GOP “Antitrust Concerns” Magically Disappear Now That Larry Ellison Is Buying Warner Brothers 

You might have noticed that when Netflix was attempting to acquire Warner Brothers, Republicans were suddenly and uncharacteristically interested in media consolidation and antitrust reform. Republican AGs threatened investigation. The Trump DOJ launched a (fake) antitrust inquiry. Senator Mike Lee scheduled a hearing where he’d planned to press Netflix on the competitive impacts of the deal.

But now that Trump-allied billionaire Larry Ellison has decided to elbow out Netflix and dramatically overpay for Warner Brothers instead, all of this furrowed-brow concern has magically disappeared. Despite the fact the Paramount deal is arguably worse for the market, labor, and Democracy.

Mike Lee says he’s cancelled his planned Netflix hearing, but curiously has no similar hearing scheduled for Paramount. He issued a statement that didn’t mention Paramount at all:

“Netflix’s proposed acquisition of Warner Brothers raised serious antitrust concerns. When a massive streaming platform consolidates even more TV shows and movies behind a single paywall, American families lose. Walking away from this deal is a win for consumers.”

There are far more operational redundancies between Paramount and Warner Brothers, guaranteeing significantly more layoffs. The higher debt load from subsequent CBS and Warner transactions also guarantees more layoffs and higher prices for everyone (labor and consumers always foot the bill for these deals). It’s also easy to argue that David Ellison (who was basically gifted a role as media mogul by his dad) and friends are dramatically less competent, likely resulting in significantly more mistakes and operational chaos.

And that’s before you get to the fact that Larry Ellison is a Trump-allied technofascist who is obviously trying to create the kind of propaganda-heavy, dictator-friendly, state television systems we’ve seen in autocratic countries like Hungary (given how well past Warner Brothers transactions have gone, that’s far from a guaranteed outcome).

And yet, Republicans couldn’t care less because the billionaire now buying Warner Brothers is aligned with their (increasingly unpopular) authoritarian agenda.

For as long as I’ve been alive, a key platform for the GOP has been to coddle corporate power, encourage rampant and harmful consolidation and monopolization wherever possible, and aggressively undermine corporate oversight, consumer and labor protections, and regulatory integrity. It’s not been subtle.

Yet consistently you’ll see the press trip over itself to give the GOP credibility on corporate oversight or “antitrust reform” they never had to actually earn. You’ve seen it constantly with phony populists like Josh Hawley and JD Vance, we saw it repeatedly during last election season, and you saw it again recently during the Netflix deal, when the press failed to indicate none of the inquiries were in good faith.

Democrats like Cory Booker are now threatening inquiries from the other side of the aisle:

“The circumstances surrounding this Administration’s antitrust enforcement, and the apparent political favoritism that has colored this, have cast a shadow over every transaction now moving through the approval process. Congress has a responsibility to ensure the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission are not clearing megamergers for the benefit of the Administration’s allies.”

But historically Democrats have been generally terrible on media policy, media reform, protecting labor, and protecting consumers from consolidation. Outside of folks like Lina Khan and Katie Porter, it’s another area where they’ve been a somewhat decorative opposition party that will often say the right thing, but fail to really apply pressure when it matters. We’ll see what happens next.

The Trump DOJ will of course rubber-stamp Ellison’s deal, and outside of potential state antitrust lawsuits, they don’t have a lot of leverage until they can regain control of the House, Senate, and the courts. Hooker is threatening to unwind the deal should they retake the majority during the midterms, but given Dem history, that’s the sort of threat you’d need to see before you really believe.

Consolidated corporate power buys the U.S. government (or lack of) they’d like to see, and the rest of us live in the wreckage while the corporate press tries to direct your attention elsewhere. I never thought this corruption was particularly subtle in years past, and now the clobbering is so ham-fisted it almost feels overtly satirical.