#david ellison

[liberalsarecool]

Holy shit his son is creepy.

The Ellisons are going to strip assets from their acquisitions that were built by talented artists and truly skilled professionals and create new content that caters to these douchebags.

[justinsentertainmentcorner]

Paramount, WBD hit with lawsuit from 12 states, including California, to block merger

A group of states, including California, filed a lawsuit to block the merger between Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery.

Lillian Rizzo at CNBC:

A group of 12 state attorneys general filed a lawsuit Monday challenging Paramount Skydance’s proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. The lawsuit, which came after weeks of speculation on if and when it would be filed, seeks to block the merger for antitrust concerns. CNBC’s David Faber reported earlier in the day that the lawsuit was expected to come on Monday. The merger deal would combine two storied film studios — Paramount and Warner Bros. — as well as streaming platforms Paramount+ and HBO Max. Paramount CEO David Ellison has previously said the streaming services would become one following the transaction. It would also mean the formation of the largest portfolio of TV networks in the U.S., bringing together Paramount’s broadcast network CBS and pay TV channels like MTV and BET with WBD’s CNN, TNT and others. Led by California Attorney General Rob Bonta, the lawsuit, which was filed in the U.S. District for the Northern District of California, is also brought forth by attorneys general of Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, and Washington.

[...] Paramount could face additional costs if closing the deal were to be delayed. As part of the proposed merger, Paramount has has agreed to pay a so-called ticking fee, which kicks in if the closing goes past Sept. 30. Paramount set the fee at an additional 25 cents paid to WBD shareholders per quarter until closing. The fee would equal about $650 million in cash value per quarter for every quarter the deal is not closed.

12 states, led by California, are leading a lawsuit against the Paramount Skydance behemoth’s takeover of WBD.

See Also:

Reuters, via HuffPost: California, 11 States Suing To Block Paramount's $110 Billion Warner Bros. Deal

Daily Kos: Democratic attorneys general sue to stop MAGA media merger

[charliejaneanders]

If Paramount does succeed in buying WBD in the end, consolidation will have reached a new peak. We'll have one fewer major movie studio. And a few players would have much more power over what gets made going forward.

In my latest newsletter, I interview box office pundit Lisa Laman about why a Paramount-Warner Bros. merger would be bad for the movie industry.

[onlytiktoks]

[departmentq]

As I look at the promotional photos of the Starfleet Academy show that were dropped at SDCC, a feel a touch of sadness...

The current era of Star Trek could come to an end...

If you have been keeping up with business news, the Skydance/Paramount merger was approved by the FCC, albeit some drama and alleged financial compensation for a certain failed NY real estate mogul.

Skydance CEO, David Elliott, is the son of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, a known Trump supporter... and already the effects are being felt; CBS has fired Stephen Colbert and ended the 30 year run of the Late Show. Paramount also owns the networks Comedy Central, and Nickelodeon. The new CEO has promised to end DEI initiatives at Paramount:

The Star Trek franchise is one of Paramount's well known IP, but currently doesn't align with the prevailing administration's values.

Meant to be social commentary, Roddenberry created a future of equality and diversity. Women, People of color were cast in positions of command and professional authority under Berman's tenure. In the Kurtzman era, we saw inclusion of LGBT+ with same sex couples/parents, non binary and trans characters.

I don't see the new CEO endorsing a progressive vision of the franchise, and I see two possible outcomes going forward:

1) Paramount lets the last of Kurtzman shows end and just let the franchise go dormant or:

2) they find a new show runner who's values align, and retool to be more whoosh-whoosh and pew-pew, and less social commentary and progressive vision.

At 8yo, live TAS was my gateway (1973), and after that, all I had, all we had was three seasons of reruns. Our outlet for our fandom was the art we created; be it illustrative, physical, or written. Conventions were our trading outposts where we sold/traded the results of our passions for a show that lasted only 79 episodes. A decade of fan produced content, from the last episode, until the premiere of TMP.

Perhaps it is up to us, the fans, to take back and ensure the vision the Star Trek; a vision of progress, of diversity , inclusion, and empathy.

A vision of hope that things will be better tomorrow, for all of us.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

"Stains the Legacy"

An 18-year-old said to CBS’s face what the network’s own stars have spent a year only daring to imply.

Parker Molloy at The Present Age:

Last Wednesday, at the 47th News and Documentary Emmy Awards, an 18-year-old high school senior named Santiago Campos accepted a $10,000 scholarship from CBS News and used his moment at the microphone to tell a ballroom full of the most powerful people in American television that the network had betrayed the man whose name was on the award. The award is named for Mike Wallace, one of the original “60 Minutes” correspondents and the kind of interviewer the powerful learned to dread. The grant money comes from CBS News. Scott Pelley handed it to him.

Campos thanked them for it. Then he kept talking. He said CBS’s recent direction “stains the legacy of Mike Wallace, the namesake of this scholarship.” He said corporate elites were seizing “the very pipes through which our information flows.” And he finished like this: “So if at any time you hesitate to utter the word ‘genocide’ or remain silent in the face of blatant lies, remember to ask yourself, who is this for?” Then, to the room: “I hope you choose us.” [...] For about a year, the journalists watching CBS get hollowed out have been saying a version of what Campos said. Just not like that. They’ve said it in resignation memos and farewell broadcasts and the occasional interview, in language vague enough to keep their jobs or protect against getting blackballed elsewhere. Campos didn’t have a job to keep. So he said it the way you’d say it if you weren’t afraid, and the reaction in that room gave away how rare that’s gotten.

The long takeover

None of this started with Campos, and none of it was a secret. I’ve covered just about every step of it.

Trump sued CBS over an edited 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris and demanded $20 billion. Paramount, which needed the Trump administration to wave through its merger with Skydance, paid $16 million to make it disappear. When Stephen Colbert called that settlement a “big fat bribe” on the air, CBS canceled his show and called it a “financial decision.” Bill Owens, the executive producer of 60 Minutes, resigned in April. Wendy McMahon, the president of CBS News, was gone a month later. Then the new owners made their real move. David Ellison’s Skydance took over Paramount, and Ellison, who is friendly with Trump, bought Bari Weiss’s opinion site The Free Press and installed her atop CBS News, with her former Free Press colleague Adam Rubenstein as a top deputy. In December, three hours before air, Weiss spiked a finished 60 Minutes report on the El Salvador megaprison where the administration was shipping the men it deported. It ran a month later, buried. Weiss said the segment “was not ready.” Take her at her word for a second, then look at what “ready” has turned out to mean.

Weiss is staunchly pro-Israel, and so is the pattern she’s built. A Variety cover story on Ellison reported that one staffer believed CBS’s layoffs had fallen hardest on journalists whose work was critical of Israel, among them the veteran foreign correspondent Debora Patta, who’d reported from Gaza for years. The New York Post reported that Weiss pulled a pro-Israel correspondent off the layoff list after he lobbied to become the network’s Israel correspondent, and cut Patta instead, months after Patta’s interview with Mike Huckabee, Trump’s ambassador to Israel, drew his complaint that CBS had edited his words unfairly. And Zeteo reported that Weiss personally reworked a CBS Sunday Morning story about Israeli digs in the occupied West Bank just before it aired, something staffers said she’d never done to that broadcast before.

This is the context for the word Campos chose. In September, a UN commission of inquiry concluded that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza (Israel rejected the finding). So when an 18-year-old stood on a CBS stage and dared the room to say “genocide,” he was reaching for the exact word the network had trained its people not to say. Notice how all of it got described. A finished report “wasn’t ready.” Killing a late-night show was “a financial decision.” Every move came wrapped in language built to mean as little as possible. For a year, nobody inside CBS said the plain thing out loud. And then, last week, somebody did.

Then Pelley said it too

Scott Pelley had handed Campos that award only days earlier, and told the room, “God, we need young people like you right behind us.” On Monday, the staff of 60 Minutes gathered to meet the new boss Weiss had chosen to run the show: Nick Bilton, a former tech columnist and author who has never produced television news. Bilton said Weiss “loves” 60 Minutes. Pelley cut him off. “She’s murdering ‘60 Minutes,’” he said. “She was brought in to kill it, and she’s doing exactly that.” He said it in a closed meeting, on audio that Oliver Darcy’s Status newsletter obtained.

Then he kept going, the way Wallace might have. He told Bilton, to his face, that he had “slender” qualifications for the job. He pressed him on the firings of the week before, when Weiss cleared out much of the show, and called the way they’d been handled “cruel.” When Weiss’s deputy Charles Forelle told Pelley he was being “rude,” Pelley shot back that what was rude was “Black Thursday.” The other producers in the room applauded him. Afterward, some of them wondered whether he would resign. Here’s what makes Pelley worth pausing on. A year ago he gave a commencement speech at Wake Forest that went viral, anchored to a line from George Orwell, carved into the wall of the BBC, that liberty “means telling someone something that they don’t want to hear.” He warned those graduates about “the fear to speak in America.” Last week, on the Emmy stage, an 18-year-old did the exact thing Pelley had described, told a room what it didn’t want to hear, at his own expense, and Pelley applauded him for it. Now Pelley’s doing it himself.

Start with where Campos was standing.

He’s eighteen, a senior at a public school in Washington, about to leave for college. The scholarship is a one-time check, not a contract. He doesn’t have a beat to lose or a future at CBS to protect, because he was never angling for one. The network has something to hold over everybody we just met: a paycheck, a next assignment that comes or doesn’t. It has nothing to hold over a kid who’s only passing through. He wasn’t trying to detonate the evening, either. “I knew it was kind of what I had to do,” he told Barr, and he’d run the gist of his remarks past the television academy beforehand, so it wasn’t an ambush. He used the moment anyway, with CBS’s money already in hand. And he saw the asymmetry clearly. Asked about the response, he told the Guardian that all the attention mostly proved how far the bar has dropped, that what he said should be ordinary, the kind of thing working journalists do every day rather than something left to an 18-year-old at a podium. He’s right, and he put it better than I could.

His own statement afterward said the rest. He believes in journalism made for ordinary people instead of elites, and that it starts with “the audacity and integrity to call out the same organization funding my award.” Reporters who can’t manage that much, he wrote, can’t be trusted at all. That’s the whole asymmetry. The word he reached for, “genocide,” named exactly what CBS had been editing around. He could say it because he wants nothing the network is in a position to withhold. The fear Pelley named at Wake Forest belongs to people with something to lose inside the building. Campos was never inside it.

This is a profile in courage: Santiago Campos, the recipient of a $10,000 scholarship from CBS News named after Mike Wallace, tore into the destructive Weiss/Ellison/Bilton takeover of the once-esteemed CBS News and its storied 60 Minutes program on the News and Documentary Emmy Awards stage.

[joe-england]

The CBS Evening News may never recover from Bari Weiss' meddling

Just how bad are things at CBS? Insiders & seasoned pros say it's a train wreck, calamity, crisis, sinking ship & disaster as the marquee ev

The CBS Evening News may never recover from Bari Weiss' meddling

[tomorrowusa]

Senate Dem Threatens Companies Courting Trump’s Favor for Mergers: ‘We’re Going to Break’ You Up

“We have to make it so painful that generations from now CEOs will flinch at the idea of business corruptly teaming up with government.”

Corporations and broligarchs who pander to Donald Trump need a reality check. He will not be in power forever. And when MAGA ends up in the dumpster fire of history, much of Trumpdom will be undone.

Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) has some words of warning to those who manipulate Trump to bypass fair business practices.

Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) warned business leaders who he sees as cozying up to President Donald Trump to get mergers approved that once Democrats return to power, “we’re going to break up your companies.” Gallego made the comment to Semafor, and it was included in a larger piece about Democrats weighing “how harshly to go after firms that courted Trump.” The article ran amid the news that Paramount, a company owned by Trump ally David Ellison, is moving closer to a takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery – which would include major media properties like CNN. If the merger were to go through, CNN, CBS, HBO Max, and various other media behemoths would all be under one roof. “Once we take power, whoever the president is, we’re going to break up your companies,” Gallego told Semafor. “So all the investment you did to create these mergers are going to be for naught. Your investors are going to be pissed at you, and you’re likely going to end up getting fired as the CEO because you wasted so much money and corrupted yourself in the process.” The Arizona Democrat later added on social media, “We have to make it so painful that generations from now CEOs will flinch at the idea of business corruptly teaming up with government.”

Antitrust laws are being ignored. During the Progressive Era of the early 20th century, Standard Oil was broken up into 39 separate companies. In the early 1980s, AT&T's near monopoly over telephone service and phones was ended.

The growing 21st century monopolies in tech, communications, and entertainment are bad enough by themselves. What makes them worse is that they and their owners are having an inordinate influence on government. This is corruption at the highest level and needs to be ended.