The Puck report also said Bonta “knows he’ll have a tough time winning” an antitrust case seeking to halt the merger.
About the report, Bonta responded, “I don’t know where that comes from, to be honest. There’s been a lot of opining about what I’m thinking or what I’m saying or what I’ll do, and I have no idea where it comes from. I know a lot of people are interested in this transaction and what my office will do. And what we will do is what I’ve always said. We are investigating. The transaction has not cleared regulatory scrutiny. There are red flags in the air everywhere.”
“We’re concerned,” Bonta continued. “We’re concerned about job loss and prices being increased and lack of quality and choice for consumers. And so, we’re looking and we’ll decide timely what we’re going to do. But I’m not sure what the origin of [the report the California AG wants to require the CNN divestment] is. We expect more opining that may or may not be tethered to the truth, but we’re just head-down focused on an antitrust fair but firm and comprehensive analysis, and we’ll make a decision in the coming weeks.”
Soboroff then asked, “How much is what’s played out at CBS in terms of CBS News and the editorial independence of that organization affected the way that you are looking at CNN potentially coming under the same umbrella?” That’s a reference to David Ellison’s installing Free Press founder Bari Weiss in charge of editorial at CBS News. Weiss’s disruptive tenure at the helm of the news division has included a dramatic shake-up of the leadership at “60 Minutes” and the firing of correspondent Scott Pelley, who among other things alleged that Weiss wanted to put “a thumb on the scale for the president’s version of events that I felt was a level of political influence that I had never seen in 37 years at CBS News.” (In response to Pelley’s claims, CBS News said Weiss had made suggestions on a specific Pelley story that was part of “the course of editorial back and forth” that “had no political motivation and were proposed solely to make the piece as strong, fair and accurate as possible.”)
Bonta replied, “You know, we have to be concerned about that. We’re not naive. We see what’s happening in the world. And I have always been a supporter of the independent free press as a critical guardrail in our democracy. That needs to continue. But our analysis is a straight-up antitrust analysis. That’s our lane. That’s our focus. We will do an antitrust analysis here and make a decision based on that analysis.”
Meanwhile, on Tuesday, the British government issued notice that it is likely to intervene in the Paramount-WBD deal. One of the reasons Lisa Nandy, the U.K.’s Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, cited in a written statement to Parliament was “the need for, to the extent that it is reasonable and practicable, a sufficient plurality of views in news media in each market for news media” in the U.K.
The Paramount-Warner Bros. deal was cleared earlier by the U.S. Justice Department, without imposing any requirements for divestitures or other concessions on the part of Paramount Skydance. The merger also has cleared regulatory approval in China, Australia, Germany, France and Saudi Arabia. The European Union reportedly will give it the greenlight if certain “remedies” are made, such as the ending of the Paramount-Universal distribution joint-venture known as UIP.