Antitrust lawsuit on Paramount-Warner Bros. merger is just a ploy to stoke anti-Trump hate before midterms

Lawyers for Warner Bros.­Discovery recently briefed top executives on the risks of an antitrust suit getting filed by some lefty state attorneys general to upend the $80 billion WBD sale to Paramount Skydance — and the operative word is “politics,” The Post has learned.The case is a dud on antitrust grounds, they said.

There’s very little overlap when you combine these companies.Where overlap exists (in terms of two big studios, streaming services), consumer-pricing concerns are negligible given the vast changes going on in the media business.“So why the hell do we have to worry about this?” came the obvious question from one senior executive during the sit-down.The answer, the lawyers said, is “politics.”Indeed, that should be the headline when the lawsuit is filed by a coterie of ambitious Democrats, as is expected sometime in the coming days.

But it won’t be front and center of the coverage, of course, because most reporters genuflect to the left even when it’s absurd to do so.Also the politics in this case will be too hard to resist — for the ­media and for the pols behind it — since it involves President Trump, who is friends with the money behind the deal, Paramount’s David Ellison and his longtime, Trump-backing father, Larry Ellison.Months of Trump bashing, conjuring images of the president controlling news reporting from CBS (a Paramount property) and CNN (WBD’s cable news network) is too much to resist for that ambitious pol, California AG Rob Bonta, who will likely be leading the charge alongside another equally lefty ambitious pol, New York AG Tish James.It’s certainly not the merits of an antitrust case, which according to every lawyer I speak to is weak on so many legal metrics that it’s almost hard to imagine how a court just won’t throw it out.Sign up to receive On The Money by Charlie Gasparino in your inbox every Thursday.

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