Antitrust lawsuits aren’t supposed to be about politics, and yet that’s what’s been happening lately, whether it’s Trump’s attempt during his first term to stop AT&T from buying Time Warner, or California AG Rob Bonta’s seeking to thwart Paramount’s purchase of TW’s successor, Warner Bros. Discovery.
It’s a strange way to run an economy and it doesn’t benefit anyone.
This includes the Poles themselves who end up looking stupid and weak when they end up losing.
It’s also a mess for the supposed beneficiaries of these lawsuits, the American people.
The reasons why Warner found himself in the middle of this bipartisan madness are instructive.
The company is simply not up to par on its income statement.
Never.
That’s why AT&T — after rebuffing Trump’s attempt to end its deal to buy the Hollywood studio that also owns HBO and CNN — pulled out all the stops in a deal that gave birth to Warner Bros. Discovery.
It’s also why WBD CEO David Zaslav, for all his managerial excellence in cutting overhead costs and achieving major movie successes, was forced to hand it all over to Paramount Skydance, another new conglomerate run by independent producer David Ellison and his father, tech mogul and Trump friend Larry Ellison.
Recall: Trump tried to argue that AT&T, combined with Warner Media – HBO, CNN, various cable channels and a streaming service – would constitute a monopoly that would harm consumers, ignoring that it was barely competitive with Big Tech and streaming giant Netflix. His real enemy was CNN, which is why the courts understood his antitrust arguments and approved the deal.
Weird that Bonta, a left-wing politician that no one had ever heard of until now, tried to claim that he had discovered a monopoly when in reality he was just rehashing the nonsense that Trump 1 had tried to push.
AT&T was unable to do business with Warner Media and the latest iteration of Warner Bros. Discovery didn’t work either.
Score some points
Bonta enjoyed a few months of non-stop publicity, claiming that these two mid-sized companies were going to rule the media world with a monopoly.
Meanwhile, EU and UK regulators are approving the merger as quickly as the Trump administration, despite their distaste for the latter.
Bonta’s biggest goal, of course, was to score points with the far left — an ever-growing contingent of his party — by pointing out how Larry Ellison is Trump’s best friend and shouting that he wasn’t about to let Ellison’s media giant rule the airwaves with Trump.
But politics has its limits, as Trump and now Bonta have discovered.
As my old man would say, Bonta’s fatal mistake was believing his own bullshit.
For weeks, he celebrated on X how left-wing activist actor Mark Ruffalo inspired the trial, working to win more points with his progressive base.
Ruffalo, it should be noted, these days spends more time opining on antitrust law than he does making movies.
Like Bonta, he could not keep quiet.
According to my sources, this may have been the deciding factor in the AG’s decision to agree to settlement terms so favorable to Ellison that it’s hard to believe Bonta brought the case in the first place.
Ruffalo spewed a lot of crap about the power of these companies to upend the media ecosystem and eclipse Netflix and Big Tech.
But his bizarre and baseless claims that Larry Ellison, who is Jewish, contributed to the “genocide” in Gaza because Larry’s software giant, Oracle, provided technology to Israel, went too far.
It’s worth noting that California’s Democratic establishment began demanding Bonta settle as soon as David Ellison began threatening to leave the state and cut 50,000 jobs with him.
Also note the tide that turned after Ruffalo’s noxious Ellison-Israel comment.
Jewish groups publicly condemned the chatter, but behind the scenes, Hollywood’s sizable pro-Israel contingent told Gov. Gavin Newsom, his likely successor Xavier Becerra and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass that they were unhappy that a rising star in the party was taking inspiration from people like Ruffalo.
Money talks in this case, and the Hollywood establishment was threatening to hold him back.
For the state political apparatus, it was obvious.
Did they really want a state AG with weird, wonky ideas about antitrust, Israel, and who knows what else that would shake up the media industry?
As one person involved in AG’s deliberations said: “I can’t tell you how much that Ruffalo statement hurt Bonta’s efforts.” »
Bonta, meanwhile, got his 15 minutes of fame but a little more.
He walked away with a settlement that included none of the structural changes he demanded, and a truce highlighting his legal and political recklessness that won’t work well if he tries to run for governor.
A victory for common sense, one might say.
Hopefully this is also a wake-up call to antitrust authorities as our monthly bills for Netflix, Amazon Prime, and YouTube continue to skyrocket.
Gn entert
