While the Skydance–Warner Bros. merger is in legal limbo, the CEO seeking to pull it off makes a disingenuous case for it in the court of public opinion.
Skydance CEO David Ellison attends a UFC bout in Las Vegas in January.
Now that the looming Paramount–Warner Bros merger is on hold until a lawsuit from nearly a dozen states to stop it is resolved in in an Oakland, California, courtroom next June, backers of the deal have renewed their efforts to sell it as a journalistic-creative breakthrough as well as an entertainment miracle. Former Fox and CNN anchor Chris Wallace, now an adviser to Redbird Capital, which has a major stake in the deal, wrote an op-ed hymning its genius for The Hollywood Reporter. Ari Emmanuel, brother of Rahm and CEO of the Ultimate Fighting Championship league, which has a $1.1 billion deal with Paramount-Skydance, echoed the same basic case in The Wall Street Journal. But it was the New York Times salvo from Paramount-Skydance’s chief executive, David Ellison, that drew the most attention, as he defended his bid to absorb Warner-Discovery into the maw of Skydance, as well as his checkered first year in journalism at CBS.
First and foremost, Ellison hoped to use his platform at the paper of record to take back the narrative from the hundreds of petition signers, film-industry critics, journalists, and politicians who have decried the bid from Paramount-Skydance to buy out Warner Bros. Discovery for $111 billion as a move to drastically narrow the independence of both filmmaking and news-gathering in the MAGA age. “When California’s attorney general, 11 other state attorneys general and, a day later, the Writers Guild of America sued to stop the deal, I stayed quiet,” Ellison wrote in a disingenuous show of humility. “I quickly learned such restraint has costs. While I was silent, others were happy to write my story for me. No more.”
The ensuing testimony was something well shy of the inspiring story of a scrappy young producer who arrived in Hollywood with nothing but a dream and his father’s Oracle fortune in his pocket. It was a list of talking points that relied more on familiar right-wing claims about the media industry than on a case to deliver even more corporate control and news-making influence into the hands of the Skydance conglomerate. Since a Warner Bros takeover would leave David Ellison, and more alarmingly, his MAGA-devoted father, tech billionaire Larry Ellison, exercising near-unprecedented control over the production of theatrical films, multiple cable networks, and both CBS and CNN, Ellison’s broadside offered little substantive response to the deal’s detractors in multiple industries, unions, and the sprawling global audience their platforms will reach.
Ellison pointedly disregarded such concerns, opting instead to defend his proposed stewardship of CNN in the wake of Bari Weiss’s controversial ideological makeover of his CBS News. “The issue is whether I can be trusted as a steward of Warner’s CNN. There has been speculation about my politics, my loyalties, my intentions.”
And with good reason. During the period of this deal and his buyout of Paramount and its properties, David Ellison was spotted at June’s White House UFC bout sitting next to President Trump. Ellison also attended the State of the Union address as the guest of the now-deceased Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, and convened a dinner in Trump’s honor during the White House Correspondents’ Dinner weekend in April.
Trump has been clear in spelling out what he wants. “It’s imperative that CNN be sold,” he said at a cabinet meeting last December. When he’s not deriding network anchor Jake Tapper as “Fake Tapper,” he calls CNN a “disgrace.” He clearly wants some guarantees that the Ellisons will steer CNN into MAGA-friendly territory, in much the same way that Weiss has made CBS News an obliging outlet for Trumpian agitprop. Trump’s cabinet officials have fallen into line; during a Pentagon briefing this spring, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth whined about CNN’s coverage of his debacle in Iran, saying, “The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better.” (Ellison’s PR flacks immediately shot back, “Editorial independence will absolutely be maintained. It is maintained at CBS; it will be maintained at CNN.”)
At a Simon Wiesenthal Center gala last December, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav accepted an award and recounted an earlier episode of government censorship—unrelated to CBS—in his acceptance speech. He drew a moral from the episode that seemed squarely aimed at David Ellison, who was in the crowd: “When the government controls the news, that is the end of democracy.”
Ellison’s op-ed sought to deflect attention from the prospect of journalistic interference from Trump’s White House and invoke the declining public trust in the media—a trend vastly accelerated by the MAGA movement’s demonization of the “fake news” industry and journalists as “enemies of the people.” The remedy for the media industry’s crisis in public confidence, Ellison advises is to redouble its commitment to impartial news-gathering. “Great news organizations like CNN and CBS News are here to tell it straight down the middle,” he writes. “That requires newsrooms that reflect the whole world, not one side of it. And it requires independence. Our journalists will continue to answer to the facts and to all the people they serve—not to any party or cause.”
There’s just one problem with this line of thinking: There is no “middle” in journalism—particularly when it comes to covering politics. Political parties are not stationary objects that a “straight down the middle” journalist can mathematically triangulate and break down into an easily digestible equation for public consumption. The GOP moves constantly to the pseudo-populist right. Recent primary elections have shown that the base of the Democratic Party is moving to the left. How do you find the middle with two moving targets? Ellison invokes the exhausted ghost of Edward R. Murrow as his supposed avatar of the endangered straight-news sensibility—but Murrow is best known today for his takedown of red-baiting Senator Joseph McCarthy and his stooge, lawyer Roy Cohn. Now Trump, Cohn’s best-known protégé, is keen to exploit his transactional leverage with the Ellisons, who need his approval for the deal to go through, to remake Murrow’s former network in his own image.
As for the entertainment industry, Ellison seeks to disarm his detractors by announcing that the industry they want to preserve is already dead. In assessing the antitrust actions now putting the merger on hold, he says that “the states claim this deal will give one company too much influence over theatrical releases and cable operators…while [the Writers Guild of America] argues that our combined market power will hurt writers. Both suits imagine a Hollywood that no longer exists—an industry ruled by a handful of legacy studios.”
One hundred and 11 billion dollars is a lot of money to pay for something that no longer exists. Currently in theaters, Disney’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day has generated $655 million in 10 days at the summer box office and Universal’s The Odyssey has grossed $461 million in 24 days. Ellison has promised that his proposed merger will put out 30 feature films a year. Like his promise of an unbiased and confidence-building news industry, that claim has met with skepticism, because no studio has done that in 25 years. What’s more, the newly merged Paramount-WB would set out to turbocharge its production arm, as the company would be saddled with a massive debt load.
Competing with Netflix was also the prime directive behind the Disney company’s $71 billion takeover of Fox—a stand-alone legacy studio owned by Rupert Murdoch’s Newscorp. “The opportunity to buy Fox first came up later that year,” Disney CEO Robert Iger said at the time of the 2019 buyout. “In fact, just a few months after the board approved us buying the majority share of BAMTech—which was done for one reason, to go into the direct-to-consumer business—Rupert and I sat down and talked about a transaction…. We would not have done that transaction had we not decided to go in this direction, because—if we hadn’t, we would have been looking at that business and through a traditional lens.”
Competing with Netflix and expanding Disney’s market share in streaming proved to be an impossible mission for the recombined Disney-Fox company. Since the merger, Disney has lost billions in streaming and only this year generated a profit with advertising and by raising subscription fees. The merger cost some 7,000 jobs in post-Covid downsizing. Disney and Fox’s combined film and television output shrank. Consumers now pay more for far less. This year, Disney’s ABC network lost the Oscar broadcast to Google as it aggressively expands its own streaming business. In a Disney quarterly call, Wells Fargo analyst Stephen Cahill argued that the company should phase out its streaming platform and return to only making and licensing content.
