First off, a disclaimer for those of you as confused as I was why the usual images that accompany the dissemination of these musings was missing yesterday. Apparently I was the unwitting victim of a hack which prevents sharing them across social media and private communication platforms. Text appears to be fine and no other issues of consequence have arisen that impact readers. So thank you for visiting the actual site as requested to get your fix; I am most deeply appreciative of the extra effort.
Besides, based upon what has transpired in the last 24 hours, the musings of yesterday quickly became moot. First off, my call to action for ignoring what the Fool Near The Hill spews was apparently heeded. It has already produced at least one embarassing incident where the blatherer-in-chief was effectively silenced by those omnipresent helicopter blades which clearly ground his gears. But the fact that every single one of those entities operating for once in solidarity–and a lot more–chose to cover it at all sort of proves my initial point–much like unhealthy fast and/or processed foods, most of us can’t go completely cold turkey. Hence I’m gonna refrain from any further amplification or victory lap of my own–if you truly feel compelled to do so, there’s plenty more places you can click onto for that emotional release.
But speaking of unhealthy obsessions, the other national nightmare that came to resolution on Yom freaking Kippur that was accompanied by the sort of rhetoric and white smoke usually accompanying a conclave provoked reactions and overreactions aplenty from just about everyone with media credentials. VARIETY’s Gene Maddaus was among the first and most objective to share these bare boned details:
Paramount has reached a deal with 12 state attorneys general that removes a major obstacle to closing its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. The deal comes just before the company was to begin accruing a $7 million daily “ticking fee” on Oct. 1, which was seen as an important milestone in the case…The merger was on hold pending the outcome of the states’ antitrust lawsuit, which was set for a trial on March 2, 2027. The $111 billion merger is the largest in Hollywood history.
As the day evolved from Kaddish to Musaf more and more details emerged. DEADLINE rattled them off with a slew of breaking news alerts highlighting the various points that were of particular concern to differing niches within media, politics and indeed life:
Paramount To Keep Headquarters In Los Angeles Post-Merger: “We Aren’t Going Anywhere”
Paramount-WBD Settlement Sets Up Editorial Independence Board For CNN And CBS News
Read The Proposed Consent Decree To Settle The Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery Merger
If you have the time and/or bandwidth, click through as many of these as you choose. Or you can save yourself time and effort with this two-word recap that effectively sums up the post-mortem analyses I’ve perused. BONTA CAVED.
Ted Johnson drew the short straw to relay the bitching from the most vocal advocates:
The primary group mobilizing opposition to the Paramount–Warner Bros. Discovery merger condemned the state attorneys general settlement of their antitrust lawsuit to block the transaction.
Just minutes before California Attorney General Rob Bonta was to appear at a press conference to announce the details of the settlement, the Block the Merger Coalition put out a statement calling the proposed resolution “a bad deal for the future of film, entertainment, independent journalism, and a strong democracy in this country.”…“We are disappointed and angry that the interests of average Americans have been trampled to benefit oligarch billionaires,” the group said.
And BIG’s Matt Stoller picked up on the rhetoric big time both on his Substack and after being given a megaphone by THE ANKLER’s Richard Rushfield to once again wail to the masses:
Today they won, and we lost, as the key political leaders opposing the deal, California Attorney General Rob Bonta plus eleven other state law enforcement chiefs, allowed the merger to go through, conditioned on certain promises that I’ll get into, most notably more investment in movie-making and editorial independence for news channels. There are a bunch of reasons they cleared the deal, such as threats to move the studio out of California, corruption, and general incompetence.
Stoller then rattles off a series of second-guesses, accompanied by a series of X-eets from other aggravated activists, that pick apart the consent decree like a vulture would a dying carcass. Which when one considers the relative health of Paramount and Warner Brothers as separate entities seems all the more appropriate.
And for good measure, the internationally nuanced Claire Atkinson threw in her own myriad laments on her MEDIA MIX Substack of what sort of folks are in theory going to be controlling our minds going forward:
David Zaslav and his cable cowboys will finally get rich beyond their wildest imaginations, the Saudis will finally get their bloodied hands on CNN and all our TV and TikTok habits will be poured into a giant Oracle powered AI to take-on the world…What would Ted Turner say? Is this what Warner’s one time CEO Jeff Bewkes imagined for his baby when they brushed off Rupert Murdoch in 2014? Is this what AT&T gift wrapped for the oil Princes of the Emirates when they swapped out the inept John Stankey and Jason Kilar in favor of John Malone’s favorite lawyer…I had to rub my eyes when I read last week that the FCC cleared the path for up to 100% of the equity investment behind this TV and film giant to shift into the hands of three sovereign wealth funds after the deal closes. They’re poised to own just under 50 percent for now, and they’ll supposedly have no say in running the thing…Was it really forty years ago that Rupert Murdoch had to renounce his Australian citizenship and become an American to buy some local TV stations to build Fox? Boy, how the rules of the game have changed.
Well, yeah, Claire, things have changed in forty years. Ted’s dead, Bewkes, Stankey and Kilar are well out of the public limelight and have enough FU money for several generations, and Rupes seems more than content focusing on the California Post and its never-ending quest to turn the Left Coast as right and red as possible. And neither one of us is working for him any more.
More significantly, new generations and technological innovation have made local stations and indeed linear television an afterthought with anyone born in that span and utterly irrelevant for a plurality of those born in this century. Ratings overwhelmingly confirm this, and if you spend even a few minutes on Instagram or Tik Tok you’ll find way more reasons to get severly depressed.
Here’s what I find especially galling about all of these folks who feel the necessity to sound alarms and harp (word chosen carefully) about this deal. Virtually none has ever spent any time within the executive ranks of a media company and therefore tasked at some point with coming up with better ideas than the ones that they have sh-t all over.
In the cases of Paramount and Warner Brothers plenty of bad choices were made over that 40-year span that Atkinson referenced–and dispropotionately more in the last 15-20 years since the spectres of streaming and device consumption became realities. The collective corrosion and tarnish of those decisions–long before our current administration was even a possibility–is largely the reason these conglomerates are in such dire straits now. Where the only way they can survive at all is to turn to foreign investors and cut what so many would otherwise consider “bad” deals to even have the possibility of existing. Maintain at least a percentage of those jobs that everyone seems to think are of paramount (word chosen carefully again) importance. Where only a nepobaby like Ellison has even a warped desire to want to try and find a Don Quixote-ish battle with the windmills of Apple, Netflix and Amazon. 
I was in those executive ranks and involved in all sorts of discussions–creative, financial, predictive. When you sit at the nexus of actual information you get invited into more of those conference rooms than most. I saw how and why those decisions were made by companies who were mired in the false belief that they could turn back time and stop the inexorable march of progress. They generally played it safe fearing risk. On some occasions, those approaches actually worked on a short-term basis.
Admittedly, I worked exclusively for legacy media companies and had few colleagues who had even been inside Cupertino or Los Gatos or Redmond. Those that had been would often use folks like me as sounding boards since I tended to have a better handle on facts. They would propose some radical and alternative options. Sometimes my team would even have data to support their hypotheses. With rare exceptions these brainstorms would be shot down. Not by diabolical oligarchs but by paranoid middle managers trying to qualify for a quarterly bonus.
Have any of these journalists ever been in that position? Of all the ones who chose to decry yesterday’s events as somehow being the end of civilization I’d contend only Rushfield even comes close to being a media entrepreneur as a founding partner in Ankler Media. But respectfully, the scale of economics for launching a new competitor in a digital niche are light years away from that needed to battle technology-backed entertainment side hustles. You try finding a common ground with as wide a swath as adults 18-49 or 25-54 are in this day and age.
What grandstanding politicans, opinionated journalists and advocacy groups do have in common is what binds online chat rooms and social media sh-tposters. An outsized desire to weigh in on something most are remarkably naive and often extraordinarily defensive about. Until you’ve walked a mile in shoes like mine and my peers, I’ll contend your judgment of our posturing is no more respected than that of online trolls. If you indeed had invented the better mousetrap, how come you didn’t find your way into a position to actually trap a few rats at some point?
Knowing what I know about what constitutes priorities for entertainment journalists based on how they’ve exhaustively covered Colbert and Kimmel I’d recommend the next bus they chase is the one that got buried deep in the details of the proposed consent decree that only TOO MUCH TELEVISION’s Rick Ellis seemed to pick up on–one that deals with a proposed penalty should the Combined Entity (sounds damn DCU-ish, no?) commit a faux pas in how they choose to handle cable negotations. The document references a series of Divestiture Channels potentially in play in such case. Ellis actually identified them with a shot fired of his own:
BET (Black Entertainment Television, including BET, BET Gospel, BET Her, BET Hip-Hop, BET Jams, and BET Soul), VH1, Comedy Central, Smithsonian, Destination America, and Science. It’s notable that the list several so-called “zombie” channels, which haven’t produced any new content in years. So being forced to sell the networks doesn’t seem like much of a penalty.
Yeah, but to your big brother competitors that could–gasp–mean Jon Stewart’s days are numbered!!! Not that the production costs of a four-times-a-week day-and-date show staffed by a team of writers and supplemental hosts/correspondents with a fraction of the audience even Kimmel gets on a network that currently produces only a handful of other originals wasn’t already on the endangered species.
I’m sure between all of the aggreived parties and their respective net worths as well as their insistence that the CE will undoubtedly violate something the time to start to find a strategic partner or outright buyer for Comedy Central should have started yesterday. I know you all think you’ve got better ideas than executives to deal with these sorts of existential crises. Well, have at it, boos. Time’s a wastin’.
Until next time…