The Ellisons apparently don’t take “No” for an answer. After Warner Bros. Discovery rejected Paramount Skydance’s hostile takeover bid last week over a concern of insufficient financing, the company owned by David Ellison returned on Monday with a new offer that includes a promise from daddy. Per a report from CNBC, the latest offer includes an “irrevocable personal guarantee of $40.4 billion” from Oracle CEO Larry Ellison.
The offer comes right as another Ellison media acquisition is in the middle of a crisis. CBS, which fell under the ownership of David Ellison when his company Skydance purchased Paramount, saw its news organization devolve into chaos on Sunday after it came to light that recently appointed editor-in-chief Bari Weiss spiked a “60 Minutes” story on the Trump administration’s practice of deporting migrants to a brutal and inhumane prison in El Salvador.
Weiss reportedly decided to sideline the story just three hours before broadcast, according to the New York Times, after the network spent the week promoting it. She claimed the story “needed additional reporting,” and wanted to get the Trump administration on record before running the story. Sharyn Alfonsi, the “60 Minutes” correspondent who reported the story, said in a memo to the newsroom that the story had been cleared by attorneys and network Standards and Practices. She didn’t mince words, saying that the decision “is not an editorial decision, it is a political one.”
That situation, which is basically DEFCON-1 for the state of network journalism, should loom large in the heads of any WBD shareholder, knowing that any decision to hand the company over to the Ellisons also means handing CNN to the same people actively gutting the integrity of CBS. Appointing Weiss, a Trump ally, to head CBS was just one of many administration-friendly decisions that David Ellison was willing to concede to get his acquisition of Paramount pushed through by Trump’s regulators. Lord only knows what he’s willing to commit to doing to CNN if he wants to solidify this takeover attempt.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Ellison and his dad are already working the refs. Reportedly, right after Netflix announced its intention to acquire WBD, David Ellison called Trump and said the transaction would hurt competition. David Ellison also reportedly told Trump that he’d make sweeping changes at CNN, which surely speaks to the President, who seems to do little more with his days than watch cable TV and bandage his hands.
Should WBD shareholders decide they’re willing to take the Ellison’s bid, they should know what they are doing: handing over one of the largest news apparatuses in the world to an administration-aligned ownership who have already managed to demoralize one of the country’s most prestigious newsrooms as it quickly transforms it into state-approved media. Hopefully, the fat check is worth it.
