{"id":862473,"date":"2026-09-27T13:32:09","date_gmt":"2026-09-27T13:32:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/862473\/"},"modified":"2026-09-27T13:32:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-27T13:32:09","slug":"rob-bontas-paramount-wbd-debacle-has-created-political-chaos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/862473\/","title":{"rendered":"Rob Bonta\u2019s Paramount-WBD debacle has created political chaos"},"content":{"rendered":"

Antitrust suits aren\u2019t supposed to be about politics, and yet that\u2019s what\u2019s happening of late, whether it\u2019s Trump\u2019s attempt during his first term to block AT&T from buying Time Warner<\/a>, or California AG Rob Bonta looking to thwart Paramount\u2019s purchase<\/a> of TW\u2019s successor, Warner Bros. Discovery.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an odd way to run an economy and doesn\u2019t do anyone any good. <\/p>\n

That includes the pols themselves who end up looking foolish and weak when they ultimately lose. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s also a clunker for the supposed beneficiaries of these lawsuits, the American \u00adpeople.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The reasons that Warner has landed in the middle of this bipartisan folly are instructive. <\/p>\n

The company simply isn\u2019t cutting it on its profit-and-loss statement. <\/p>\n

\t\t\tMore From\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCharles Gasparino<\/p>\n

Never has. <\/p>\n

That\u2019s why AT&T \u2014 after beating back Trump\u2019s attempt to kill its deal to buy the Hollywood studio that also owns HBO and CNN \u2014 unloaded the whole thing in a transaction that created Warner Bros. Discovery.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That\u2019s also why WBD CEO David Zaslav, for all his managerial excellence in cutting overhead and achieving major success<\/a> in \u00admotion pictures, was forced to unload the whole thing to Paramount Skydance, another new conglomerate run by indie producer David Ellison and his father, tech tycoon and Trump pal Larry Ellison.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Recall: Trump tried to argue that AT&T coupled with Warner Media \u2014 HBO, CNN, various cable channels and a streaming service \u2014 would be a monopoly that hurt consumers, ignoring that it was barely competitive against Big Tech and streaming giant Netflix. His real enemy was CNN, which is why the courts saw through his antitrust arguments and approved the deal.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Odd that Bonta, a lefty pol no one had ever heard of until now, tried to spin that he had uncovered a monopoly when in reality he was just rehashing the nonsense that Trump 1 tried to pass off. <\/p>\n

AT&T couldn\u2019t make a business with Warner Media and the latest iteration of Warner Bros. Discovery didn\u2019t work, either.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Scoring a few points\u00a0<\/p>\n

Bonta enjoyed a few months of nonstop publicity arguing that these two middling companies were going to rule the media world with a monopoly. <\/p>\n

Meanwhile, EU and UK regulators are approving the merger<\/a> as swiftly as the Trump administration, despite their distaste for the latter.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Bonta\u2019s bigger goal, of course, was to score points with the far left \u2014 an ever growing contingent of his party \u2014 by pointing out how Larry Ellison is besties with Trump and crowing that he wasn\u2019t about to let the Ellisons\u2019 media giant rule the airwaves with Trump.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But politics has its limits, as Trump and now Bonta have discovered.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As my old man would say, Bonta\u2019s fatal mistake was believing his own bulls\u2013t. <\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCharlie Gasparino has his finger on the pulse of where business, politics and finance meet\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSign up to receive On The Money by Charlie Gasparino in your inbox every Thursday.\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\tThanks for signing up!\n\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

For weeks he celebrated on X how lefty activist actor Mark Ruffalo inspired the lawsuit, scrambling to earn more points with his progressive base.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Ruffalo, it should be noted, spends more time these days opining about antitrust law than doing movies.<\/p>\n

Like Bonta, he couldn\u2019t keep his mouth shut. <\/p>\n

This may have been the deciding factor, my sources say, in the AG\u2019s decision to agree to settlement terms<\/a> so favorable to Ellison that it\u2019s hard to believe that Bonta brought the case in the first place.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Ruffalo spewed lots of garbage about these companies having the power to upend the media ecosystem and eclipse Netflix and Big Tech. <\/p>\n

But his bizarre and \u00adunsubstantiated assertions that Larry Ellison, who is Jewish, aided \u201cgenocide\u201d in Gaza because Larry\u2019s software giant Oracle provides technology to \u00adIsrael was a bridge too far.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Note that California\u2019s Democratic establishment began demanding that Bonta settle as soon as David Ellison began threatening to leave the state and take 50,000 jobs with him.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Also notice the tide turning after Ruffalo\u2019s noxious Ellison-Israel comment. <\/p>\n

Jewish groups condemned the blather publicly, but behind the scenes Hollywood\u2019s significant pro-Israel contingent told Gov. Gavin Newsom, his likely successor Xavier Becerra and LA Mayor Karen Bass that they weren\u2019t happy with a rising star in the party taking cues from the likes of Ruffalo.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Money talks in this instance, and the Hollywood establishment was threatening to withhold it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For the state\u2019s political apparatus, it was a no brainer. <\/p>\n

Did they really want a state AG with weird, half-baked ideas about antitrust, Israel and who knows what else upending the media business?\u00a0<\/p>\n

As one person involved in AG\u2019s deliberations put it: \u201cI can\u2019t tell you how much that Ruffalo statement hurt Bonta\u2019s effort.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Bonta, meanwhile, got his 15 minutes of fame but little more. <\/p>\n

He walked away with a settlement that included none of the structural changes he was demanding, and a truce underscoring his legal and political fecklessness that won\u2019t play well if and when he tries to run for governor.\u00a0<\/p>\n

A victory for common sense, you might say. <\/p>\n

Let\u2019s hope it\u2019s also a wakeup call for the antitrust enforcers while our monthly bills for Netflix, Amazon Prime and YouTube continue to go through the roof.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Antitrust suits aren\u2019t supposed to be about politics, and yet that\u2019s what\u2019s happening of late, whether it\u2019s Trump\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":862474,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[7746,24691,28,15284,18205,7687,12,88,2013,1035,1506,10580,69141,41215,217,4208,93508,158620,10343,9282,37812,9280],"class_list":["post-862473","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-amazon-prime","tag-att","tag-business","tag-cnn","tag-david-ellison","tag-david-zaslav","tag-donald-trump","tag-entertainment","tag-gavin-newsom","tag-hbo","tag-hollywood","tag-karen-bass","tag-larry-ellison","tag-mark-ruffalo","tag-netflix","tag-paramount","tag-rob-bonta","tag-time-warner","tag-warner-bros-discovery","tag-x-formerly-twitter","tag-xavier-becerra","tag-youtube"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/862473","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=862473"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/862473\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/862474"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=862473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=862473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=862473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}