Paramount-Warner merger -- Billionaires got what they wanted
- Mon, Sep 21 2026 at 5:11 PM
Mark, California Attorney General Rob Bonta just caved. And I’ll be honest: this stinks.
After months of promising he would block the Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery mega-merger or force the companies to sell off major parts of the combined business, he signed off on a weak settlement full of empty, unenforceable promises with only a smattering of forced sell-offs, no real protections for workers and no meaningful limits on the Ellison family warping CBS and CNN’s journalism to serve Donald Trump.
This is the same attorney general who told us that promises from the merging companies aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on. Now he’s agreed to exactly that: a toothless editorial oversight board and commitments on movie production that amount to less than what both companies were already doing on their own.
You took action to oppose this deal. So did hundreds of thousands of other people. That pressure worked for months. Bonta was holding strong until just days ago. Then Paramount owner David Ellison threatened to move the studio out of California, Governor Newsom signaled that he wanted the whole thing to go away, and Bonta folded.
So yes. This moment stings. But I need you to know what your support helped build.
We stood up protests. We turned up members of Congress to voice their opposition. We worked with the press and our partners to shape the public narrative around this deal while Paramount deployed every resource it had to dominate and manipulate the outcome. We permanently damaged David Ellison’s reputation. An even weaker deal was supposed to close on Friday, and we fought around the clock and forced it into this week.
When you spoke out against this merger, you became part of a movement that made the billionaires trying to consolidate the media fight for every single inch of this deal. And we came out of this fight with new allies, sharper skills, and a fired-up community of people who understand why breaking up big media matters.
I’m proud of that. You should be too, because you showed up when it mattered.
Here’s what I know for certain: we can’t rely on the federal government to enforce the law. We’ve known that for a while. But this capitulation shows that we can’t count on state-level enforcers either, not when billionaires have enough money to threaten and manipulate their way through every safeguard we have.
That means the work Free Press does is more important than it’s ever been. We’re not just opposing bad mergers, but building the political will to pass laws that break up big media conglomerates.
We already know what happens when billionaires control the news. The Ellisons gutted CBS’s editorial independence at Trump’s request. This deal hands them CNN, too. Consolidating the media in the hands of friendly oligarchs is right out of the authoritarian playbook, and we just watched it work in real time.
This fight is not over – and the next one is already here.People across the political spectrum are fed up with corruption and consolidation, with billionaires calling all the shots while everyone else struggles. They won’t forget who stood up for them and who capitulated.
We stood up. And we’re not done.
What’s exceedingly clear is that our laws and our political system are not strong enough to resist the pressure and manipulation of corrupt billionaires. We need to strengthen democratic systems of government, including getting money out of politics, and pass laws that break up big media conglomerates. We need to ensure that a few billionaires can’t drown out the masses to dictate bad policy. That’s where Free Press will focus in the weeks, months and years to come.
Thank you for being part of this fight,
Jessica J. González
Co-CEO
Free Press and Free Press Action
P.S. You showed up when we asked. The coalitions we built, the press coverage we shaped, the delays we forced: you were part of it all.
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