Netflix projected insouciance. “We’ve always been disciplined,” Sarandos and Greg Peters, the other C.E.O., said in a statement. “This transaction was always a ‘nice to have’ at the right price, not a ‘must have’ at any price.” Investors and Wall Street analysts seemed to agree; various observers suggested that a tie-up doesn’t look great for either Paramount or Warner Bros. (The step-grandson of one of the actual founding Warner brothers likened the deal to “a shotgun wedding with your dumb cousin.”) Others freaked out, not least at the prospect of the Ellisons controlling CNN. Mark Thompson, the network’s current chairman, warned staff not to jump to conclusions, but many quickly did. (“We are doomed,” one employee told the media-news site Status. “We are f**ked,” said another.) Many looked at the Ellison-era CBS News as proof of concept; indeed, it’s very possible that that unit will somehow be fused with CNN under the stewardship of Bari Weiss, the anti-woke TV-news neophyte whom David Ellison tapped to lead CBS News in the fall, with results that have, variously, been cringe-inducing, icky, and democratically concerning. “It’s hell over here,” a CBS source told Justin Baragona, a media reporter at the progressive news site Zeteo, last night. The freakout, they added, was justified.
In a general sense, I’d agree. Weiss has not exactly turned CBS News into Pravda—and, as I’ve written before, she appears to be less a Trump lackey and more a standard-bearer for a tedious, adjacent strain of billionaire-class faux-contrarianism. But, at minimum, her corporate overlords clearly seem drunk on some cocktail of cowardice and greed, and the concentration of multiple major news organizations in their hands is precisely the sort of thing that people meant when they warned against the United States turning into Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. (And this is without going into Larry Ellison’s stake in the U.S. arm of TikTok.) Indeed, as I see it, no one should get to own two powerful national news networks, regardless of their politics. Similar logic applies—or applied, anyway—to the prospect of Netflix taking over Warner Bros., even without CNN. Given the ghoulishness of the Ellisons, it might have been tempting to cheer Netflix on, as the Good Suitor. But their takeover would have represented an even greater consolidation of corporate power, albeit one set to the jaunty string-pop of “Bridgerton” rather than “The Imperial March.” As Richard Brody observed in December, many Hollywood people saw the prospect as “existential, perhaps portending the end of mainstream moviegoing.” Trump may have been acting disingenuously when he highlighted the resulting market share. But his words weren’t wrong.
This week, I wrote about a much smaller, yet still highly consequential, media merger—a proposed deal for Nexstar, already a prolific owner of local TV stations, to grow further by taking over a rival, Tegna—and how it is contingent on Trump officials doing away with an obscure federal law barring such companies from reaching more than thirty-nine per cent of households nationwide. Brendan Carr, the chair of the Federal Communications Commission, is supportive of the Nexstar deal, and of nixing the cap. Other proponents of the deal have sought to assuage concerns about unconstrained broadcast conglomerates by pointing out that D.O.J. antitrust enforcers will still get to weigh in.
For opponents, such reassurances might have carried more weight a year or so ago. Initially, on the subject of antitrust, Trump’s second term looked contiguous with the Biden Administration, which aggressively went after big mergers; Trump’s new antitrust chief, Gail Slater, was plucked from the growing corporate-skeptic wing of the G.O.P., and won praise from many progressives. This impression, however, was always complicated, and as time passed, the enforcers started to look more like enablers. There were growing allegations that MAGA-aligned lobbyists for big corporations were effectively navigating around Slater. This month, she found herself out of a job. Various observers concluded that MAGA’s turn against big business was over, if it was ever sincere to begin with. The Administration appears, increasingly, to favor not only big businesses that Trump likes but big business, period—even if he clearly favors the former much more.
