{"id":814,"date":"2026-08-10T19:04:27","date_gmt":"2026-08-10T19:04:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=814"},"modified":"2026-08-10T19:04:27","modified_gmt":"2026-08-10T19:04:27","slug":"david-ellisons-delusional-stab-at-self-justification","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=814","title":{"rendered":"David Ellison\u2019s Delusional Stab at Self-Justification"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Now that the looming Paramount\u2013Warner Bros merger is on hold until a lawsuit from nearly a dozen states to stop it is resolved in in an Oakland, California, courtroom next June, backers of the deal have renewed their efforts to sell it as a journalistic-creative breakthrough as well as an entertainment miracle. Former Fox and CNN anchor Chris Wallace, now an adviser to Redbird Capital, which has a major stake in the deal, wrote an op-ed hymning its genius for The Hollywood Reporter<\/em>. Ari Emmanuel, brother of Rahm and CEO of the Ultimate Fighting Championship league, which has a $1.1 billion deal with Paramount-Skydance, echoed the same basic case in The Wall Street Journal<\/em>. But it was the New York Times<\/em> salvo from Paramount-Skydance\u2019s chief executive, David Ellison, that drew the most attention, as he defended his bid to absorb Warner-Discovery into the maw of Skydance, as well as his checkered first year in journalism at CBS.<\/p>\n

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First and foremost, Ellison hoped to use his platform at the paper of record to take back the narrative from the hundreds of petition signers, film-industry critics, journalists, and politicians who have decried the bid from Paramount-Skydance to buy out Warner Bros. Discovery for $111 billion as a move to drastically narrow the independence of both filmmaking and news-gathering in the MAGA age. \u201cWhen California\u2019s attorney general, 11 other state attorneys general and, a day later, the Writers Guild of America sued to stop the deal, I stayed quiet,\u201d Ellison wrote in a disingenuous show of humility. \u201cI quickly learned such restraint has costs. While I was silent, others were happy to write my story for me. No more.\u201d<\/p>\n

The ensuing testimony was something well shy of the inspiring story of a scrappy young producer who arrived in Hollywood with nothing but a dream and his father\u2019s Oracle fortune in his pocket. It was a list of talking points that relied more on familiar right-wing claims about the media industry than on a case to deliver even more corporate control and news-making influence into the hands of the Skydance conglomerate. Since a Warner Bros takeover would leave David Ellison, and more alarmingly, his MAGA-devoted father, tech billionaire Larry Ellison, exercising near-unprecedented control over the production of theatrical films, multiple cable networks, and both CBS and CNN, Ellison\u2019s broadside offered little substantive response to the deal\u2019s detractors in multiple industries, unions, and the sprawling global audience their platforms will reach.<\/p>\n

Ellison pointedly disregarded such concerns, opting instead to defend his proposed stewardship of CNN in the wake of Bari Weiss\u2019s controversial ideological makeover of his CBS News. \u201cThe issue is whether I can be trusted as a steward of Warner\u2019s CNN. There has been speculation about my politics, my loyalties, my intentions.\u201d<\/p>\n

And with good reason. During the period of this deal and his buyout of Paramount and its properties, David Ellison was spotted at June\u2019s White House UFC bout sitting next to President Trump. Ellison also attended the State of the Union address as the guest of the now-deceased Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, and convened a dinner in Trump\u2019s honor during the White House Correspondents\u2019 Dinner weekend in April.<\/p>\n

Trump has been clear in spelling out what he wants. \u201cIt\u2019s imperative that CNN be sold,\u201d he said at a cabinet meeting last December. When he\u2019s not deriding network anchor Jake Tapper as \u201cFake Tapper,\u201d he calls CNN a \u201cdisgrace.\u201d He clearly wants some guarantees that the Ellisons will steer CNN into MAGA-friendly territory, in much the same way that Weiss has made CBS News an obliging outlet for Trumpian agitprop. Trump\u2019s cabinet officials have fallen into line; during a Pentagon briefing this spring, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth whined about CNN\u2019s coverage of his debacle in Iran, saying, \u201cThe sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better.\u201d (Ellison\u2019s PR flacks immediately shot back, \u201cEditorial independence will absolutely be maintained. It is maintained at CBS; it will be maintained at CNN.\u201d)<\/p>\n

At a Simon Wiesenthal Center gala last December, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav accepted an award and recounted an earlier episode of government censorship\u2014unrelated to CBS\u2014in his acceptance speech. He drew a moral from the episode that seemed squarely aimed at David Ellison, who was in the crowd: \u201cWhen the government controls the news, that is the end of democracy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ellison\u2019s op-ed sought to deflect attention from the prospect of journalistic interference from Trump\u2019s White House and invoke the declining public trust in the media\u2014a trend vastly accelerated by the MAGA movement\u2019s demonization of the \u201cfake news\u201d industry and journalists as \u201cenemies of the people.\u201d The remedy for the media industry\u2019s crisis in public confidence, Ellison advises is to redouble its commitment to impartial news-gathering. \u201cGreat news organizations like CNN and CBS News are here to tell it straight down the middle,\u201d he writes. \u201cThat requires newsrooms that reflect the whole world, not one side of it. And it requires independence. Our journalists will continue to answer to the facts and to all the people they serve\u2014not to any party or cause.\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s just one problem with this line of thinking: There is no \u201cmiddle\u201d in journalism\u2014particularly when it comes to covering politics. Political parties are not stationary objects that a \u201cstraight down the middle\u201d journalist can mathematically triangulate and break down into an easily digestible equation for public consumption. The GOP moves constantly to the pseudo-populist right. Recent primary elections have shown that the base of the Democratic Party is moving to the left. How do you find the middle with two moving targets? Ellison invokes the exhausted ghost of Edward R. Murrow as his supposed avatar of the endangered straight-news sensibility\u2014but Murrow is best known today for his takedown of red-baiting Senator Joseph McCarthy and his stooge, lawyer Roy Cohn. Now Trump, Cohn\u2019s best-known prot\u00e9g\u00e9, is keen to exploit his transactional leverage with the Ellisons, who need his approval for the deal to go through, to remake Murrow\u2019s former network in his own image.<\/p>\n

As for the entertainment industry, Ellison seeks to disarm his detractors by announcing that the industry they want to preserve is already dead. In assessing the antitrust actions now putting the merger on hold, he says that \u201cthe states claim this deal will give one company too much influence over theatrical releases and cable operators\u2026while [the Writers Guild of America] argues that our combined market power will hurt writers. Both suits imagine a Hollywood that no longer exists\u2014an industry ruled by a handful of legacy studios.\u201d<\/p>\n

One hundred and 11 billion dollars is a lot of money to pay for something that no longer exists. Currently in theaters, Disney\u2019s Spider-Man: Brand New Day<\/em> has generated $655 million in 10 days at the summer box office and Universal\u2019s The Odyssey<\/em> has grossed $461 million in 24 days. Ellison has promised that his proposed merger will put out 30 feature films a year. Like his promise of an unbiased and confidence-building news industry, that claim has met with skepticism, because no studio has done that in 25 years. What\u2019s more, the newly merged Paramount-WB would set out to turbocharge its production arm, as the company would be saddled with a massive debt load.<\/p>\n

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When Ellison talks about \u201ca Hollywood that no longer exists,\u201d he\u2019s gesturing toward the real quarry of the Warners deal\u2014streaming and Netflix. During a quarterly-report call in March, Ellison made this objective plain to his investors: \u201cWe will combine the streaming portfolios of the two companies into one stronger platform over the coming years.\u201d The same analysis held for Skydance\u2019s earlier absorption of Paramount+ and HBO; Ellison sold that deal by observing that \u201cthere are more than 200 million [direct-to-consumer] subscribers today, and more than 100 countries and territories worldwide, positioning us to compete effectively with the leading streaming services in today\u2019s marketplace.\u201d<\/p>\n

Competing with Netflix was also the prime directive behind the Disney company\u2019s $71 billion takeover of Fox\u2014a stand-alone legacy studio owned by Rupert Murdoch\u2019s Newscorp. \u201cThe opportunity to buy Fox first came up later that year,\u201d Disney CEO Robert Iger said at the time of the 2019 buyout. \u201cIn fact, just a few months after the board approved us buying the majority share of BAMTech\u2014which was done for one reason, to go into the direct-to-consumer business\u2014Rupert and I sat down and talked about a transaction\u2026. We would not have done that transaction had we not decided to go in this direction, because\u2014if we hadn\u2019t, we would have been looking at that business and through a traditional lens.\u201d<\/p>\n

Competing with Netflix and expanding Disney\u2019s market share in streaming proved to be an impossible mission for the recombined Disney-Fox company. Since the merger, Disney has lost billions in streaming and only this year generated a profit with advertising and by raising subscription fees. The merger cost some 7,000 jobs in post-Covid downsizing. Disney and Fox\u2019s combined film and television output shrank. Consumers now pay more for far less. This year, Disney\u2019s ABC network lost the Oscar broadcast to Google as it aggressively expands its own streaming business. In a Disney quarterly call, Wells Fargo analyst Stephen Cahill argued that the company should phase out its streaming platform and return to only making and licensing content.<\/p>\n

Seven years later, Paramount-Skydance wants to make the same mistake. Acquiring Warner Bros. means that the parent company will take on billions in debt while it reorganizes (read downsizes) the two giant media companies at the center of the deal. To get the takeover financed, Skydance has recruited three Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds, while also making itself available to a Trump White House keen to prosecute the president\u2019s many vendettas against CNN.<\/p>\n

Studios like Sony have done just fine without entering the streaming business and just producing movies and shows. Despite everything, the unchallenged faith of Hollywood takeover kings like Iger and the Ellisons is to become<\/em> a Netflix\u2014which in practice means warping and disappearing huge swaths of their own legacy-media world in a business model that\u2019s a proven dead end. Perhaps it\u2019s time to ditch that unsustainable goal and break up Netflix instead.<\/p>\n

Certainly, that was the thinking of Paramount-Skydance when it looked like Netflix had won the bidding earlier this year for Warner Bros. and the word \u201cantitrust\u201d entered the chat. Suddenly, the free-market billionaires at Oracle and the Trump administration felt capitalism had gone too far (i.e., they were about to lose). The same issue came up during the 2023 labor strike by the WGA and Screen Actors Guild. Miles Mogulescu, a former business affairs VP for MGM\/US and current labor union documentarian, argued in the Los Angeles Times<\/em> that for Hollywood unions to be able to negotiate with the streaming giants, companies like Netflix, which produce their own content for their platforms, must be forced to separate their production arms from their distribution operations. As a precedent, he cited the Supreme Court\u2019s Paramount Decrees of 1948, which required the studios to spin off their theater chains in order to reduce vertical integration in the industry. It forced the Hollywood studios to finally relinquish the deep reach of their chains that strangled competition at local levels\u2014a move that notably broadened the range of films audiences saw.<\/p>\n

In 2025, James Cameron waded into the long-simmering theaters debate between streamers and traditional studios over what metrics production companies should meet to have their films qualify for Oscar consideration. Cameron argued that the playing field should be leveled with a requirement that Netflix (and, one presumes, all streamers its size) release a film in at least 2,000 theaters for at least a month. Currently, the rule (meant for indie filmmakers) is to release a film seven consecutive days in brick-and-mortar theaters in designated cities for it to be eligible for nomination. That would secure the standing of independently produced films in Oscar competition, since those offerings can disappear quickly from movie screens but the Netflix movie sits on your Netflix home screen for months of in-house hype until Oscar night.<\/p>\n

In all these areas\u2014be it the specter of an omnivorous giant like Paramount-Skydance, threats to working conditions highlighted by Hollywood trade unions, or making the Oscars less skewed against independents\u2014the same problem continually emerges as the central worry: Netflix is too big. At some point, we have to ask why we\u2019re going to such enormous lengths to adapt an entire industry to one company\u2019s model. If Netflix is too big to fail, that means it\u2019s also too big for its competitors to have a fair shot at success.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s still ample time for the Warner merger to be stopped in court or simply collapse under its own rickety leviathan-scale debt load. When the Ellisons bought Paramount, the silver lining was that David Ellison is something the industry hasn\u2019t seen in a half-century: a true producer-owner of a legacy studio. He came into the business as a filmmaker\u2014that\u2019s all he\u2019s ever done, and that\u2019s all he wants to do. It\u2019s been 50 years since the last one, Jack Warner, retired to Palm Springs. Ellison still has the chance to be the owner of a great studio\u2014but he shouldn\u2019t be the CEO of two.<\/p>\n

Read more Do Epics Need Heroes?<\/a><\/p>\n<\/article>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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