Rob Bontas Paramount-WBD debacle has created political chaos
Antitrust suits aren’t supposed to be about politics, and yet that’s what’s happening of late, whether it’s Trump’s attempt during his first term to block AT&T from buying Time Warner, or California AG Rob Bonta looking to thwart Paramount’s purchase of TW’s successor, Warner Bros.Discovery. It’s an odd way to run an economy and doesn’t do anyone any good.
That includes the pols themselves who end up looking foolish and weak when they ultimately lose.It’s also a clunker for the supposed beneficiaries of these lawsuits, the American people. The reasons that Warner has landed in the middle of this bipartisan folly are instructive.
The company simply isn’t cutting it on its profit-and-loss statement.Never has.
That’s why AT&T — after beating back Trump’s attempt to kill its deal to buy the Hollywood studio that also owns HBO and CNN — unloaded the whole thing in a transaction that created Warner Bros.Discovery. That’s also why WBD CEO David Zaslav, for all his managerial excellence in cutting overhead and achieving major success in motion pictures, was forced to unload the whole thing to Paramount Skydance, another new conglomerate run by indie producer David Ellison and his father, tech tycoon and Trump pal Larry Ellison. Recall: Trump tried to argue that AT&T coupled with Warner Media — HBO, CNN, various cable channels and a streaming service — would be a monopoly that hurt consumers, ignoring that it was barely competitive against Big Tech and streaming giant Netflix.
His real enemy was CNN, which is why the courts saw through his antitrust arguments and approved the deal. Odd that Bonta, a lefty pol no one had ever heard of until now, tried to spin that he had uncovered a monopoly when in reality he was just rehashing the nonsense that Trump 1 tried to pass off.AT&T couldn’t make a business with Warner Media and the latest iteration of Warner Bros.
Discovery didn’t work, either. Bonta enjoyed a ...