‘Independent CNN Oversight Board’ To Be Hand Picked By Paramount

from the embarrassing-capitulation dept

Earlier this week we noted how California Democrats fecklessly folded to Paramount’s demands and settled the 12-state antitrust lawsuit against Paramount’s $111 billion merger with Warner Bros. We also noted how the conditions affixed to the deal are largely pathetic, and generally consist of a lot of performative fluff Paramount itself recommended and California AG Rob Bonta had previously laughed off.

But Bonta is thinking politically about not just Paramount’s lobbying influence, but any future relationships with potential presidential candidate Gavin Newsom or potential future California governor Xavier Becerra (both of whom rushed to pushing for settlement).

None of the conditions meaningfully protect consumers, labor, and markets from what’s coming, but they clearly spent a lot of time designing conditions that let them pretend otherwise.

That includes a purported “independent CBS and CNN oversight board” that’s supposed to prevent Larry Ellison from degrading CNN and CBS’ editorial mission even further. That’s something Paramount itself first floated last August, largely because it knows it will be able to safely ignore it (just as Rupert Murdoch did when he struck a similar deal after the acquisition of the Wall Street Journal).

And sure enough; as details leak out it’s clear the board is largely decorative. Insiders have already noted how the “independent” board will consist of journalists that have at least ten years experience in journalism, but they’ll be hand picked by Paramount:

“According to the terms of the settlement, the board must be established within 180 days of the closing of the deal. It will be composed of five current or former journalists with at least 10 years of experience each and will be appointed by the board of the company for three-year terms.”

That’s just profoundly embarrassing. There’s absolutely zero chance that Paramount is going to appoint the kind of folks capable of pointing out that Ellison, and underlings like Bari Weiss, are actively working to convert CNN and CBS into corporation and oligarch-friendly agitprop. And there’s really nothing preventing Paramount from tap-dancing around the requirements.

I’m sure, like a stopped clock, this board will occasionally and initially make a useful decision to give the impression it’s a real entity. But historically this stuff is designed to prevent real oversight, particularly by government. Former and current insiders at the network simply aren’t impressed:

“There is no way that is going to work,” former CNN anchor Jim Acosta said. “They will start to fire anchors and certain folks to send a message, and the rest will either have to fall in line or leave. This was a colossal mistake.”

CNN and CBS were already pockmarked with a lot of weak-kneed corporation-friendly journalism. Now that Ellison’s involved, both will indisputably begin to look more and more like other right wing propaganda outlets like the New York Post and Fox News.

These kinds of conditions are designed to make it look like responsible people are doing something about media consolidation — without actually doing anything about media consolidation. You protect consumers, labor, and markets by actively enforcing antitrust law; not by endlessly designing half-cooked half-measures that state regulators then fail to consistently enforce.

What’s extra embarrassing is that Democrats like Bonta, Karen Bass, and Newsom had an opportunity here to demonstrate that Democrats had backbone and actually care about subjects like media reform, media consolidation, and the rise of right wing propaganda and disinformation.

Instead they immediately buckled to Ellison’s threat that he’d move Paramount out of California, and are now patting themselves on the back for “saving jobs” — when the end outcome of these deals is always thousands of layoffs as the bigger company offloads merger debt to labor and consumers.

One nice thing about antitrust: if U.S. politicians were to actually enforce the law, we’d have markets more heavily peppered with the kind of small and mid-sized companies that lack the scale and political influence to threaten government when it tries to enforce the law.

Throughout this whole process Paramount (and by proxy a consolidated press) have made it sound like the 12 states were engaged in “radical leftism” simply by enforcing existing antitrust law. It’s important to remember how little Newsom, Bonta, Bass, and Becerra cared about standing up to corporate power the next time you’re in the voting booth.

Filed Under: consolidation, corruption, david ellison, gavin newsom, hollywood, larry ellison, mergers, movies, oversight board, rob bonta, tv

Companies: cbs, cnn, paramount, warner bros.