The Ellisons Are Spending a Fortune to Make the Media Worse
Three major takeaways from Paramount buying WB.
I thought Netflix would fight a little harder for their bid on Warner Bros., but I guess they looked at Paramount’s relentless pursuit and said, to quote Logan Roy, “Congratulations on saying the biggest number, you fucking morons.” Of course, money is no object to David Ellison and his daddy Larry (founder and head of Oracle), who have personal billions to throw around. They’ll spend $111 billion to acquire all of Warner Bros. Discovery (Netflix only wanted Warner Bros. Studios, HBO, and a few other attractive entertainment assets), and they’ll likely face no regulatory headwinds as the Ellisons are staunch Trump supporters.
As I noted in December, Netflix was the lesser of two evils in this equation. I now want to dive a bit further into why Paramount’s purchase of WB is such a catastrophe, and why Democrats should make it a point of unwinding the Ellisons' massive power grab.
Fewer Hollywood Movies
While I think movies will continue to live on, like many other aspects where America once excelled, we’ll now see great films from other countries while Hollywood stagnates. We know how one studio gobbling up another works out because we saw it a few years ago when Disney ate 20th Century Fox. We need more competition in Hollywood, not less, and one fewer studio means one less place creatives can go to make their movies. The notion that Paramount will make 30-40 movies per year is preposterous. They don’t have the infrastructure or the interest to do so. It’s an empty promise meant to assuage a creative community they don’t understand or care about.
What will happen is what happened to 20th Century Fox, which is that not only do audiences get fewer movies, but they also get fewer original movies. While there are exceptions (the successful Send Help is a 20th Century Studios feature), Disney mostly cares about the IP stuff. When features don’t fit into the IP niche, they’re shuttled off to Hulu like No One Will Save You and In the Blink of an Eye. Nothing is safe from this stagnation, as we saw with the diminishment of Searchlight Pictures, which, for the first time in almost a decade, doesn’t have a single movie in the running for Best Picture.
I’m sure Paramount is ravenous for all the IP that Warner Bros. has to offer, but that also means Paramount is likely uninterested in all the original features the studio backed to great success. David Ellison’s big Hollywood claim to fame is backing the Mission: Impossible franchise, starting with Ghost Protocol. Beyond that, most of what they’ve backed are IP movies for dudes with franchises like Transformers and Terminator. I seriously doubt they would ever greenlight movies like Sinners, One Battle After Another, and Weapons. What’s more likely is taking the big IP stuff (Barbie, DC Superheroes, etc.) and rebooting it in a direction that aligns with Ellison’s belief of what media should be, i.e., “anti-woke.” But since that’s already such a vague and difficult target to hit (if Superman saves a person of color, is he woke?), it will lead to bland, uninteresting slop that fails to connect with people who like multiculturalism as well as the anti-woke crusaders who can never be happy because their entire existence rests on being in an endless culture war.
No News Is Bad News
One way to look at Ellison acquiring CNN is a situation akin to Victor Orbán’s Hungary or Vladimir Putin’s Russia, where friendly oligarchs control the media to create a kind of state-run media. The Ellisons have already taken CBS News and TikTok, and now they’ll have a major cable news channel. This makes everything a version of Fox News where conservatives are always winning, and all problems can be traced to Democrats, immigrants, and minorities. We’ve already seen how Bari Weiss is carrying this banner at CBS News as she retreats from any story that might be critical of the administration while embracing right-wing slop like a town hall with Erika Kirk that no one watched.
You could counter that the audience isn’t buying what the Ellisons are selling. CBS News and CNN are dying animals, unable to survive in a media environment that’s moving into short-form video and podcasts. TikTok is a sound acquisition, but even here, users may just move to other short-form video platforms like Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts (which have their own Trump-friendly oligarchs, but that’s another issue). Essentially, we don’t need to worry too much about the rightward turn of these institutions because they’re fading anyway.
But I would argue that the goal isn’t simply conservative capture, but a hollowing-out of any institution that can challenge the powerful. The Ellisons aren’t necessarily trying to make successful right-wing media as much as they’re ensuring that fewer places can do real journalism. We’ve seen this over at The Washington Post, where Jeff Bezos gave the publication a right-wing turn and then laid off a bunch of the staff. It’s not that he can’t afford to keep it going; it’s that it’s to his benefit and the benefit of his billionaire buddies if there’s not a real journalistic counterweight to their power.
As much as we can talk about the rise of “citizen” journalists and “independent” creators, we’re all seriously vulnerable on our own. The #MeToo movement couldn’t get as far as it did if not for major publications like The New York Times and The New Yorker backing their reporting with both financial resources and legal representation. If you keep knocking players off the board, fewer outlets can look into wrongdoing. The Ellisons don’t want accountability, and they want the media that remains to be in their corner regardless of ratings.
Democrats Have a New Issue
In the words of John Oliver (who may find himself out of a show like his CBS brethren Stephen Colbert), “So, what can we do?” Individually, I doubt many of us were tuned to CBS News or CNN, and TikTok could certainly lose users to a competing service. But to put so much media power across different platforms in the hands of one family that has a clear political allegiance is a threat to the nation at large. For all the whining about “liberal bias,” I don’t know any socialists who own major media organizations, but I sure do see a lot of right-wing billionaires with their hands on the controls.
Democrats need to realize that there’s nothing to prevent an Orbán-like “soft authoritarianism” from thwarting them for the foreseeable future. Anyone in the party who thinks that they’re just a left-wing Joe Rogan away from victory cannot be taken seriously. Instead, they need to use government power to break up massive media organizations so that Americans have real alternatives and protections through journalistic institutions. It’s not up to voters to come up with a perfect solution for how to do this (maybe it’s rethinking the FCC, maybe it’s through antitrust legislation, and of course to even reach certain points Democrats will need to kill the filibuster and expand the Supreme Court), but we at least need politicians who are committed to pushing back against such a vast apparatus designed to eat away a diverse media from the inside.
Outside of politicians, Democratic donors need to be smarter with their money. Instead of throwing bottomless pits of money into congressional races that they likely can’t win despite the massive fundraising advantage, donors should be financing new institutions that can stand against right-wing billionaires. This goes beyond a simple handful of influencers. We'll need to build an entire media ecosystem with a long-term vision of investigative reporting and a commitment to democratic ideals. That’s not going to happen overnight, but the time for handwringing about “liberal bias” has long since passed.
Paramount’s takeover of WB is a serious matter, and we have cause to be concerned. But we are not powerless, no matter how much the Ellisons and their ilk would like us to think we are. Consider how much right-wing capture there’s been of media in the last decade, not only in terms of what the Ellisons are doing but also Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. And yet they can’t cover up the stench of right-wing policies or make Donald Trump a more popular President. They can work to stifle voices outside their conservative orthodoxy, but they can’t drown out average Americans who believe in democracy and aren’t going to swallow what the oligarchs tell them. Paramount taking over WB is the continuation of a fight, but it is far from its end.
