Last month, Paramount Skydance CEO and Trump ally David Ellison threatened to relocate the company out of California in response to his ongoing legal battle with California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who is suing, along with 12 other states, aiming to block the $110 billion Warner Bros. Discovery takeover. The threat was first reported by Semafor. Now, Bonta has responded.
“Paramount agreed to halt the merger until a court decision or until June 2027, asked for a November trial, and is now back with another attempt to blackmail the state into letting an illegal deal through,” Bonta wrote on X. “Paramount has lost the plot as it continues to lose in court. It didn’t work the first time … and it won’t work this time.”
If Paramount were to move its HQ, it would likely happen before Oct. 1, when “Paramount will start accruing a $7-million-per-day ‘ticking fee’ payable to WBD shareholders until the deal closes,” according to Variety. Which state will it be? That’s not clear yet, but presumably it wouldn’t be any of the dozen states suing the company, which include Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon and Washington. Ellison’s shortlist reportedly includes Georgia, Texas and Tennessee.
The Warner Bros. Discovery takeover has been steeped in controversy since the beginning. Recently, a pair of government watchdog groups demanded investigations into whether Paramount gifted luxury gala tickets to Federal Communications Commission members, thus violating ethics requirements, while the company sought approval for its acquisition.
In a span of weeks, Paramount agreed to halt the merger until a court decision or until June 2027, asked for a November trial, and is now back with another attempt to blackmail the state into letting an illegal deal through.
Paramount has lost the plot as it continues to lose…
Ellison has been a major Trump acolyte in the president’s second term. After the Trump administration approved Skydance’s takeover of Paramount in 2025, Ellison hand-picked political commentator Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News, sparking months of controversy as viewership has cratered and stories related to the Epstein files and immigration were spiked.
Two government watchdog groups have demanded investigations into whether Federal Communications Commission members violated ethics requirements by accepting luxury gala tickets from Paramount as the company sought government approval for its $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery.
Commissioner Olivia Trusty’s most recent financial disclosure said Paramount gave her two tickets to the December 2025 honors gala that together were worth more than $12,000. Trusty was one of two commissioners who voted last year to approve Paramount’s merger with another media company, Skydance.
ProPublica’s investigation found FCC members had long enjoyed a night out at the Kennedy Center courtesy of CBS or its parent company. Seven of the 10 commissioners who served since 2016 accepted tickets worth more than $260,000, according to a ProPublica analysis of ethics disclosures.
FCC Chair Brendan Carr’s financial statements show he has reported accepting honors gala tickets from CBS or its parent company eight times since his 2017 appointment to the commission, totaling over $75,000 in gifts.
Carr, who also voted in favor of the Paramount-Skydance merger last year, sat with his wife in a private skybox at the December gala with Paramount CEO David Ellison and other executives from Paramount and CBS. Such seats sold for $125,000 a ticket, according to Kennedy Center guidelines.
Carr disclosed on his latest financial statement that he accepted tickets from Paramount for himself and a guest to the 2025 gala and reception worth $12,390. Carr did not respond to a request from ProPublica to clarify the apparent difference in value between those tickets and the skybox seats.
The FCC only released Carr’s disclosure late on Friday, more than a month after ProPublica had first requested it. The document says the agency certified it on June 22.
“The federal gift regulations and the gratuities statute exist to ensure that government decisions are made on the merits, free from the influence of private benefits,” the Democracy Defenders Fund said in its complaint. “The public must have confidence that the FCC’s merger review process is not compromised by self-dealing or the appearance of impropriety.”
Carr, Trusty and the FCC did not respond to requests for comment. The agency’s inspector general declined to comment. An FCC spokesperson previously told ProPublica that agency ethics officers have for years cleared commissioners to accept the tickets, finding it consistent with ethics law. And Paramount’s chief of communications said it was a decades-long “CBS practice to invite government officials from both parties” to the Kennedy Center show. Carr last year defended the FCC’s approval of the Paramount merger with Skydance, saying it “advances the public interest.”
The FCC’s review of the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger is one of the final federal hurdles facing a historic consolidation of two of the five largest film studios in Hollywood. The deal would unite Paramount Skydance with Warner Bros., bringing under the control of one company Paramount+ and HBO Max streaming services; CBS and CNN; and scores of other major broadcast channels, cable networks and digital platforms.
Four ethics experts told ProPublica that by accepting the tickets, Trusty and Carr had compromised the FCC’s impartiality and should not take part in any upcoming decision on Paramount’s proposed merger.
The Democracy Defenders Fund — led by Norman Eisen, former ambassador to the Czech Republic and White House ethics czar under President Barack Obama — filed its grievance on Thursday with the federal Office of Government Ethics, the FCC’s inspector general and the FCC’s ethics office.
The group said the investigation should examine whether Carr and Trusty broke rules on accepting gifts or broke criminal laws prohibiting federal officials from accepting illegal gratuities.
Carr and Trusty should be required to repay Paramount the “fair market value” of any improper gifts and the federal ethics agency should refrain from certifying Carr’s annual disclosure report until he can prove that he has complied with ethics laws, Democracy Defenders Fund wrote. Its letter to the FCC and the Office of Government Ethics also requests that Carr be disqualified from further participation in the commission’s decision on the Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger.
The nonprofit organization noted that hours after last year’s honors gala ended, Paramount announced it was launching its hostile takeover bid of Warner Bros. Discovery, a move that would later result in a merger agreement that requires FCC approval. About three months later, Carr publicly endorsed the deal on CNBC, promising swift approval.
“The facts that have been reported raise serious questions about the integrity and impartiality of FCC Chairman Carr in particular matters involving Paramount,” including the attempted merger with Warner Bros. Discovery, the letter said.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the other group that filed a written protest, requested an FCC inspector general probe of the luxury gifts.
“The reported gifts to FCC officials from businesses that are not only subject to agency regulation but presently engaged in billion-dollar mergers and acquisitions that must be approved by the commissioners themselves are extremely concerning threats to the integrity of FCC operations,” the CREW letter stated.
CREW, founded in 2003 as a nonpartisan organization dedicated to government accountability and ethics, is headed by Donald K. Sherman, a former House Ethics Committee attorney and special assistant to President Joseph Biden.
“Government officials have the power to make decisions that impact huge swaths of the American people,” Sherman said in a statement about the organization’s demand for an inspector general investigation. “With this tremendous power comes a higher ethical standard that apparently wasn’t met. The IG can and must get answers for the public.”
The proposed merger between Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery has drawn a flurry of legal opposition.
California, New York and 10 other states filed a lawsuit seeking to block the merger under federal and state antimonopoly laws. The Writers Guild of America, the Freedom of the Press Foundation and the Public Interest Project filed similar court challenges in recent weeks.
Paramount has recently agreed to pause its merger until the litigation is resolved or until June 1, 2027, whichever comes first.
The trouble with Diarra Brickland is she can’t let things go.
“Diarra From Detroit” presents this as the schoolteacher-turned-detective’s greatest asset and her biggest flaw. If it weren’t for her stubborn insistence on finding out why a great guy, Chris (Shannon Wallace), ghosted her after an incredible first date, she might be happier. Then again, nobody would have noticed that Chris had been kidnapped.
But Diarra’s tendency to fixate on small details and slights eventually cracked the case. They also brought to light a broader conspiracy, starting with the twist that this wasn’t Chris’ first kidnapping.
As Season 2 begins, Chris and Diarra have settled into coupledom, which is precisely what Diarra thought she wanted, but nothing like she pictured it would be. Chris is a mess. Diarra would love to dump him, but her nearest and dearest friends Aja (DomiNque Perry) and Tea (Bryan Terrell Clark) warn her that would damage her reputation. The single bright spot and mixed blessing to come out of all this is that her neighbors see Diarra as the go-to person for fixing lost causes and finding lost people. Hence her latest caper, which begins with a mission to track down a vintage desk and turns on a dime into a heist tied to a cache of gold.
But wait, as our hard-boiled citizen investigator is fond of saying. I should go back. You see, these latest episodes of “Diarra From Detroit,” created by its star, Diarra Kilpatrick, have been cooking for more than two years. Three, if you count the series’ debut at the 2023 Tribeca Festival before its 2024 premiere on BET+. From there, it sat in limbo until Paramount renewed it in 2025.
But limbo is better than canceled, which is more likely to happen if the proposed merger between Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery goes through.
Like Diarra and Chris’ relationship status, the case of Paramount’s proposed marriage to Warner Bros. is complicated. Hollywood all but accepted that the merger was a done deal until mid-July, when a dozen state attorneys general and along with the Writers Guild of America West and Eastfiled a lawsuit to stop the merger and California U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín issued a restraining order to temporarily halt the proceedings. (Salon’s unionized employees are represented by the WGA East.)
On July 24, Paramount’s legal team agreed to postpone the merger pending the outcome of the states’ antitrust case. That could potentially delay the transaction for more than a year, since the opposing sides can’t agree on when they want the trial to begin. The states would prefer a 2027 start while Paramount wants to kick it off this fall. If the AGs win, Paramount’s inevitable appeal could keep the $110 billion deal backburnered well into late 2027.
The states argue that this merger would leave consumers paying more for less diverse news and entertainment options if finalized.
The continued existence of shows like “Diarra From Detroit” — shows by female, non-white creators about a place and people rarely depicted in the fullness of their humanity on television — is a miracle under normal circumstances.
What this means is that as tough as it already was for a TV series created by a Black woman to be picked up by a major platform, it could be nearly impossible in a universe in which Paramount has swallowed HBO, CNN and other prime Warner Bros. channels. Even in a scenario where BET+ still existed — it officially shut down on July 22 — making original stories like “Diarra” requires resources and a level of corporate will that a megacorporation’s smaller brands don’t tend to be afforded. In a contracted media landscape with fewer places to pitch, its odds of landing in front of audiences on a major platform decline even further. And they weren’t all that high to begin with.
Meanwhile, Paramount is urging us to pay no attention to the Ellisonsbehind the curtain. “This merger is lawful, pro-competitive, and will benefit consumers, creators, workers, and the entertainment industry,” a Paramount spokesperson said in a statement.
“All four categories of diversity—ownership, representation, viewpoint, and outlet—are threatened by this merger, reducing the forms of diversity the public depends upon in cinemas, over the airwaves, and across online platforms,” they warn in a recently published paper. Previous findings by the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative back this conclusion.
Among those paying attention to The Mystery of the Media Merger, the survival of TV’s Diarra Bricklands is not the top concern. All eyes are on CNN, as Sharon Waxman, the founder and editor-in-chief of The Wrap, explained in a recent New York Times column.
If what’s happening to CBS News under editor-in-chief Bari Weiss is a sign of things to come, that’s another assault on our already besieged democracy. A greater one, even, since CNN is a global news brand.
Consider that only days ago, “60 Minutes” announced that former New York Times Opinion columnist Ross Douthat is joining its ranks. Douthat, if you’ve forgotten, is the guy who proposed in a 2018 column that the solution to placating incel violence may be between the legs of hypothetical charitable women who feel sorry for them. Or sexbots.
Corporate media traded insightful journalism for ragebait like this years ago, which is what makes figures like Diarra Brickland and her creator ever more valuable. They’re Black women excelling in roles not often associated with (or awarded to) people of color.
And to specifically bring it back to Douthat’s dubious query, Diarra — either of them — is precisely the kind of woman who puts the lie to fantasies about female submissiveness. Season 2 starts with her realizing she’s probably better off free of her mystery prize.
But for now, Chris and Diarra are in counseling. Part of their unofficial relationship homework involves field missions that spark heated conversations about masculine insecurity and Diarra’s conflicted desires about motherhood.
One topic she’s absolutely clear about, however, is being in control of every aspect of her life — including but not limited to Chris’ access to the part of her body she describes as “the Cadillac of the human anatomy: Gorgeous interior, impeccable design, not to mention the portal for all of humanity.”
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Writing like this ensures that “Diarra From Detroit” remains nimble from start to finish of each episode. That alone isn’t why this show and others like it need to be championed and protected. Television history is littered with the bodies of terrific shows denied more than a few seasons, or even a full order of one.
Citizen detectives like Diarra Brickland, who arranges her messy life around ensuring that the people and prizes typically overlooked or quietly erased by the mainstream keep being seen, are even less common. The continued existence of shows like “Diarra From Detroit” — shows by female, non-white creators about a place and people rarely depicted in the fullness of their humanity on television — is a miracle under normal circumstances. With that in mind, both the show and the merger are cases worth tracking right now and in the months to come, as if the quality of our lives depends on it.
New episodes of “Diarra From Detroit” stream Wednesdays through Sept. 9 on Paramount +.
Donald Trump’s Great American State Fair was widely mocked as a great American flop: overpriced, uncomfortable and, above all, dull.
Well, bad news for fans of fun: Trump’s billionaire buddies, Larry and David Ellison, are about to bring MAGA-ified misery to the rest of entertainment with their proposed merger of Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery, which will likely make movie theaters, cable TV and other entertainment products a lot more MAGA — and a lot more boring.
Larry and David Ellison are the father-and-son duo behind Paramount’s attempted purchase of Warner Bros., a move that would consolidate most of Hollywood into a few hands and dramatically reduce free market competition in the entertainment industry. The two often present, especially in court documents, as simple businessmen just trying to make money. But in reality, Larry Ellison was called a “shadow president” by a Trump adviser speaking to Wired last year. The Ellisons aren’t just in this for money. They are in it for power — and their vision of remaking the country and even world in their MAGA-centric image.
Above all, MAGA is bad at culture, too strapped to their narrow interests and bigotries to understand what makes entertainment actually entertaining.
Whether they succeed in the long run remains to be seen, but in the process, they are going to make your movie-going and likely TV-viewing experiences more tiresome. Above all, MAGA is bad at culture, too strapped to their narrow interests and bigotries to understand what makes entertainment actually entertaining.
Last week, the attorneys general of a dozen states, along with the Writers Guild of America West and East, filed suit to stop the merger, which has unsurprisingly been approved by Trump’s corrupt Justice Department. (Full disclosure: I’m a member of WGAE.) Labor and economic concerns fuel these lawsuits, but the consumer experience is front and center. On Monday afternoon, the merger was frozen by a federal judge’s temporary restraining order.
“The unlawful merger of these two entertainment behemoths would lead to higher prices, lower quality, and less content for film and television, harming movie theaters, basic cable distributors, and ultimately, audiences on every sofa and movie theater seat in the U.S.,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said at a press conference on Wednesday.
On the podcast “The Town with Matthew Belloni,” he argued that the quality of movie theaters themselves will decline even more if the merger goes through. “You won’t have comfortable seating,” Bonta said. “You won’t have the same quality and variety at concession stands.”
Under the Ellisons, the future of the movies stands to echo the Great American State Fair, where consumers had the pleasure of paying $25 for an overcooked drumstick while they stood in an empty plaza on the National Mall in Washington waiting for the elderly Lee Greenwood to sing “God Bless the USA” for the billionth time.
Experts I talked to explained that such decline is the economic result of consolidation, which reduces competition and therefore removes incentives for movie studios to take creative risks. Miranda Banks, a professor at Loyola Marymount University who has conducted extensive research on media mergers, contrasted this low-competition era with the 1970s, when Hollywood was full of “creative workers” and “a lot of independent companies,” which created “an open market of bidding for good quality programming.” Now companies avoid originality in favor of “churning out more films within franchises,” which is cheaper and easier than developing original products with independent creators.
But it is also about power and political ideology, explained James Schamus, a screenwriter who once ran Focus Features and is now a Columbia University professor. He argued that the Ellisons are building a “techno fascist project” that is far more interested in waging “war on democracy” than old school Hollywood concerns like selling movie tickets. “Short-term profit is happily sacrificed to long-term domination,” Schamus said.
Chief among these goals is mass surveillance of the population through many means, which includes making sure people can’t watch a movie or TV show without having to hand all their data over to Oracle, the another Larry Ellison-owned company. The elder Ellison isn’t exactly coy about his dystopian scheme: At an Oracle financial analyst meeting in 2024, he promised his company would pave the path to mass social control.
“Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on,” he said. Unsurprisingly, both Larry and David Ellison are big fans of artificial intelligence, seeing it as a way to streamline their surveillance operations, and for what David Ellison euphemistically calls “cost efficiencies and synergies.”
That’s just code for “firing thousands, if not tens of thousands, of creative people,” Schamus said, and replacing good work with dreck “made for the cheapest price” for the “lowest common denominator.”
Anyone who spends time on X or Truth Social knows that, while most Americans loathe empty A.I. slop, there is one audience that eats it up: MAGA folks. Trump himself loves it. He constantly posts A.I. videos that are as tedious as they are uncanny, and his cultural tastes are mirrored by the bulk of right-wing audiences, who artistic discernment is too clouded by bitterness and ideological obsession to engage with the more human emotions that make movies, TV and music engaging to other people. The MAGA capture of Hollywood behemoths like Paramount and Warner Bros. threatens to gut the ability of smart, creative people to make good things, and replace it with mind-numbing rubbish.
“Once upon a time, in Hollywood,” Banks said, movie studios were run by people whose “goal was to get people into the theater.” They were “not good guys or kind guys,” she explained, but ultimately, they saw their job as “making money to make more movies.” However cynical — and largely straight, white and male — some old-school operators were, they helped to build a Hollywood that was centered around giving the people what they wanted. This seems like paradise compared to what the Ellisons and their kind envision.
“For these guys,” Banks said, the goal “is extraction,” and “what they’re extracting is not just our money, but our data.” For years, movie ticket sales have been declining, because of this shift from seeing the consumer not as a customer to please, but a mark to suck dry. In some ways, the Ellisons don’t care that much if you ever go back to the movies.
“They all think they should be the techno-fascist philosopher king at the end of the day,” Schamus said, referring not just to the Ellisons, but also to similar megalomaniacal MAGA billionaires like tech investors Peter Thiel and Elon Musk (who recently lost his trillionaire status). At a certain point, these men have amassed so much money that it’s meaningless. The next hill to conquer is social control.
Making media more MAGA will make it dumber, but that’s by design. Truly creative and inspiring art undermines that goal, because it provokes responses like empathy and critical thinking in audiences — which gets in the way of authoritarian domination.
UPDATE: This article has been updating to reflect a federal judge’s temporary restraining order against the merger on July 20.
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