Merger Madness and How to Stop It
Netflix wants to buy Warner Bros. Discovery — and it’s inked an $87.2 billion agreement for the company’s studio and streaming businesses.
But Paramount Skydance wants to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, too. In fact, it wants the whole company so badly, it’s launched a $108 billion hostile takeover backed by a shady group of Middle Eastern sovereign-wealth funds.
Paramount’s main argument for its offer is “we’ll fire more workers” and “Trump likes us more.” Netflix’s primary talking point is “Hey, at least we’re not Paramount,” which so far is winning over the WBD board and top executives, who stand to make out like Scrooge McDuck if the deal goes through.
So what’s in it for you?
How do higher prices, huge job losses, fewer choices, less opportunity and diversity in Hollywood, and more media capitulation sound?
“Consolidation at this scale would be catastrophic for an industry built on free expression, for the creative workers who power it, and for consumers who depend on a free, independent media ecosystem to understand the world,” actor and activist Jane Fonda wrote in The Ankler. “It will mean fewer jobs, fewer opportunities to sell work, fewer creative risks, fewer news sources, and far less diversity in the stories Americans get to hear.”
No evidence of any merger benefits
Netflix and Warner Bros. Discovery should have to prove why this merger has any benefit to the public — or even the companies themselves. What would make this deal any different from the failed experiments that created WBD itself or AOL Time Warner, for that matter? Where’s the evidence?
As the Writers Guild of America said in October when the bidding war began: “Merger after merger in the media industry has harmed workers, diminished competition and free speech, and wasted hundreds of billions of dollars.”
The only people who stand to benefit from a mega-merger like this are the bankers, lawyers and money-swimming McDucks — plus Donald Trump, who gets to put the squeeze on these media executives, demand bribes and further warp coverage to cover up his lies and crimes.
As I told Democracy Now!, the only competition Trump is interested in is the one for his favor.
Why antitrust laws exist
The Netflix deal would combine the No. 1 streaming service with HBO Max, the fourth-largest streamer. Paramount’s version would merge two of the top-five biggest movie studios and give one company control of both CBS and CNN (where Paramount’s MAGA-friendly David Ellison is already promising “sweeping changes.”). This level of concentration and control should be unthinkable. It’s also against the law.
“Business leaders are fond of saying that if there’s one thing they want from the law, it is certainty — clear rules to plan around,” Tim Wu, a law professor and former White House official (and long-ago Free Press board member), wrote in The New York Times. “That being the case, they should be happy to hear that Netflix’s plan to buy Warner Bros. Discovery is illegal under U.S. law, as is Paramount’s competing takeover bid.”
The question is whether anyone in the Justice Department will enforce the law. And Trump’s promise to be “involved in that decision” doesn’t inspire much confidence. But we’re still in the earliest days of a review that will likely take more than a year to complete in a fast-changing political climate.
State attorneys general — in places like California, Colorado and New York — could make their own challenges to the deal, as could European regulators. And Congress has an important oversight role to play. We need hearings to grill these CEOs, listen to the workers who stand to lose the most from this merger — and investigate what these companies are promising the Trump regime.
The growing opposition
Labor unions like the Writers Guild and the Teamsters have come out strongly against any WBD deal, as have public-interest and free-speech groups like Fonda’s Committee for the First Amendment and MoveOn. So have filmmakers, distributors and movie-theater owners.
On Dec. 17, I joined nearly 1,000 filmmakers at an online “teach-in” organized by the International Documentary Association, Future Film Coalition and ArtHouse Convergence. At the event, we broke down what’s wrong with these deals and why speaking out now in public and to elected officials is so important. The IDA has posted the whole video or you can watch below.
“We must change the narrative around these deals, which have such huge implications for what we watch and read every day, for our ability to express ourselves freely, and for the future of this democracy,” I wrote in Jacobin. “if we speak out, mobilize and raise the political cost of rubber-stamping this deal — we can not only stop this merger but start building the media system we actually need.”
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