Amid mounting obstacles and delays to a planned $110 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, CBS Sports parent company Paramount is still growing more defiant that it can—and should—close the deal.
After Paramount agreed late last month to an elongated schedule for the media megadeal as it fights an antitrust challenge from 12 states, company CEO David Ellison attacked the plaintiffs in a New York Times op-ed.
More specifically, Ellison claimed the complaint from the dozen states is not really about an illegal concentration of Hollywood market share, as they allege, but rather Paramount’s planned ownership of WBD’s CNN.
“I believe this fight is not really about market share,” Ellison wrote in the piece published Tuesday. “If it were, it wouldn’t have been reviewed and approved by regulators reflecting 65 countries, including the United States and China, as well as the European Union. I believe a plainer worry sits beneath the briefs and the news releases: the news. The issue is whether I can be trusted as a steward of Warner’s CNN. There has been speculation about my politics, my loyalties, my intentions.”
Furthering that speculation is the repeated criticism of CNN by U.S. President Donald Trump, who has a close relationship with Ellison. Trump isn’t mentioned in the op-ed, but Ellison insists that the news network, along with Paramount’s existing CBS News, would operate free from his influence. Notably, the arrival of CBS News editor Bari Weiss under Paramount, and the subsequent upheaval at that outlet, are also not discussed in Ellison’s op-ed.
