00:00On Wall Street shares in a Warner Brothers discovery opening slightly higher after Paramount's hostile counteroffer to the Netflix bid to buy the storied Hollywood studio that owns CNN.
00:13It turns out that Donald Trump's doubts about Netflix getting regulatory approval could have something to do with another perhaps blurring of the lines between what's in the public interest and personal profit.
00:30Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, with a major role in financing Paramount's 108 billion dollar bid. More from Errol Maxwell.
00:43Could the president's influence tip the scales in the Paramount v Netflix media battle over Warner Brothers? On Monday, Donald Trump was evasive.
00:52I know the companies very well, I know what they're doing, but I have to see what percentage of market they have.
00:58We have to see the Netflix percentage of market Paramount the percentage of market.
01:03I mean, none of them are particularly great friends of mine.
01:07Both Paramount and Netflix are likely to face intense antitrust scrutiny because their respective deals would consolidate significant portions of the market.
01:16This gives the government a big say in who ultimately buys Warner Bros.
01:21While praising Netflix's head Ted Sarandos, who's made overtures to Trump, the president expressed skepticism about the company's bid.
01:29Netflix is a great company. They've done a phenomenal job. Ted is a fantastic man. I have a lot of respect for him. But it's a lot of market share.
01:37But Trump's involvement in the decision raises conflict of interest concerns.
01:43Paramount's hostile bid for Warner Bros. includes financing from Affinity Partners, an investment firm run by Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner,
01:51along with financing from the Saudi and Qatari sovereign wealth funds and a holding company owned by Abu Dhabi.
01:58If Paramount is supported by Jared Kushner, Mr. President, would that impact your decision?
02:03If Paramount is, I don't know. I've never spoken to him.
02:07Meanwhile, Paramount's head, David Ellison, is the son of the world's second richest man, Larry Ellison, who has close ties to Donald Trump.
02:15Last summer, David Ellison's Skydance Media overcame regulatory hurdles to buy Paramount Global after being greenlit by the Trump administration.
02:25We're joined by Vincent Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights. Thanks for being with us here on France 24.
02:32It's wonderful to be with you. Thank you.
02:34This bid that the whole world is watching because so much of the content that we consume in our spare times comes from these big media conglomerates.
02:50Turns out now there's a Donald Trump angle to it. Your thoughts?
02:54Well, you know, I think the Trump family is really acting like a mob family.
02:59And, you know, interestingly enough, the Goodfellas, which is a mob movie, is a movie from Warner Brothers.
03:06And the the the idea here is that they're making an offer that they can't refuse.
03:13Let's let's think if let's think back for a couple of months and people will remember in July, Paramount settled with the Trump family after Trump sued them for billions of dollars and they gave millions of dollars to the Trump library.
03:26And they did that because they wanted this sale with Skydance to go through.
03:31And now the same company is back in the Trump family is very excited.
03:36Number one, Trump, I think, is very excited to be able to move forward a paramount bid because of his ties with the Ellisons.
03:43And secondarily, his son in law stands to make a lot of money here.
03:48And this is really merging the lines between what good government governance should be.
03:55And we're actually focused on what really looks like corruption.
03:59What are the reactions in the United States?
04:01I mean, it's an era of mergers and acquisitions of light touch regulation.
04:06The stock market has soared since the start of the year.
04:09Are investors all of them happy?
04:11Well, I think some of the investors are happy and I think the people that are not happy are the people that are not going to be making the billions of dollars from this deal.
04:19I think one of the key pieces about the streaming services, first of all, is that I'm a fan of movies.
04:25I like going to the theater.
04:26And I think with Netflix, there's a risk that Netflix will actually not do theatrical releases.
04:32With respect to Paramount, there's also a risk that Paramount will have too much control of the market share.
04:38So I think people are very concerned about it.
04:41And I think also people are very are quite upset that the Trump family seems to stand to make millions and millions of dollars off of a deal where the regulatory entities really need to be looking at this more holistically and impassionately.
04:57The Netflix offer left CNN out of the deal.
05:03The Paramount author, we don't know.
05:07Do you see CBS and CNN coming under the same roof?
05:11And what would that mean in terms of journalism in the United States?
05:14Well, I think journalism is definitely under attack.
05:17And the last thing that we need in the United States is to have journalistic entities all owned essentially by the same company.
05:24For no other reason that it would prevent a president like President Trump from being able to press a switch and to be able to control the content of what's happening.
05:34I mean, we saw what happened with Paramount.
05:37Paramount and different different shows were starting to cancel their their their people that were critical of the of the administration.
05:47That's going to continue to happen, particularly when these companies come together around new services and that they're under the control of the Trump administration.
05:57I think this concentration of power, if you will, there is a pushback.
06:04And, you know, in the United States, you have checks and balances right between the executive branch, the judicial branch and the legislative branch and also between the federal government and the states.
06:14There are states, for instance, who now want to regulate artificial intelligence.
06:19But now the Trump administration says, no, there should be just one law and it's a federal law.
06:24Who wins that battle?
06:25I think the states win that battle.
06:27I mean, what we see in the Trump administration, this is not, in my view, the just a situation that we picked the wrong leader,
06:35that there is actually an authoritarian push that is happening in the United States that's concentrating power in the presidency,
06:41which was not something that was contemplated in our Constitution.
06:44And so here's a great example.
06:46The states have rights to be able to regulate things that they need to regulate.
06:51The federal government, and particularly the president, doesn't have a role and influence over that.
06:55Congress has more to say about it than the president.
06:57And here we have states that are rightly concerned about AI.
07:01And what are they trying to regulate?
07:02They're trying to make sure that medical decisions aren't made by AI, that employment decisions aren't made by AI,
07:09without at least us knowing about it.
07:11And the administration wants to have one law to rule them all that comes from the president.
07:17And in fact, when you look at what his strategy is, there was a leaked document about this particular executive order,
07:24and he's going to theoretically order the Department of Justice, the federal law enforcement agency,
07:30to pursue states where he thinks the guardrails that they're putting up around AI are too strenuous.
07:37It's a very, very bad solution, particularly for people that live in states.
07:40And the people that he's going to see pushback from are the very same Republicans that he's been relying on.
07:46Republicans are not happy with this either.
07:48Republicans are not happy, but Donald Trump has allies and powerful ones.
07:51You talked about the Ellisons and these captains of industry.
07:57At one point, is there a tipping point where there is so much power concentrated in the hands of one family that the United States is no longer the same kind of democracy it was?
08:11Well, we're actually pretty close to not being the same democracy that we were, even at this particular point.
08:17You know, my organization and many organizations in the United States have been suing the Trump administration.
08:23There are more than 250 lawsuits.
08:25We're actually winning 90 percent of them in the lower courts.
08:28In the U.S., there's the lower court and then there's the appeals court.
08:31But we're losing 70 percent of them in the Supreme Court.
08:34And the reason why that's important is because this administration is essentially out to break the government and they're breaking the laws.
08:42And these these executive orders that they're doing are essentially tests.
08:46They're trying to determine, can we get away with this?
08:48And what we actually need are the courts to be able to put guardrails on it.
08:52We need the states to be able to put guardrails on it.
08:54And that's not happening yet.
08:56I spoke to one judge.
08:58This was the start of the year.
09:00Who said, well, who told me off the record, you know, the United States, there'll be elections.
09:06And then we'll see.
09:07We'll all determine the midterm elections are a year away.
09:12The next presidential election is three years away.
09:16Is that judge correct that the next election will, in the end, redress the pendulum?
09:23You know, that I don't think so.
09:25Ask any citizen in an authoritarian regime whether the elections really matter.
09:30We're getting close to the fact where elections don't matter.
09:33And an important piece here is that definitely the midterms are going to be important.
09:38And they're a pathway to ending this problem.
09:40But they're not going to be the whole thing.
09:42And litigation alone is not going to be able to do it.
09:44What we actually need to happen are for civil society to take and our legislators to take a stand firmly against what's happening.
09:53No kings, no corruption, and that sort of thing.
09:57That's what's going to need to happen in addition to the elections.
10:00Okay, so tell us what that means concretely for an organization like the Center for Constitutional Rights.
10:07How much of your energy is devoted to the next election cycle?
10:12And how much of it is devoted to other stuff?
10:14And what is that other stuff?
10:15So none of our energy is geared toward the election cycle.
10:20What we're spending our time and energy on is the following thing.
10:23What we see in the United States is that there is an attack on institutions and the rule of law.
10:28And we are moving forward and challenging that.
10:31The next phase is going to be attacks on people, on immigrants, on the organizations like ours that represent people and immigrants and protesters.
10:41You know that if you read the executive orders, the administration casts protests.
10:46We have a First Amendment right to be able to protest whatever we want.
10:50They cast that as criminality and terrorism.
10:53And when we think about, for example, the National Guard troops, the military troops that are being sent to the cities,
10:58they're being sent to the cities as a provocation that people are protesting and they're resisting ICE and the immigration enforcement from trying to pull people off the street and deport them unconstitutionally.
11:13And then the National Guard is there because Trump is saying that the protesters are the problem.
11:19And so we're going to have a normalization of military on our streets as we get into the midterm elections.
11:26And so we're really focused on representing the people who are protesting, the people that are standing up against this.
11:32And we're building a wide network of lawyers to be able to challenge that because that comes next.
11:36So, yeah, because there's been, you know, this claim that, oh, he's putting those military forces on the street in order to find an excuse to declare martial law and suspend elections where the result might be unfavorable.
11:50But what's the evidence of that?
11:52Well, the evidence is you have to look no further than the fact that when he loses elections, he says that the elections are frauds.
12:00He's always done that. He's always done that. But I think that's evidence enough, because I think if you take the idea that he is going to tell the lie that he won the election when he lost and you couple that with his now normalizing the military on our streets, that to me suggests that there's a real concern that a lie coupled with military activity really is going to, at the very least, depress people.
12:27Do you really see him asking troops to intervene to stop a vote count, to stop an election from happening?
12:34I certainly, I certainly see that because I've seen no evidence to the contrary.
12:38I've seen in any other administration, you can say clearly that's where we would draw the line.
12:43In this administration, I'd love to see the evidence to make me feel more comfortable with that.
12:47And are there signs of pushback besides a few sparse elections that took place?
12:52Yes, there are tremendous signs of pushback. On the electoral front, there were victories, as we mentioned, with respect to state governors.
13:01The mayor of my city of New York, Zoran Mandami, won incredibly. There are discussions now that there are in some of the states and districts that he won that he's not polling as well as he used to.
13:14So there is a sense that there is a change that is coming. But I also want to make the point that that change is not going to be enough.
13:22If the Democrats won everything in the midterm elections, they still have a broken government and they have a Supreme Court that is giving the executive too much power.
13:30And then what happens to the balance of power after that?
13:33All right, Vincent Warren, so many thanks for joining us here on France 24.
13:37Stay with us. There's much more to come. More news, plus the day's business and in sports.
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