Time-Warner
see CNN
HOSTILE TAKEOVER 12 25 KUSHNER TRUMP ARABS FCC CARR ELISON NEPO
---
AN 12 25
On Sunday, President Donald Trump declared that he will “be involved” in the federal government’s decision on whether to allow the streaming service Netflix to buy mass media and entertainment conglomerate Warner Brothers Discovery. On Monday, Paramount Skydance, another mass media and entertainment conglomerate, announced a hostile takeover bid for WBD — with news soon following that Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner’s private equity firm is part of the Paramount offer.
“Paramount is telling WBD shareholders that it has a smoother path to regulatory approval than does Netflix, and Kushner’s involvement only strengthens that case,” Axios reported. “Paramount is led by David Ellison, whose billionaire father Larry is a major supporter of President Trump.”
Axios added that Kushner’s firm, Affinity Partners, “was not mentioned in Paramount’s press release on Monday morning about its $108 billion bid, nor were participating sovereign wealth funds from Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi and Qatar.”
Fortune reported that “Affinity and the other outside financing partners have agreed to forgo any governance rights, which Paramount said means the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States would have no jurisdiction over the transaction.”
But Axios’ Sarah Fischer wrote on social media: “Ask yourself, why would anyone want to put money into an investment of this caliber and have no governance rights or board seats?”
“Essentially,” she added, “people want to have control/access/political power behind the scenes.”
“Reality is,” Fischer explained, this hostile takeover is a good explanation “of how capitalism/democracy can be exploited for political gain,” with “Paramount essentially betting our open system incentivizes shareholders to take [the] best financial deal even if it means giving soft power” to three sovereign wealth funds, the President, and his son-in-law.
Critics are blasting Kushner’s and Trump’s involvement.
U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) remarked, “Donald Trump said he’ll ‘be involved in’ deciding if Netflix can buy Warner Bros. Is that an open invite for CEOs to curry favor with Trump in exchange for merger approvals? It should be an independent decision by the Department of Justice based on the law and facts.”
Award-winning journalist Sophia A. Nelson, responding to trump’s remarks, observed: “This is ridiculous. Corrupt. And NOT what a President gets involved in.”
Professor, investor, and marketing executive Adam Cochran wrote: “Trump is talking about him personally being involved in deciding the fate of the Netflix-Warner Brothers deal, and how it’s ‘bad.’ Meanwhile his son-in-law is financing the competing offer. There has truly never been a more corrupt administration in US history!”
Alexander Vindman, former Director of European Affairs for the United States National Security Council (NSC), wrote: “F– NO to another corrupt Trump deal. Nepobaby, Jared’s, involvement would deliver CNN to MAGA.”
NewsNation’s Kurt Bardella, a communications advisor and media relations consultant, asked: “Alexa, what is a ‘conflict-of-interest’?”
---
---
MMA
September 17, 2025, edition of MSNBC's All In with Chris Hayes
CHRIS HAYES (HOST): So given that context, I want you to look around the U.S. right now and see what's been happening here, right in front of our eyes. In July, the Trump FCC — that's the entity that Brendan Carr controls — approved the sale of Paramount, with it CBS, to Skydance Media, which is controlled by the family of pro-Trump tech billionaire named Larry Ellison. It was his son, actually, who's buying it. Now that approval only came after Paramount paid Trump $60 million to settle the president's obvious frivolous, ludicrous lawsuit against CBS News and 60 Minutes for editing interviews, and after the Ellisons agreed to eliminate DEI programs, and after they agreed to install an executive formerly from a conservative think tank to essentially act as a sort of ideological minder at CBS News for political bias. So they did all those things, then they got the approval for this very, very large merger. After that, CBS canceled Stephen Colbert's top-rated late-night show, which was notorious for its criticism of the sitting president.
Last week, after Larry Ellison officially leapfrogged another pro-Trump billionaire, Elon Musk, to become the world's richest man, the new Paramount conglomerate made another media bid, this time for Warner Brothers Discovery, which just so happens to own CNN. So there's a possibility that they could purchase that and roll that up as well. Then yesterday we got this news about TikTok, perhaps you've seen it. Do you remember the Chinese-owned app that was banned as a security risk because of a bipartisan vote in both houses of Congress and signed into law by Joe Biden? And then Donald Trump just literally ignored the law while he searched for a U.S. buyer. Well, yesterday there was news of a framework of a deal. Interesting. Let's see what the deal is — gives Americans an 80% stake in TikTok. Which Americans? Well, you'll never guess. Yes, Larry Ellison is one of them, along with far-right venture capitalist, Trump donor, DOGE consultant, MAGA-backer Marc Andreessen.
As Talking Points Memo noted, if all those deals all go through that would mean the Murdoch family controlling Fox News, the Journal, New York Post, its other properties. Twitter, TikTok, CBS, CNN and more owned by Elon Musk and the Ellison family. The Washington Post owned by Jeff Bezos. The Trump administration is threatening to bring the government down on free speech and use it against dissent. It is also facilitating the sale of some of our biggest private media outlets to Trump allies, and is a very obvious attempt to consolidate power over free expression.
//
07/23/25 9:56 PM EDT
07/18/25 10:06 PM EDT
07/16/25 10:16
---
==
https://www.mediamatters.org/cnn/outgoing-cnn-ceo-chris-licht-did-exactly-what-was-expected-him
6 23
Ousted CNN chief executive Chris Licht did exactly what his bosses wanted, ideologically repositioning the network in hopes of attracting Republican viewers. Now the network’s ratings are in the toilet, its reputation is damaged, and Licht is out after a devastating profile in The Atlantic — but there’s little reason to expect the situation to change.
Licht’s run at CNN ended on Wednesday after only 13 months. David Zaslav, the chief executive of CNN’s parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery, reportedly told staff at a meeting announcing the change that Licht “poured his heart and soul into this job” but that ultimately “for a number of reasons things didn’t work out.” Media accounts of Licht’s dismissal invariably point to the impact of a brutal Atlantic profile published on Friday, which triggered a newsroom revolt.
In that Atlantic profile, staff writer Tim Alberta detailed “the meltdown at CNN” under Licht, who comes across as an underprepared and ineffectual network president who is trying to undertake a doomed mission he does not seem to fully understand. Alberta writes:
When he took the helm of CNN, in May 2022, Licht had promised a reset with Republican voters—and with their leader. He had swaggered into the job, telling his employees that the network had lost its way under former President Jeff Zucker, that their hostile approach to Trump had alienated a broader viewership that craved sober, fact-driven coverage. These assertions thrust Licht into a two-front war: fighting to win back Republicans who had written off the network while also fighting to win over his own journalists, many of whom believed that their new boss was scapegoating them to appease his new boss, David Zaslav, who’d hired Licht with a decree to move CNN toward the ideological center.
Zaslav’sdesire to remake CNN by moving it toward the ideological right is shared by John Malone, a major Republican donor and Warner Bros. Discovery board member who has said he would like the network to be more like Fox News.
Their shared approach, as implemented by Licht, damaged CNN’s reputation by giving the right what it wanted. Licht fired harsh critics of former President Donald Trump, cozied up to Republican leaders, and made clear that he wanted a return to “both sides” journalism.
His work culminated with last month’s live town hall with Trump, who steamrolled CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins with lies and called her a “nasty person” on-air, as the live audience of his supporters cheered. The event drew devastating reviews from journalists inside CNN and out — but Licht staunchly defended it to his staff, and indeed, it seemed entirely in keeping with Zaslav’s vision for the network.
This version of CNN isn’t just journalistically indefensible — it’s also failed to attract an audience. In theory, catering to Republicans was supposed to lure viewers away from more right-wing outlets. In reality, there isn’t an audience for Fox Light: CNN’s viewership withered under Licht as viewers switched to MSNBC or away from cable news altogether. Zaslav and Malone don’t seem to care — they just want CNN to meet their ideological demands.
And that’s why Licht’s departure won’t end CNN’s problems. His successor may be canny enough not to put their office on a separate floor from CNN’s journalists, or to treat a reporter writing a profile like a personal therapist. But that person will likely get the same demands from Zaslav and Malone to move the network toward the right and away from the truth, and try to follow them.
https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/here-are-5-of-the-craziest-revelations-from-the-new-yorkers-expose-of-fox-news-influence-on-trump/
Monday, The New Yorker published Jane Mayer’s stunning exposé into how Fox News, always a right-wing network, has morphed into an overt propaganda instrument of President Donald Trump’s White House, and how the symbiotic relationship between the president and Fox’s billionaire international news mogul owner Rupert Murdoch has effectively created something that has never before existed in American politics.
To some degree, the article covers ground that has long been known or suspected — the way that Trump’s policy decisions on everything from the federal government shutdown to the transgender military ban are informed by his daily binge-watching of Fox talk shows; how former Fox executive Bill Shine has blurred the Fox and White House payrolls since being hired as Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff; and how Fox itself has discarded the few journalistic guardrails it had during President Barack Obama’s years, with hosts like Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs now free to openly join political rallies and offer advice to the president.
But there are some new, mind-blowing revelations in Mayer’s article. Here are five of the most significant:
- Trump ranks reporters on a scale of 1 to 10 for their “loyalty” to him — and Steve Doocy is a 12.
Trump is well known for assigning numbers to women based on how attractive he thinks they are. But according to Mayer’s reporting, he does the same thing for reporters based on how loyal he thinks they are to him. “Bret Baier, Fox News’ chief political anchor, is a 6; Hannity a solid 10. Steve Doocy, the co-host of ‘Fox & Friends,’ is so adoring that Trump gives him a 12.”
Needless to say, this is a dangerous development. Trump has a track record of rewarding and punishing reporters based on his whims. During the presidential transition, he reserved a seat at a press conference for a Breitbart reporter. And last year, Trump suspended the press pass of CNN’s Jim Acosta after he challenged the president’s claims on special counsel Robert Mueller and the Honduran migrant caravan. He later relented after one of his own judicial appointees ordered him to restore Acosta’s credentials.
- Jared Kushner is effectively Rupert Murdoch’s direct pipeline to the White House.
Despite having essentially no qualifications for any of it, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner has worn numerous hats in the administration, from meeting with foreign heads of state to working on the Middle East peace plan to fixing the opioid epidemic — and Trump trusts him enough to have overridden intelligence officials to give him a top-secret security clearance.
One other person who trusts him, according to Mayer’s article, is Murdoch. In fact, Kushner may be Murdoch’s most direct liaison with the Trump administration.
Sources told The New Yorker that Kushner routinely asks Murdoch for advice, has “assured Murdoch that the White House is a smooth-running operation, despite many reports suggesting that it is chaotic,” and that the two of them communicate “Like, every day.” Given that the White House has given Kushner such a massive portfolio of responsibility and trust, Murdoch’s relationship with Kushner is likely one of the biggest influences he has on the executive branch.
- Roger Ailes allegedly fed Trump questions before the GOP debates.
During the presidential election, it was reported that former Fox News host Megyn Kelly — who famously tried to question Trump on his treatment of women at the GOP debates only to have Trump dismiss her as on her period — asserted that Trump had help with the debate questions ahead of time. She later denied saying or believing this — but Mayer’s reporting now backs up this idea:
A pair of Fox insiders and a source close to Trump believe that Ailes informed the Trump campaign about Kelly’s question. Two of those sources say that they know of the tipoff from a purported eyewitness. In addition, a former Trump campaign aide says that a Fox contact gave him advance notice of a different debate question, which asked the candidates whether they would support the Republican nominee, regardless of who won.
It is hard to know whether this claim is accurate, as Ailes is deceased and contemporary reporting suggested that Fox was not yet in Trump’s orbit at that point of the Republican cycle. But if true, this would be highly damning — especially considering Trump asserted that the incident where former Democratic National Committee Chief Donna Brazile gave Hillary Clinton CNN questions ahead of time proved the network was “a total fake.”
- Fox News uncovered the Stormy Daniels scandal during the election — but buried the story and retaliated against the reporter who found it.
The revelation that Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen made an illegal hush payment to silence an affair between Trump and porn star Stormy Daniels, first reported in January 2018 by the Wall Street Journal, was a huge story that led to a massive federal investigation, jail time, and congressional investigations.
But all of it could have come out much sooner — because as Mayer reports, Fox News had the story during the 2016 presidential election, killed it, and may have retaliated against Diana Falzone, the reporter who uncovered it:
Falzone had worked on the story since March, and by October she had confirmed it with Daniels through her manager at the time, Gina Rodriguez, and with Daniels’s former husband, Mike Moz, who described multiple calls from Trump. Falzone had also amassed e-mails between Daniels’s attorney and Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen, detailing a proposed cash settlement, accompanied by a nondisclosure agreement. Falzone had even seen the contract.
But Falzone’s story didn’t run—it kept being passed off from one editor to the next. After getting one noncommittal answer after another from her editors, Falzone at last heard from LaCorte, who was then the head of FoxNews.com. Falzone told colleagues that LaCorte said to her, “Good reporting, kiddo. But Rupert wants Donald Trump to win. So just let it go.” LaCorte denies telling Falzone this, but one of Falzone’s colleagues confirms having heard her account at the time.
According to The New Yorker, Fox then proceeded to demote Falzone, without explaining why. She later sued Fox, which settled the case and made her sign a nondisclosure agreement that prohibits her from discussing the details of her employment.
- Trump personally ordered an economic adviser to use antitrust lawsuits to attack Fox News’ competitors.
The Justice Department’s opposition to the AT&T-Time Warner merger, which is cleared to go through after federal courts demolished the antitrust lawsuit, has always seemed legally suspicious — indeed, one of the reasons judges rejected it is that AT&T put forward compelling evidence that Trump personally wanted to kill the deal to harm CNN.
According to Mayer’s reporting, that’s exactly what was going on.Trump ordered his then-economic adviser Gary Cohn to pressure the Justice Department to block the merger — something Cohn refused to do, but which the department eventually followed through with. Trump showed no such anti-corporate sentiment with Disney’s acquisition of 21st Century Fox, a deal of similar scope but which would benefit Murdoch financially.
This development also puts the Federal Communications Commission’s unexpected decision last year to kill the Sinclair Broadcast Group’s merger with Tribune Media, which was arguably good for the local news market, in a more sinister light: that merger could have strengthened Fox’s biggest competitor in conservative television broadcasting.
Antitrust law is a powerful pro-consumer tool when applied fairly and equitably, but in the hands of someone like Trump, it can also be used to chill freedom of the press by rewarding and punishing news organizations.
==
5/18 merger AT&T:
charlieBlack is currently working with AT&T in its lobbying campaign to be given retroactive immunity against lawsuits for having assisted the administration in its warrantless wiretapping program.
==
Washington Post reports that President Trump’s personal lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen’s company won a $600,000 contract just days after Trump’s inauguration to advise the telecom giant AT&T over its planned merger with Time Warner. This follows reports that Cohen used the promise of White House access as he brought in a total of $4.4 million in payments to his shell company, Essential Consultants LLC—the same company that Cohen used to pay hush money to the adult film star Stormy Daniels—also known as Stephanie Clifford—who says she had an affair with Donald Trump in 2006.
==
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-att-trump-michael-cohen-20180509-story.html
In
the early days of President Trump's administration, Trump had a friend in AT&T Inc. Chief Executive Randall Stephenson.
https://www.propublica.org/article/these-professors-make-more-than-thousand-bucks-hour-peddling-mega-mergers
If THE GOVERNMENT ENDS UP approving the $85 billion AT&T-Time Warner merger,
credit won’t necessarily belong to the executives, bankers, lawyers, and lobbyists pushing for the deal. More likely, it will be due to the professors.
A serial acquirer, AT&T must persuade the government to allow every major deal.Again and again, the company has relied on economists from America’s top universities to make its case before the Justice Department or the Federal Trade Commission. Moonlighting for a consulting firm named Compass Lexecon, they represented AT&T when it bought Centennial, DirecTV, and Leap Wireless; and when it tried unsuccessfully to absorb T-Mobile. And now AT&T and Time Warner have hired three top Compass Lexecon economists to counter criticism that the giant deal would harm consumers and concentrate too much media power in one company.
Today, “in front of the government, in many cases the most important advocate is the economist and lawyers come second,” said James Denvir, an antitrust lawyer at Boies, Schiller.
Economists who specialize in antitrust — affiliated with Chicago, Harvard, Princeton, the University of California, Berkeley, and other prestigious universities — reshaped their field through scholarly work showing that mergers create efficiencies of scale that benefit consumers.But they reap their most lucrative paydays by lending their academic authority to mergers their corporate clients propose.Corporate lawyers hire them from Compass Lexecon and half a dozen other firms to sway the government by documenting that a merger won’t be “anti-competitive”: in other words, that it won’t raise retail prices, stifle innovation, or restrict product offerings. Their optimistic forecasts, though, often turn out to be wrong, and the mergers they champion may be hurting the economy.
American industry is more highly concentrated than at any time since the gilded age. Need a pharmacy? Americans have two main choices. A plane ticket? Four major airlines. They have four choices to buy cell phone service. Soon one company will sell more than a quarter of the quaffs of beer around the world.Some of the professors earn more than top partners at major law firms. Dennis Carlton, a self-effacing economist at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business and one of Compass Lexecon’s experts on the AT&T-Time Warner merger, charges at least $1,350 an hour. In his career, he has made about $100 million, including equity stakes and non-compete payments, ProPublica estimates. Carlton has written reports or testified in favor of dozens of mergers, including those between AT&T-SBC Communications and Comcast-Time Warner, and three airline deals: United-Continental, Southwest-Airtran, and American-US Airways.
Mergers peaked last year at $2 trillion in the U.S. The top 50 companies in a majority of American industries gained share between 1997 and 2012, and “competition may be decreasing in many economic sectors,” President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers warned in April.
While the impact of this wave of mergers is much debated, prominent economists such as Lawrence Summers and Joseph Stiglitz suggest that it is one important reason why, even as corporate profits hit records, economic growth is slow, wages are stagnant, business formation is halting, and productivity is lagging. “Only the monopoly-power story can convincingly account” for high business profits and low corporate investment, Summers wrote earlier this year.
In addition, politicians such as U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren have criticized big mergers for giving a handful of companies too much clout. President-elect Trump said in October that his administration would not approve the AT&T-Time Warner merger “because it’s too much concentration of power in the hands of too few.”
During the campaign, Trump didn’t signal what his broader approach to mergers would be.But the early signs are that his administration will weaken antitrust enforcement and strengthen the hand of economists. He selected Joshua Wright, an economist and professor atGeorge Mason’s Antonin Scalia Law School, to lead his transition on antitrust matters. Wright, himself a former consultant for Boston-based Charles River Associates, regularly celebrates mergers in speeches and articles and has supported increasing the influence of economists in assessing monopoly power. “Mergers between competitors do not often lead to market power but do often generate significant benefits for consumers,” he wrote in The New York Times this week.
...
==
==
The effort to defeat the tougher food standards heated up late last spring and summer, when lobbyists said they went on high alert.
On July 12, White House visitor logs show a who's who of food company chief executives and lobbyists visited the White House. The group met with Valerie Jarrett, Obama's senior adviser, and Melody Barnes, then director of the president's Domestic Policy Council. Among the group at the meeting: CEOs of Nestle USA, Kellogg, General Mills, and top executives at Walt Disney, Time Warner, and Viacom, owner of the Nickelodeon children's channel -- companies with some of the biggest financial stakes in marketing to children. Those companies have a combined market value of more than $350 billion.
Two people who attended -- lobbyist Scott Faber of the Grocery Manufacturers Association and Kolish of the Better Business Bureau -- said the group told the White House that it opposed government action and favored voluntary initiatives. Other participants and the White House have declined to describe the meeting or did not respond to requests for comment.
==
http://www.prwatch.org/news/2014/11/12665/aol-quits-alec
===
time warner murdoch 7/14
==
==
http://www.alternet.org/media/10-even-worse-things-you-dont-know-about-comcasts-proposed-merger-time-warner
WHITE HOUSE WITHDRAWAL
The effort to defeat the tougher food standards heated up late last spring and summer, when lobbyists said they went on high alert.
On July 12, White House visitor logs show a who's who of food company chief executives and lobbyists visited the White House. The group met with Valerie Jarrett, Obama's senior adviser, and Melody Barnes, then director of the president's Domestic Policy Council. Among the group at the meeting: CEOs of Nestle USA, Kellogg, General Mills, and top executives at Walt Disney, Time Warner, and Viacom, owner of the Nickelodeon children's channel -- companies with some of the biggest financial stakes in marketing to children. Those companies have a combined market value of more than $350 billion.
Two people who attended -- lobbyist Scott Faber of the Grocery Manufacturers Association and Kolish of the Better Business Bureau -- said the group told the White House that it opposed government action and favored voluntary initiatives. Other participants and the White House have declined to describe the meeting or did not respond to requests for comment.
Advocates for tougher standards tried to counter the lobbying surge, calling, emailing and visiting the White House scores of times last year.
owns cnn: