redstone nat'l amusements
SUCK UP TRUMP MERGER SKYDANCE 4 25
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PRESS SUPPRESS MAFIA DON SHAKEDOWN
AN 7 25
On July 1, CBS News' parent company, Paramount, agreed to pay $16 million to settle a lawsuit from President Donald Trump —who claimed that CBS edited a 2024 interview with Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris in a way that amount to election interference. Many Trump critics attacked the lawsuit as frivolous and baseless, arguing that Paramount was submitting to a shakedown just to be done with the matter.
Now, Fox News is drawing criticism for its editing of a 2024 interview with Trump, and critics argue that it was edited in a way to make Trump look good — not edited for journalistic purposes.
CNN's Andrew Kaczynski, in a July 14 post on X, formerly Twitter, tweeted video of the Fox News interview and noted their editing of comments on convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
READ MORE: 'You dress as a cowgirl?' Kristi Noem bashed at homestate fundraiser
Kaczynski posted, "I had not seen this Fox News extended interview with Trump from 2024 — where they deliberately edited his (Jeffrey) Epstein answer — where he won't commit to releasing the full files because of 'phony' stuff in it."
Kaczynski, comparing the unedited interview to Fox News' edited version, tweeted, "Check out what Trump said vs what Fox edited."
In response to Kaczynski's tweets, Media Matters' Matthew Gertz — obviously mindful of Trump's CBS News lawsuit — posted, "My understanding based on the CBS News precedent is that this is an illegal interference with the 2024 election that should result in Fox News paying tens of millions of dollars to orgs chosen by Kamala Harris and facing an FCC probe. Quote Andrew Kaczynski @KFILE."
In a separate tweet, Gertz posted, "At least that's the result when the president is engaged in a corrupt abuse of power crying out for more scrutiny."
READ MORE:There's far more to Trump and Epstein's relationship: Trump biographer
Former Trump supporter turned Trump critic A.J. Delgado tweeted, "Yup, I was tweeting about this last October, as were others, and no one seemed to care. It's insane that Fox edited the answer (the only reason the full answer came out is, I believe, that Will Cain later absentmindedly shared the full answer on his own show. That's the only reason we even know.)"
The Trump War Room account on X posted Fox News' edited version of the interview in June 2024.
Observations from Kaczynski, Gertz and Delgado's tweets on Fox News' 2024 interview with Trump are drawing a lot of discussion on X.
Former Obama Administration official Tommy Vietor wrote, "Time for Kamala to sue Fox News???"
X user Michael Serdikoff tweeted, "This is same (guy) suing CBS for editing Harris' remarks."
Another X user, Cindy Cooper commented, "So the Fox News network via Fox News Radio did air the entire answer. Thanks."
Watch the video belowor at this link.
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no lnx
Defamation, capitulation and phonies: Inside this week's wild and disgusting news
D. Earl StephensApril 27, 2025
Tuesday was a banner day in the news business as it continues its transition into authoritarian-controlled propaganda that is sold to the highest bidders, which in this case are our nation’s ever-increasing collection of hideous tech bros — otherwise known as Boosters of Trump (BOTs).
It was nothing if not a wild and disgusting day, and featured some heavy-hitters in the political, entertainment and journalism world, as well as reputable truth-tellers like Larry David, who was the only person proving capable of seeing though all the never-ending BS that has blanketed the United States of America.
Good ol’ Sarah Palin appeared out of the Alaska wilderness and into a courtroom in New York City Tuesday where she once again provided some much-needed, albeit brief comedic entertainment to a starving American public.
You’ll remember Palin, who with the help of John McCain and his slippery handlers was hurled downward into the Republicans’ glass floor 17 years ago, making it possible for literally anything or anybody to lower themselves and land with a thud in the basements of power in Washington.
Before there was Marjorie Taylor Greene, Nancy Mace, Marsha Blackburn or Lauren Boebert, there was Sarah Palin …
The 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee, Russia-stalker, second-rate reality TV star, and Hall-of-Fame embarrassment lost in the retrial of her defamation case against The New York Times, because of course she did.
Defamation cases are almost impossible to prove, but you can’t blame her for trying, because as delicious as this loss was by one of America’s all-time fools, the real news here is how bad it made the supersonic losers at ABC-News look by comparison.
Just four months ago, that one-time reputable news outlet flew the white flag in their very public $16M surrender to the America-attacking Trump on similar charges.
This time George Stephanopoulos was the target of the beady-eyed Trump, who was incensed that he was incorrectly referred to as “a rapist” on the air during Stephanopoulos’ questioning of Mace about Trump’s veracity as a serious candidate given his talent for treating women like one of his sand wedges.
Turns out all Trump was technically found guilty of was being a lowly sexual-abuser. Before settling, ABC-News decided to conveniently forget the fact that the very judge who tried the case, said that most people would call what Trump did, and what the jury found him guilty of, was in fact, “rape.”
You say, “potatoes.” I say “rape.”
ABC-News’ capitulation, while weak and embarrassing, also only encouraged lowlifes like Trump, because … also on Tuesday … CBS-News signaled it was about to tell its once-rivals at ABC-News to hold their beer …
The venerable 60 Minutes, which has been one of the few news programs that has continued to righteously pound away on the America-attacking Trump will now be in search of a new leader. Executive Producer Bill Owens, announced his resignation Tuesday saying:
“Over the past months, it has become clear that I would not be allowed to run the show as I have always run it, to make independent decisions based on what was right for ‘60 Minutes,’ right for the audience.”
Owens sudden departure is hinting loudly at yet another surrender by yet another billionaire to Trump.
This time Shari Redstone. The Chairwoman of the Board at Paramount which owns CBS, has been dutifully kissing any inappropriate ass she can find in the White House to ensure her sale of Paramount for gobs of billions to the son of tech billionaire Larry Ellison goes through.
She can’t have Trump mad at her for telling the truth on air, so Owens had to sacrifice herself on the Mar-a-Lago altar first.
No surprise, Ellison is yet another slimy tech bro and the buddy of the sexual-abuser Trump, who some judges refer to as a rapist.
The sexual-abuser, who some judges refer to as a rapist, has sued CBS for $20 billion claiming the network aired two different versions of an answer Kamala Harris gave about Israel and Gaza on the network’s flagship news programs, Face the Nation as well as 60 Minutes.
As if the serial-lying Trump doesn't give 17 different answers to any question every hour ….
Well, rather than fight that one out and win going away, Redstone has apparently figured it is much easier to just hand the whole franchise over to Trump’s buddy, Ellison, and be done with the damn thing. And if and when that deal goes through, if you are wondering if you will ever be able to trust anything from the CBS-News division again, the answer is, no.
While insiders at 60 Minutes like correspondent Scott Pelley are saying, “This isn't something Bill (Owens) is doing of his own volition: There was no choice in any of this," I am saying I’d have a whole helluva lot more respect for him, if he stood in strong and made these grotesque sellouts fire him and drag him out of the building.
Resigning in advance is just weak, Bill. I’ve walked a mile in your shoes during my career, and take great comfort I didn’t cave to dishonest brokers who had it out for me and the truth. Ask me about it. I’d be glad to enlighten you ...
Finally, Larry David arrived on the scene to save Terrible Tuesday when he took to the editorial pages of The New York Times to politely skewer the smarmy, one-time comedian, turned Trump-propagandist, Bill Maher, with some deftly aimed satire in his short and sweet piece “My dinner with Adolph.”
David, the genius behind Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm never mentioned Maher by name preferring instead the roughly 257 million people across the world who will end up seeing or hearing about the piece connect the dots all on their own.
I’ll guess it’s behind a paywall for now, so I’ll treat you to the piece’s conclusion:
“Two hours later, the dinner was over, and the Führer escorted me to the door. “I am so glad to have met you. I hope I’m no longer the monster you thought I was.” “I must say, mein Führer, I’m so thankful I came. Although we disagree on many issues, it doesn’t mean that we have to hate each other.” And with that, I gave him a Nazi salute and walked out into the night ...”
Maher of course accepted an invitation to dine with the America-attacking Trump recently, and through his 500-lb. smirk bragged to everybody that breaking bread with the racist, Lysol-guzzler was actually a very normal and wholesome experience. Hell everybody should try it, but of course they can’t because not everybody can be Bill Maher.
Here in part is how Maher described his dining experience, sandwiched around his usual overcooked, fatty condescending barf:
“Honestly, I voted for Clinton and Obama, but I would never feel comfortable talking to them the way I was able to talk to Donald Trump. That’s just how it went down. Make of it what you will.”
Oh we will, sport, no worries there.
Your foolish capitulation and normalization of a woman-abusing, America-attacking thug should finish you off for good. That you tipped him at the door after being played like Stephen Miller’s used violin was pret-ty, pret-ty, pret-ty, pret-ty pret-ty …pathetic.
You’ve been a damn fool for going on a long time now, Bill. Your once-clever condescension is now full-blown, look-at-me arrogance.
I know you will invariably ignore my advice to just shut up and go away for a period of about six years for some serious introspection, because I have come to understand that guys like you and Trump simply can’t help themselves.
You have the phonies in our billionaire-controlled media to do that for you …
D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here, and follow him on Bluesky here.
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MMA
Trump is trying to throttle the free press — and U.S. moguls are going along with it
Written by Matt Gertz
Published 02/04/25
President Donald Trump is wasting no time in carrying out his goal of throttling the free press. Over the first two weeks of Trump’s presidency, his appointees have wielded federal regulatory authority to punish outlets the president dislikes — and American media moguls are responding with submission.
Trump has turned standard conservative attacks on journalists into one of the hallmarks of his political agenda.
He takes as his model Hungary’s autocrat Viktor Orban, who has “effectively dismantled the news media in his country” as “a central pillar of Orban’s broader project to remake his country as an ‘illiberal democracy,’” as New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger noted in an extraordinary warning last year.
During his first term in office, Trump repeatedly tried to leverage state power against his despised “fake news,” and together with his Project 2025 allies has developed a playbook to attack, defund, and delegitimize news outlets in his second.
Major media companies began signaling before Trump took office that they were willing to play ball with his administration in order to preserve their business interests. But since Inauguration Day, as Trump’s appointees have begun showing their intentions, executives at several news outlets have gone into full retreat.
CBS News preps for a Trump settlement
In the final weeks of the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump denounced CBS News’ editing of a 60 Minutes interview with Vice President Kamala Harris as “the biggest scandal in broadcast history” and declared that CBS should be stripped of its broadcast license. But in addition to invective and threats, Trump also filed a lawsuit against the outlet for producing journalism which displeased him.
The suit, which alleged that CBS airing different portions of Harris’ answer to a question in different venues constituted “partisan and unlawful acts of election and voter interference,” drew derision from First Amendment attorneys, who described its legal theory to CNN as “ridiculous junk” and “a frivolous and dangerous attempt by a politician to control the news media.”
But over the past few weeks, reports have indicated that CBS News’ parent company, Paramount, may be preparing to settle the suit with Trump. Such a settlement would be “an extraordinary concession by a major U.S. media company to a sitting president, especially in a case in which there is no evidence that the network got facts wrong or damaged the plaintiff’s reputation,” as The New York Times put it.
But Paramount needs federal approval for its proposed merger with Skydance Media, the production company founded by filmmaker David Ellison, and apparently sees giving the president a payoff as a valid way to smooth the path. Pressure for the settlement is coming from top Paramount shareholder Shari Redstone, the Times reported, who “stands to clear billions of dollars on the sale of Paramount.”
LA Times’ biotech industry owner goes all-in for RFK Jr.}:
Billionaire doctor Patrick Soon-Shiong once drew plaudits for using a small fraction of the vast fortune he made in the biotech industry to purchase and sustain his hometown newspaper, the Los Angeles Times.
But Soon-Shiong’s involvement in the paper’s operations has become more heavy-handed since the final months of the presidential campaign, with the owner repeatedly weighing in on Trump’s behalf. Over the past few weeks, Soon-Shiong, whose medical patents are subject to federal oversight, has begun cheerleading for the confirmation of the anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of health and human services.
“‘I truly believe [Kennedy] has the American public's best interests at heart,’ Soon-Shiong tweeted Tuesday in a post he pinned to the top of his account on X, formerly Twitter, for much of last week,” NPR reported. “It was one of 18 messages promoting Kennedy that Soon-Shiong — a billionaire surgeon and medical inventor — posted over the course of four days, which included Kennedy's confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill.”
Soon-Shiong’s support for Kennedy appears to have bled into his paper’s operations as well. On Friday, an op-ed contributor accused the paper of deceptively editing the piece he submitted in order to remove his criticisms of Kennedy’s nomination.
- ### CNN tries to move on
Journalists at CNN regularly drew vicious attacks from Trump and his supporters during the president’s first term. During a tone-setting press conference shortly before he took office, Trump lashed out at then-White House correspondent Jim Acosta as “fake news” and “terrible.” And Trump’s salvos at the network went beyond just words — his Justice Department tried to block a merger involving CNN’s then-parent company..
This time, CNN’s corporate leadership appears less willing to leave the network vulnerable to Trumpian retribution. Network chief Mark Thompson led an editorial meeting the day before Inauguration Day in which he instructed CNN talent “to be forward-thinking and to avoid pre-judging Trump” and to avoid “expressing any outrage of their own” or “relitigat[ing] the past,” former CNN reporter Oliver Darcy reported in his Status newsletter.
As for Acosta, he left CNN last week rather than accept Thompson’s offer to anchor the network’s coverage from midnight to 2 a.m. ET.
- ### Trump’s FCC targets ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, and PBS
The tip of the president’s anti-press spear is Brendan Carr, a Republican member of the Federal Communications Commission whom Trump elevated to chair. Carr authored Project 2025’s chapter on the FCC and has notably refused to reject Trump’s repeated calls for the commission to yank the licenses of broadcast networks whose reporting he dislikes.
Following his promotion, Carr sent a letter to Bob Iger, the CEO of ABC parent company Disney, in which he denounced the network for having “contributed” to the “erosion in public trust” and pointedly referenced the FCC’s regulatory power.
Carr also restored a right-wing group’s bias complaints targeting NBC, CBS, and ABC for purportedly biased coverage of the presidential campaign, which his predecessor had dismissed. In response to the CBS complaint, the FCC demanded that CBS News provide the unedited transcript and tapes of Harris’ 60 Minutes interview, adding government pressure to the benefit of Trump’s private lawsuit. The network ultimately submitted to what one legal expert described as a “highly partisan intervention” with “no historical antecedent.”
And on Wednesday, Carr announced a new FCC probe of underwriting announcements produced by NPR and PBS, “with an eye toward unraveling federal funding for all public broadcasting.”
- ### Defense Department retaliates against news outlets
The Pentagon announced Friday night that the defense correspondents at NBC News, The New York Times, Politico, and National Public Radio are all required to vacate their dedicated workspaces. Their spots will instead go to the right-wing One America News Network, New York Post, and Breitbart — and theoretically to the progressive HuffPost, which does not have a Pentagon reporter and did not request space.
The move came a week after the Senate confirmed former Fox News host Pete Hegseth as defense secretary.
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Take Trumpist threats to jail journalists seriously
:{09/23/24
Donald Trump’s authoritarian playbook to crush the free press in a second term}:
:{10/29/24
“Fake News Networks”: Trump and Project 2025’s goal to attack, defund, and delegitimize the press}:
10/16/24
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The Sleazy, Slimy Drama Behind the Redstone Succession Fight
‘TREASURE TROVE OF LUNACY’
A bombshell new book from two Pulitzer winners reveals some truly shocking storylines within the real-life “Succession” drama that is the Paramount media empire.
Updated Feb. 13, 2023 2:24PM EST / Published Feb. 13, 2023
It hardly comes as a revelation that the media and entertainment mogul Sumner Redstone—who controlled two of the planet’s most influential companies, Viacom and CBS, almost until his death in 2020 at age 97—was something of a monster; he evoked, by most accounts, an oversexed combination of Shakespeare’s King Lear and Goya’s “Saturn Devouring His Children.”
Nor is it big news anymore that disgraced former CBS chairman and CEO Leslie Moonves—in his heyday the Redstone empire’s most successful and richly compensated executive, until his forced resignation in 2018—stands credibly accused by multiple women of sexual harassment and worse.
To be sure, co-authors James B. Stewartand Rachel Abrams faced an epic challenge in making their book Unscripted: The Epic Battle for a Hollywood Media Empire and the Redstone Family Legacy,a must-read for anyone who followed the juicy saga in real time.
Not to worry.
Abrams, a New York Timesinvestigative reporter, and Stewart, a Times business columnist—both recipients of the Pulitzer Prize—have written a jaw-dropping yarn of how two publicly traded companies featuring an iconic movie studio (Paramount), the highest-rated broadcast network (CBS), dozens of local television stations and several popular cable outlets (including MTV, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon and Showtime), along with a prestigious book publisher (Simon & Schuster), fell victim to a rogues’ gallery of grifters, sycophants, incompetents and gold diggers who were empowered by a once-brilliant business tycoon’s damaged psyche and wanton megalomania.
“‘Unscripted’ contains surprises even for journalists, like me, who occasionally covered Moonves and spent time in Redstone’s id-warped presence.”
:{In the book’s parallel narrative, Abrams and Stewart add fresh facts to the story of Moonves’ downfall, notably his desperate campaign to cover up his sordid past, especially after learning that The New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow was in the hunt.
Moonves erroneously blamed Redstone’s daughter Shari, the CBS vice chairman and an increasingly powerful corporate rival, for his mushrooming PR troubles, and met, texted and socialized again and again with a down-on-his-luck talent agent who represented one of his alleged victims and leveraged Moonves’ growing distress to benefit himself, the authors report.}:
Non-executive chairwoman of Paramount Global and president of National Amusements Shari Redstone arrives at the annual Allen and Co. Sun Valley Media Conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, July 5, 2022.
Brendan McDermid/Reuters
Against the backdrop of Harvey Weinstein’s comeuppance and the multitude of rich and powerful miscreants being held accountable by the #MeToo movement, it’s mystifying that Moonves chose this moment of maximum vulnerability to sue the Redstones and their movie-theater-owning holding company, National Amusements, in a quixotic effort to block the merger of CBS with Viacom and remove Shari from corporate control by diluting her and her father’s voting stock.
The cluelessness of Team Moonves, even after the publication of Farrow’s devastating *New Yorker* exposé, was personified by CBS board member Arnold Kopelson, a Hollywood producer and ardent Moonves supporter. A decade earlier, Kopelson had ignored damning evidence of the CEO’s sexual misconduct, even though the victim in this case was a close friend who also happened to be Kopelson’s diabetes doctor.
Dr. Anne Peters, director of the clinical diabetes program at the University of Southern California, agreed to see Moonves, also a diabetic, at Kopelson’s urging in 1999. The authors write that during their 7:00 a.m. appointment:
Moonves grabbed her, pulled her against him, and made grinding motions. His penis was erect… Peters pushed him away, but he tried to remove her shirt and get into her pants. Peters managed to push him off.
“Oh, you’re going to be like that,” Moonves said. Moonves went to the corner of the room and masturbated. He left the room without saying anything more.
When Peters reported the incident at the hospital, she was warned that Moonves had “more money for lawyers” than the hospital and was told “to refrain from reporting this incident formally to the police because I would lose in court,” she recalled.
But Peters had given Kopelson a detailed account of what happened. In 2007, when Kopelson was nominated for the CBS board, she had urged him to reject the position because of Moonves’s behavior. Kopelson had brushed aside her concerns as “trivial.” He said the encounter had happened years ago and, in any event, “we all did that.”
Unscripted contains surprises even for journalists, like me, who occasionally covered Moonves and spent time in Redstone’s id-warped presence to grapple with his reality-distortion field. Probably the most astonishing storyline—meticulously presented here in slimy detail—is how a pair of the nonagenarian billionaire’s paramours moved into his Beverly Park mansion, persuaded him repeatedly to change his will in their favor, took over his life and health-care decisions, blocked the Redstone family’s access (lying to the old man that his daughter and grandchildren didn’t love him and never called) and even, at times, refused phone calls from his own doctor.
Former CBS chairman Les Moonves in Manhattan, New York, Sept. 8, 2015.
Brendan McDermid/Reuters
Together, the two women leeched more than $150 million from Redstone’s bank accounts and stock holdings, and very nearly gained control of his empire. The tag team of Manuela Herzer and Sydney Holland (who had accepted the rabidly jealous Redstone’s offer to become his third wife) might have succeeded but for their bitter falling-out over Holland’s hanky-panky with a handsome fraudster, convicted felon and failed soap opera actor named George Pilgrim; the actor’s dangerous liaison with Redstone’s fiancée—once Herzer forced Holland to confess to the old man—ultimately torpedoed their carefully laid plans.
The chronicle of Pilgrim’s progress—replete with sexually provocative videos, along with text and voicemail messages supplied to the authors by Pilgrim (“Need my cock sucked,” he once wrote to Holland, who replied, “I would love to do that soon”)—provides a treasure trove of lunacy, testament to the human capacity for reckless self-indulgence.
Indeed, as her supposedly future husband descended into dementia and physical ruin (eventually requiring a feeding tube to stay alive), Holland regularly booked a $7,900 round trip by private jet—at Redstone’s expense, of course—for sex sessions with Pilgrim in Arizona and Los Angeles; meanwhile, the authors report, in 2014 alone, she and Herzer managed to charge $3.5 million to Redstone’s credit cards, to say nothing of the stacks of $100 bills that were delivered each week to the Beverly Park mansion.
Manuela Herzer, the former girlfriend of 92-year-old Sumner Redstone, in Los Angeles on May 6, 2016.
In terms of journalistic coups, however, Abrams and Stewart’s most significant success—aside from what they describe as benefiting from “a trove of documents provided by confidential sources”—probably was gaining the total cooperation of Sumner’s press-shy daughter Shari, who “responded to all our questions either directly or through a spokesperson, and participated in fact-checking, as did [her adult sons] Tyler and Brandon Korff.”
A Boston University-trained corporate lawyer, she initially resisted taking an active role in the family business and, as the authors write, her “relationship with her father was, to put it mildly, complicated. Over the years, she had clashed bitterly with her father, sometimes publicly. At the same time she craved his affection and approval, which he dangled frequently before her (especially when he needed something) but then withdrew.”
Redstone “was often dismissive of her ideas and belittled her in meetings,” they write. “Sumner may have loved Shari in his way, but as an executive, he held her to the same exacting standards as anyone else who worked for him, perhaps even higher ones. When it came to business, Sumner often treated her as a rival, another competitor to be vanquished.”
When she argued against some of his ill-advised schemes—taking exception, for instance, to Redstone’s pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into a floundering video game company, a stake that was ultimately unloaded for a mere $100,000—“Shari’s anger was nonetheless mild compared with her father’s fury over her defiance of his wishes,” the authors write. “He disparaged his daughter to Viacom executives, board members—practically anyone who would listen. He pelted her with profanity-laced emails and faxes, copying Viacom executives, even on multiple occasions calling her the four-letter ‘c-word,’ as it was delicately described inside the company. When his longtime lawyer and confidant George Abrams, among those copied on the missives, begged Sumner not to use such hurtful language, he erupted, insisting he’d call his daughter whatever he pleased.”
Redstone, who loved press attention, seldom missed an opportunity to publicly humiliate his daughter, giving multiple interviews in which he expressed doubts about her qualifications to be his successor.
Regularly underestimated by such executives as Moonves and Redstone’s sycophantic chief enabler, Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman, Shari nevertheless hung on. Her older brother Brent—who did join the business early on, working briefly and unhappily for Viacom—stopped speaking to their father entirely, moved to a ranch in Colorado, and sued Redstone for more than $1 billion.
The 68-year-old Shari, these days president of National Amusements and non-executive chairman of Paramount Global (as post-merger ViacomCBS was rebranded last year), is surely the heroine of this saga. She banished Herzer and Holland, triumphed over Moonves and Dauman, and managed to stabilize the troubled empire with her hiring of Bob Bakish to run the newly merged company. He “warmly welcomed Shari’s ideas and involvement.” the authors write.
“By most objective measures, Shari was proven right about the merger and her choice of Bakish as chief executive. During the two years he’d presided at Viacom, Bakish had brought the company back from the brink… After long describing herself as a reluctant mogul, Shari told friends and advisers she loved her new role.”
The Daily Beast here.}:
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[*King of Content
Wall Street Journal reporter Keach Hagey recounted the life and career of Sumner Redstone, whose media empire includes CBS, Viacom, Simon and Schuster, and Showcase Cinemas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Amusements
National Amusements, Inc. is an American privately owned theater company based in Dedham, Massachusetts, United States. The company was founded in 1936, as the Northeast Theatre Corporation by Michael Redstone.
National Amusements is now owned by Michael Redstone's son,Sumner Redstone, who holds 80% of the company, and Sumner's daughter, Shari Redstone, who owns the remaining 20%. Through National Amusements, the Redstones control both the CBS Corporation (owner of CBS) and Viacom (owner of Paramount Pictures) through supervoting shares.[2]
National Amusements is equal partners in MovieTickets.com.The company operates more than 1,500 movie screens across theUnited States, the United Kingdom, Latin America, and Russiaunder its Showcase Cinemas, Multiplex Cinemas, Cinema de Lux, and KinoStar brands.
National Amusements' slogan, "Welcome to the Show", was coined by policy trailer producer Pike Productions, Inc., with which National Amusements had an exclusive contract until Filmack acquired Pike, in the late 2000s.
Contents
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- :{2:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{Main competitors:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
- :{3:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{References:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
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Financial troubles
At the end of 2008, the Redstones' financial troubles started when billionaire Sumner Redstone had to dump $400 million of nonvoting shares.[3]
It was released that National Amusement planned to sell $390 million of notes in another attempt to refinance a large part of the company's bank owed debt.[4]
Sale of theaters and subsidiary stock
In October 2009, the news was released that National Amusement would be selling almost $1 billion of stock they own in CBS and Viacom.[5] National Amusements has sold 35 theaters to Rave Motion Pictures.[6]