00:00The Paramount deal is going through. The $81 billion merger between Paramount Skydance on
00:05the one hand and Warner Brothers Discovery on the other is going to proceed after California
00:10Attorney General Rob Bonta reached a settlement with a new conglomerate earlier this week.
00:15Bonta's coming out looking like the loser in this negotiation. It was Bonta who led several other
00:21attorneys general from different Democrat-run states, including New York State's Tish James,
00:24in pushing to stop the merger. And while Bonta said it was about stopping consolidation,
00:30and preserving competition, the real issue for Democrats was that the Ellison family would
00:35control CNN once this merger went through. David Ellison already acquired CBS in the deal in which
00:43Skydance bought Paramount, and he brought in Barry Weiss, who's a liberal but not woke enough for the
00:48New York Times. And she started making changes in the CBS newsroom, holding editors to a tighter
00:55standard, not allowing a network to lean so far to the left. That irritated Democrats and
00:59they are worried that the same would happen at CNN. You might think that might only boost viewership,
01:04but that's not the point to Democrats. Democrats want more control over the editorial line in cable
01:10news, and this merger threatened that. However, the failure to allow the deal to go forward would
01:16have threatened tens of thousands of jobs. Paramount was looking at leaving California, which would have
01:21devastated Hollywood. And so in the end, Bonta had to agree to something. He does come away with a few
01:27concessions. The new conglomerate will agree to spend $1.5 billion on domestic film production,
01:33and it will agree to produce 30 films per year for the first two years of the deal, and 32
01:39films per
01:39year after that, with a number of blockbusters thrown in. That might allow Bonta to save face.
01:44But for now, the left-wing activists who opposed the deal are disappointed, and they should be,
01:49because this was a fool's errand to begin with. This was playing politics
01:54with an effort to save Hollywood from its own self-destruction.
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