Los Angeles, CA — In light of today’s surprising and devastating news that California Attorney General Rob Bonta has agreed to settle the states’ antitrust case against Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, the American Economic Liberties Project released the following statement:

“Today, billionaires have yet again bribed, censored, and bullied their way to the top,” said Alvaro Bedoya, Senior Advisor at the American Economic Liberties Project. “As a result, a billionaire media conglomerate closely allied with the president will soon own one of its closest rivals, including some of the nation’s most critical news outlets. Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund will co-own those outlets, too.” 

“Layoffs will follow. People from L.A. to Atlanta will lose their jobs, small businesses will lose their contracts, your cable bill and movie ticket will be even more expensive,” Bedoya added. “Dissent against money and power will be even harder to find.” 

“This did not have to happen. Thanks to an extraordinary outpouring of grassroots anger against the merger, a coalition of 12 state attorneys general sued to block it. They beat Paramount in court, winning a court-ordered pause on the merger, and beat them again at the negotiating table, getting the conglomerate to agree to pause the merger until as late as next June.”

“But the Ellison family does not care about the law. Instead, they loudly threatened to leave California if their merger did not go through immediately. Gavin Newsom caved to that pressure. So did Xavier Becerra. And eventually, so did Attorney General Rob Bonta, agreeing to a weak settlement that will be exceedingly difficult to enforce.”

“People want champions who are not afraid of rich bullies. Newsom, Becerra, and Bonta did not meet that mark. The people who work in the film and TV industry and the small businesses who support it will suffer as a result. And so will everyone who values dissent in our democracy.” 

“This is not the end. The coalition that fought to block this illegal merger will fight to break up big media. There is legislation pending in Congress today that would retroactively break up corrupt billionaire mergers. This industry was once marked with strict rules so that a small handful of conglomerates couldn’t own everything. There’s no reason we cannot return to that reality. There’s no reason we can’t build on it.”

“But today is a loss, and that loss will be felt by the people who can least afford it.” 

Economic Liberties has documented the long history of consent decrees and merger settlements, and the record is unambiguous: they don’t work. In merger after merger — Live Nation-Ticketmaster, Disney-Fox, Albertsons-Safeway, to name a few — companies made sweeping promises to win approval, then ignored or circumvented them once the deal closed. The enforcement infrastructure to monitor these commitments is threadbare, and courts have shown little appetite for policing them. Moreover, once a merger is consummated, it is far more difficult to unwind the deal. The companies are integrated, the harm compounds and the promises are quietly ignored while the market power issues are exacerbated. 

The stakes here extend far beyond one industry. This merger will hurt the writers, actors, and crew members who fought it and spoke to us as we traveled the country during our Main Street vs. The Merger roundtables. But it also lands at a moment of immense consolidation and constriction in American news media, with ownership concentrating in fewer, more oligarchy-friendly hands. Attorney General Rob Bonta’s decision to settle isn’t only about the people whose livelihoods are immediately at risk. It’s about who controls what the public gets to see, hear, and know. That question was worth fighting for, and still is. 

Read our memo, “The Case Against Negotiating ‘Concessions’ in a Paramount-Warner Deal,” here.

Read our fact sheet, “The Antitrust Cases Challenging The Paramount/Warner Bros. Discovery Merger,” here.

Learn more about Economic Liberties here.