Twelve state attorneys general filed suit this week to block the proposed $111 billion merger of Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery. If the deal goes through, it would create a single company controlling CNN, CBS News, HBO, HBO Max, Paramount+, Showtime, and the film and television production studios behind some of the most widely distributed content in American entertainment. The attorneys general, led by California’s Rob Bonta, argue the merger would extinguish competition, raise prices, and reduce the volume and quality of content available to American audiences.
The deal has a dimension that the antitrust arguments do not fully capture. Paramount Skydance is controlled by David Ellison, whose father Larry Ellison is the billionaire founder of Oracle and a prominent financial backer of President Trump. The proposed merger would place two of America’s three major broadcast television networks — CBS and whatever CNN has become — under the control of a family with close ties to the current administration. The attorneys general did not make that argument their primary legal claim, because antitrust law does not speak directly to the political relationships of ownership. But the point is not lost on anyone paying attention.
The media consolidation story in America is not new. The number of companies controlling the majority of what Americans read, watch, and hear has been declining for decades, through a series of mergers that each seemed defensible in isolation and collectively produced an information landscape dominated by a handful of corporate actors. The Paramount-Warner Bros. deal would be the largest single step in that consolidation in the history of American media. A company that did not exist a few years ago, run by the son of a Trump donor, would control more of the American media infrastructure than any single entity has before.
The practical implications for audiences are the ones the attorneys general emphasize: less competition means less pressure to keep prices down, less incentive to invest in content quality, and less diversity in the editorial and creative decisions that shape what gets made and distributed. The streaming wars of the 2010s produced an extraordinary period of investment in original content driven by competition among Netflix, HBO, Amazon, and a field of challengers. The merger would reduce that competitive field significantly.
The suit has been filed in federal court. The Justice Department under the current administration has not indicated it will join the state challenge. The FCC review is ongoing. The deal is not complete. But the fight over who owns the infrastructure through which Americans receive information about the world is one of the most consequential contests of this decade, and it is playing out largely outside the public attention it deserves.
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