New fact sheet on both Paramount-Warner antitrust suits & a memo on why merger promises fail, both from Economic Liberties

Washington, D.C. —  In a New York Times op-ed published today, Paramount CEO David Ellison argues that the antitrust suits against his company’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery aren’t really about market share, they’re about his politics and whether he can be trusted with CNN. 

Read the complaints and it’s clear that isn’t what’s at issue. Last month a coalition of 12 state attorneys general, led by California’s Rob Bonta, and the Writers Guild of America filed two different federal antitrust cases to block the $100B deal. The arguments within weren’t squishy. They weren’t emotional pleas or about politics. They were standard antitrust cases dealing with market share. The cases are about movies, screenwriters, work and how we consume entertainment. And the numbers in them easily clear the legal thresholds for a presumptively illegal merger in the six markets they plead. 

What’s at stake isn’t only press freedom. It’s ticket prices, cable bills, how many movies get made, and whether the writers who make them have anyone left to sell to. 

This is a concentration case. That’s it. 

But the op-ed is an attempt to surreptitiously change the subject and confuse. It recast an antitrust case as a referendum on one executive’s character, and the remedy changes with it. The problem is not trust, and assurances are not a solution. The problem, as both complaints actually allege, is concentration, and no promise from Paramount fixes that. Ellison’s reframing is how mergers like this one get settled rather than blocked, with the deal closing in exchange for commitments that won’t outlast the news cycle, much less $80 billion of debt. 

A billionaire’s assurance that he intends to behave well is not a remedy, and it isn’t what the law asks.

Economic Liberties has two resources to help reporters, elected leaders, and the public make sense of this deal:

1. A memo by AELP Research Director Matt Stoller making the case against allowing the deal through on concessions. Ellison’s op-ed points to a list of voluntary commitments (30 films a year, 170 television series, more than $30 billion in annual content spending). Stoller examines more than a decade of failed merger remedies, including Live Nation-Ticketmaster, Comcast-NBCUniversal, Disney-Fox, Sprint-T-Mobile, Google-ITA, Albertsons-Safeway, and others. In each case, companies made sweeping promises to secure approval, only for those commitments to be ignored, circumvented, or rendered meaningless after the merger closed. 
2. An easy to read fact sheet diving into two federal antitrust suits. We break down down the markets each complaint pleads, the concentration figures, and the legal standards those figures are measured against. Ellison says this isn’t a market share problem. The numbers in the lawsuits say otherwise.

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

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

Learn more about Economic Liberties here.