← The Beat with Ari Melber
The Beat with Ari Melber
Paramount-Warner Merger Sends Industry Shockwaves
00:40:43
One company backed by MAGA billionaire Larry Ellison is on track to own Paramount, Warner Bros., CNN, HBO, and CBS, along with a vast array of media properties, if its massive new $100 billion merger goes through. MS NOW’s Ari Melber reports and is joined by founding partner of Puck News, Matt Belloni.
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Download Today. Welcome to the beat, everyone. I'm Ari Melber. We begin where we were. If you happened to be watching the news last night, it was at this hour, 24 hours ago, where Donald Trump made another series of statements to contradict his own timeline. And so the New York Times and other serious outlets in the news section, not some big opinion attack, have just reported the fact that on this matter of life and death for Americans and everyone in the Mideast region, the president has been sending confusing, clashing and sometimes downright contradictory messages about what we're doing in Iran and how long we'll be there. Sometimes within one day, more typically every couple days. It is, if you will, the opposite of a doctrine and more of a what's he gonna say today? He is also being pressed by his own White House team at the highest levels as people inside the Trump administration who report to Donald Trump and may want to carry out his goals as best they can, are seeking an offer. We have that reporting for you right now. We also can tell you there are new strikes rattling Tehran. As of tonight, eight confirmed US deaths, roughly 140Americans injured, according to the Pentagon. The AP estimates the Iranian death toll at over 1000, around 1200, which is a number that does keep changing, obviously as this goes on, some of Trump's advisors privately urging him to look for an exit plan, the Journal reports, amid the spiking oil prices and concerns over a lengthy conflict sparking a backlash. That backlash in the polling has already begun and so the Journal reports they're encouraging him to at least articulate a plan to extract the US from the war and make the case the military had largely achieved its objectives. Trump officials, we want you to know, deny this report, although clearly the Journal had multiple sources. This is a matter of war. They don't just push this out lightly. There may be people inside the White House who desperately want Donald Trump to hear about this, whether that's through the Journal or the television coverage of it, which is a dynamic we've seen in the past, because they're putting this out there one way or the other. According to the Journal's multiple sources. There's scrutiny on the contradictions. Is this war almost over or is it actually just beginning? Have we basically completed it, something that Donald Trump said as recently as yesterday, or are the most intense strikes only beginning now, today, something that the Pentagon chief said? And what does it mean to claim we may have basically already won? We've already won in many ways, but we haven't won enough.
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I think you'll see it's going to
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be a short term excursion. It's going to be ended soon. What I want your viewers to understand is this is only just the beginning. It's not for me to posit whether
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it's the beginning, the middle or the end.
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Are you thinking this week it will be over? No talking about days? I think so. Today will be yet again our most
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intense day of strikes inside Iran.
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Mr. President, you've said the war is, quote, very complete, but your defense secretary says this is just the beginning. So which is it and how long should Americans be?
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B
Well, I think you could say it both. You could say both, but then you would be contradicting yourself and you would be giving misleading information to the American public if you said it is both basically over and going on for a long time, to say nothing of the brave men and women around the world who represent the United States, some of whom are obviously in harm's way and trying to plan this out. Now, no one is suggesting that every step of the war will be publicly telegraphed. But whether you're asking people for a short ended operational commitment or a long term potential boost on the ground, war is a big difference. And I'll remind you, as we've reported, this is the only time we've had a conflict of this level where the president hasn't given a formal address to the nation. It was only around day 10 when he went to do a press conference and that seemed to be a response to stock and oil price jitters. Rather than telling the public what we're doing, why we're doing it, and roughly what kind of long term operation it is, then you go to the scale of this thing. And I want to show you this because it really is astounding. This war has now involved 20 countries at a military level that would be shooting, shielding or supplying, according to Axios. There's also the widening energy shock that punishes nations, of course, beyond the 20 on the front lines. Another way to state this conflagration is that the war now has more great powers and more overlapping conflicts than any crisis since the Cold War. Quoting the same article. So how is that all being absorbed in this country? That is one of 20. This war was unpopular from the start, which is rare. Most Americans already oppose it. About 41% support it. And if you put it up against other wars, you can see it's an unusually rough start. Most interventions begin with some initial boost. It's a kind of patriotic tendency to rally around the flag, as political scientists put it. And if the war remains broadly supported and popular, like the top numbers you see on the left, wars that are seen as almost obvious and existential necessities respond in a 9, 11 or World War II, a high watermark, well, they stay popular. The numbers go down over time. Iraq war of course was split and ultimately ended widely opposed. But Iran being the least popular from the jump, as unleashed by this president Donald Trump, is historically bad. Oil prices fluctuating. Gas prices are up. Americans paying 20% more already at the pump than just last month.
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If it stays like this, it's going
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to be pretty bad. It's going to stop people from traveling. We're from Tampa, we came down to Miami for a funeral and it's like I just looked at the price, I was like, wow, right now I'm already at $65 and still pumping.
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I'm just getting killed right now. I mean gas prices are so high
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and you know, they were high before the war. We gotta drive, we gotta work.
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I'm working now, you know, for ride
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share and I don't know what, what
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that's gonna look like next week because
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if gas is $4 a gallon, I'm done.
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That's the immediate reaction from real people around the country. Whether or not they're following foreign policy closely. They are learning about it at the pump in real time. The war's cost is clear. The Pentagon says what they've done already is over $5 billion in the first few days. I wanna, that we've called upon before. Middle east diplomat, longtime ambassador and Peace negotiator Dennis Ross. He worked in the Clinton and Obama administration. You can see him there in the Oval Office with President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton. He also worked on these high level Middle east negotiations which are relevant again today. Here he was with then PLO leader Yasser Arafat, you see on the right and the gentleman on the left, then a key leader back in power in Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu. That was 1997. His book is Statecraft 2.0. Welcome, Ambassador. How do you view the conflicting, sometimes contradictory statements for the Trump administration about how long we're going to be doing this war?
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You know, one could accept more easily the flexibility when it comes to not being clear specifically on the tie, if there was greater clarity on the nature of the objective. You know, it's, it's one thing to understand if you say, look, we are determined to make sure that Iran loses the ability to ever have a nuclear weapon. We want to set back their capacity to build ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and drones. We want to set it back, you know, for at least five years or more. We have an expectation that this is not a regime that can last that long. We say, well, we're saying to the Iranian people, we're creating an environment for you. But the truth is, whether we're creating that environment or not, this is a regime that can't address any of the grievances that have motivated people to come out in the streets, motivated Iranians in all 31 provinces, something we hadn't seen before to basically say, enough already. Now they killed, depending upon who's counting, anywhere between seven and 30,000 people in two days. So this is a regime that will do whatever it takes to stay in power, but they can't keep doing that because the people who pull the triggers also don't have water, also don't have electricity, also don't have a currency that has any value, also have no prospect that anything can improve. That was before this war. So if the administration were clear in terms of saying our aim is to ensure, and we have four tiers of targets that are designed to ensure the end of the day, Iran is going to be in a vastly less capable position of threatening any of its neighbors. If that were the case, then I think there would be a greater readiness to cut the administration slack in terms of how specific they need to be with regard to when it ends. You said it earlier, Ari, you really don't want to telescope or communicate to the other side. We're going to end this in two days. That's the last thing you want to do. But on the other hand, what you do want to communicate to the other side is here's what we're going to do. We are going to hit all these targets. You're already seeing how many we're hitting. And we're going to continue until we reach a standard that tells us you can't threaten anybody. Think about this. For sure, there's an objective criteria that says, this is what it takes. Here's how many targets there are. These are the machine tools that are used to build components of missiles, engines, guidance systems. We're going to take that out. We know where they are. We know there's all sorts of underground bunkers. We know there's stockpiles of weapons that are buried underground. We know where the tunnels are. We're going to go through all of that. Now, that's one set of targets that is related to an objective. That objective is weakening the regime so it can't be a threat. There's another objective related to weakening the regime, and that is go after the control mechanisms of the regime. So you hit the headquarters of the besieged, you hit the headquarters of. Of the Revolutionary Guard. You hit every command post, you hit their depots, their weapon stocks. But that's a different objective. That's an objective that is designed to say, we're going to weaken the regime to the point where it can't suppress its population, or at least where there's more likely to be defections. Right.
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Which I'll jump in and say is the fundamental difference between are you doing regime change because that's where you want it to land, or are you defanging this very despised power that's gotten away with a lot. I mean, you could take us and Israel out of the equation and you'd have a bunch of other detractors in the region for how Iran operates and what it gets away with. But that seems to be a big difference that you're saying they haven't had strategic clarity on. Others are worried in the Congress from the briefings they're getting, that this could expand to Trump putting boots on the ground, even though he would face even more blowback. Take a look. I emerge from this briefing as dissatisfied and angry, frankly, as I have from any past briefing in my 15 years in the Senate. We seem to be on a path toward deploying American troops on the ground in Iran to accomplish any of the potential objectives here. Is that a possible risk, or is that the opposition party trying to find ways to wake people up because. Because they Oppose this, but overstating what, what the risk is right now.
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Well, I think here's where you come back to the confusion of objectives. If the objective is not to defang the regime, or at least to defang the regime, but you're focused more on not the threats to, to the outside as much as you're focused on the threats to the inside, the suppression of the public. I don't know how you do regime change only from the air. Now, to be fair, maybe the administration is testing the proposition that there is a way to weaken the Revolutionary Guard and to weaken the besiege enough so they really can't suppress the public. If that objective was one in which we were making real progress, I would expect to see some signs of defections. At this point, we're not seeing those defections. The surest way of having the regime collapse would be if you begin to see whole units defect. The idea of protect. Let's say that the public rise up. I noticed that Prime Minister Netanyahu did an appeal today to the Iranian public to rise up because we're, as he said, we are weakening those who have savaged you. Now, if that's the case and people do rise up, do we not have a moral obligation? If we're calling them to rise up and they rise up, we have no responsibility.
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Now, obviously, I'll let you finish. Obviously you're speaking in the grand external sense of on earth or whatever one's worldview, what are the values that the United States still holds? But Donald Trump has ruled out any moral obligation because this is purely great power realist politics for him. I mean, he does not claim in any way to have any. It sounds like a criticism, but it's just he has no standard for foreign policy other than if you're a big enough power like Putin or China, he'll deal with you and everybody else, he might kidnap you.
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E
Well, he did say at one point help us on the way when the public was rising up. So I again, I asked the question, if we have, what happens if the Iranians rise up and the Revolutionary Guard has not been defanged or hasn't been defanged to the point where they're breaking ranks, their defections, they still have arms, whether it was 7,000 or 30,000. What we saw was there was no hesitancy to kill people. Now the question is, are they changing? Is something happening? Are there signs of weakening that give us a reason to think that we could be closer to the point where there will be defections? As I said, if they're there, I'm not seeing them at this point. That's why again, I divide the objective into is the objective to make sure that Iran cannot be a threat to its neighbors? That's different from making sure that Iran is not capable of brutalizing its public the way it has before.
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Right. And to your point, if Donald Trump is putting people in harm's way above and beyond the danger of the actual bombings, then what does America own and owe for that? Which again is why these are complicated matters when we go in there and he didn't involve the Congress or the public. So we're doing it on the back foot or the back end. Ambassador Ross, as always, we appreciate you. I want to thank you tonight and tell folks what's coming up because years later, authorities are now finally searching a new Epstein property. Believe it or not, but this is how the pressure works. We have that story coming up, including the pressure on Donald Trump as his name comes up more and more in the files. Also, I have told you we have a big problem with independent media and billionaires in this country. Donald Trump got the merger he wants. CNN is now changing hands. If the merger is approved. And we have a special insider on that. It's an important story about what you hear and whether you're going to hear the truth in the years ahead. So stay with us tonight. Right now a 90 second break and we come back with Paul Reicho.
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We're back with Paul Rykoff, the founder and CEO of Independent Veterans of America, a national security expert, host of the Independent Americans podcast. We've been looking at this in the region. I want to look back in America where you have a real pushback. Take a listen to Joe Rogan. Well, it just seems so insane based on what he ran on. I mean, this is why a lot of people feel betrayed, right? He ran on no more wars and these stupid senseless wars. And then we have one that we can't even really clearly define why we did it.
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Well, but he said he's against endless wars. Ran against endless wars.
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Listen, man, they're all endless.
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How are you feeling about the President Trump?
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That's a open ended question.
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Yeah, that's revealing. The bottom is dropping out on his support even in his base. This is a really unique, I think, defining moment for how the country is viewing him. His admin foreign conflict. Over 70% of the country is against this war. That's the highest percentage of people against any war since World War II. I mean, there's no precedent for how unpopular this war is. And I think it's really important to understand it comes on the back of the unpopularity of ice. So you've got these two overwhelmingly, bipartisanly unpopular elements that I think is actually an opportunity. And every crisis is an opportunity. This might be the one moment that defines the unification of America because they're united not just against Trump, but against ICE and against Iran. You've got the left wing, the right wing, Joe Rogan, everybody in between is against this war. The big problem is Donald Trump doesn't care. He doesn't care about public opinion. He continues to go forward, all gas, no brakes, and nothing's slowing him down. And what I wanna hear from every senator today is not just alarm and concern and anger. What is their plan to slow him down? Are they gonna defund the Department of Defense? Are they gonna impeach him? Are they gonna come up with other ways to slow him down? Because so far nothing is slowing him down, including popularity of wars to include. If he goes into Cuba, we should expect him to go into Cuba in some way militarily like he did in e door last week, and most Americans didn't even notice.
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Yeah, and as you say, I mean, there was a legislative push on the War Powers act, which Republicans basically interfered with. So some of them are making noise, but they don't actually want to call him out and use the powers that are there. Steve Bannon may not be a preeminent foreign policy expert, but he has military background. He has been in the White House, whatever you think of him. And here's where he comes down on some of this. You just can't sit there and go shine us on about imminent threat. Oh, yeah, it's not imma. Threats. No, it doesn't work like that. The people in the messaging part over there got to get serious about this. You're going to start losing people if there's not consistency, just to kind of shine on. Immense threat. No, no, no, no, no, no. Incorrect, sir. Incorrect. Mr. P. Texas. There was not an imminent threat. And now we're in it. Now we're in it.
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Yeah, we are deep in it. We're deeper than we've ever been before. It's a regional conflict, and the bodies are already coming home. And that's what all Americans will not tolerate, is caskets coming home wrapped in American flags with likely more to come. And some in this White House and some in the Republican Party who seem to have no problem with it. There's a whole new generation of chicken hawks, people who are willing to send other people's kids to die. And Trump's base, most of this country, has some connection to our military, and they don't want to see America, American men and women come to die. The question is, what is Trump gonna do here? And usually he does something. And it looks like the circular firing squad is focusing on Hegsett. He continues to fumble. He continues to be unpopular. He says egregiously negative things. I don't think he represents us very well to the world. I think that's becoming bipartisan. And the question is, does Trump make some kind of move to make it seem like he's making a move while he continues to go all gas, no bricks? That's what he did in Minneapolis, Right? He pulled back on Minneapolis. He made a staffing change, even removing Kristi Noem. But strategically, he. He's still pushing ice forward across this country. And I think that's going to be his problem here. He's deeply into this now, and it's going to be hard to get out.
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B
Yeah. All important points. Paul Rykoff, thank you very much. We appreciate it. Up ahead, we have an insider on the mega merger that's taking control of cnn and the new Epstein search coming up, and the files that implicate Trump even as he tries to turn the world abroad. We stay on that domestic story tonight. Coming up.
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Up,
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The Trump DOJ's Epstein response has been under heat. Meanwhile, local officials are taking action. State investigators searching Epstein's sprawling New Mexico ranch. The Times says it's the first thorough search for property that was overlooked. Epstein accusers alleged they were abused in traffic there. That's been reported repeatedly in articles and documentaries. The new probe spurred by tips from the files that came out, including an anonymous claim which may or may not be true. But to investigate that Epstein even buried two people on the property. It's unclear whether that serious claim was investigated by the FBI at the time. Other victims are coming out. One interview Memo describes a 16 year old who heard Trump on a speakerphone while being coerced into giving Epstein a massage in 2004. That doesn't mean that Trump knew what was going on on the other end of the line. But it's another place where he pops up in the files. The DOJ says they want to protect victims. In a review of 20 newly released documents, Ms. now reporting found unredacted names of 21 individuals. Congressman Raskin responding.
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They've got us on a wild goose chase, Michael, and this is ridiculous and I feel terrible for Danny Bensky and for the other survivors who have fought so hard to bring us to this point. And now the Trump justice is engaged in just a prolonged sustained cover up.
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Lawmakers alleging that cover up by Trump in the US Abroad, we have seen more accountability, including legal cases. These individuals deny criminal wrongdoing. But many have faced the evidence in the files with real world consequences. The New York Times Emily Bazelon is here. As we look at that new report about Trump, how he cannot silence what clearly is a story that's out of his control. That's next.
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A
You know, I wonder about how much it would prove to just be a distraction from the actual facts on the ground that are being revealed that continue to be quite damning for the Justice Department in terms of what they disclosed initially, what they held back, what they claimed were duplicates, which are not duplicates. Once the impeachment conversation starts, then it often devolves into is this the right thing? Republicans might feel much more obligated and move to defend Bondi and the Justice Department. So anyway, I think that raises a whole bunch of strategy questions.
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B
Understood. The files continue to reveal different types of information. And we've discussed this. The what's considered the most newsworthy in week one is different than what people continue to ferret out as the weeks go by. The Miami Herald went through and looked at some of the internal review notes around Epstein's death, where according to an inmate, which is not always the most credible, but the FBI got an inmate testifying about how reading from this breathe, breathe, breathe. The inmate recalled officers shouting around the time Epstein was found. An officer says, dudes, you killed that dude. A female guard replies, if he's dead, we're going to cover it up and he's going to have an alibi. My officers, according to FBI notes and the inmate said everyone overheard the exchange. There is some corroboration there because two of the officers did break the rules and were actually later charged. Cover up can mean a lot of things. It doesn't mean they were involved in necessarily any foul play prior to discovering the body, but that they weren't honest and inmates heard things that necessarily weren't completely investigated.
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A
Right. And I think also there were some payments to one of the officers that seem unexplained around this time. Maybe Epstein was paying protection or it's, who knows, inquiring minds. You know, the main reason that often inmates are not trusted is more that they are seen to benefit for being what's called a jailhouse snitch. If there were no benefits here, then maybe that concerns, concern is diminished. It does seem like this quote, don't worry, alibi on the way was a little on the nose. It's hard to imagine someone actually being that obvious or blunt. But it is all very intriguing given the questions that have already arisen and been floating around for a long time about whether this was really, this Epstein's death was really a suicide.
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B
Here's Ro Khanna. Let's take a listen to this. The worst stuff is still in these files that the, the names of some of these people which have been scrubbed by Donald Trump's FBI. But look, here's why people shouldn't give up hope because when people cover it, when people, journalists make a big deal of it, then suddenly PMDDI relents and they would get 10,000 more files, 40,000 more files. So we need to just be on this until we can get a judge to order the release of the rest of the files. Is that a fair reading that it just takes more and more pressure and then they cough up a little more?
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A
I mean, look, it is true that we have seen some of the most interesting materials come out kind of in dribbles after the fact of the big releases. So I mean, I don't, I can't prove that, but it does seem interesting and worth noting. Also, Bondi has now been subpoeded by Republicans joining Democrats in the House. Right. And so that pressure, that bipartisan pressure is pretty interesting to watch. House Republicans, Congressional Republicans have not been eager to hold the Trump administration to account. And so you see an exception to that on this particular issue. And now we don't know when that hearing is scheduled, but Bondi presumably is gonna have to show up.
- [29:47]
B
Right? And that pressure keeps building. Emily, thank you very much. Up next, I want to tell folks we look at these MAGA mergers, the effort to control CN Special GUEST Next, US Media is consolidating. Consider how one company backed by MAGA billionaire Larry Ellison is now on track to own Paramount, Warner Brothers, cnn, hbo, CBS and a vast array of related media properties if its new massive hundred billion dollar plus merger go now as a business matter, news is just a tiny part of that balance sheet. But there are major impacts on civics and democracy when a small number of the richest people in the world can own most of the big major journalism outlets in our country. That's not how it's always been. And news, of course, has an outsized impact on campaigns and politics and who gets into power. Trump has fixated on who would own CNN in the run up to this deal. In fact, the Netflix CEO basically said in public very recently after their bid fell through, that when once it was clear that the original deal they wanted was not going to include cnn, Trump didn't care. While the man on track to control cnn, David Ellison, who you see on your screen, has been clearly playing to maga's media agenda. There he was attending the State of the Union with Trump ally Lindsey Graham. The Journal reports he's promised media changes, including reshaping CNN as he has CBS, where top journalists have left the newsroom, and 60 minutes after Ellison installed a MAGA friendly opinion editor with no TV news experience to run the whole TV news operation over there. Now, David Ellison has said they won't be changing CNN's independence. But he's also said that he's happy with how they're running cbs, that he views that as independent. And a lot of longtime nonpartisan journalists object to the point of quitting. The challenges here, though, are broader than just any one person or merger. The richest people in our entire world are cutting deals with Trump on everything from tech to media to business. Some of them vowed to save journalism. That was the Jeff Bezos position in the first term when he bought Washington Post's newsroom when he said democracy dies in dark darkness. And he's now turned that media outlet as a way to kind of curry favor. He turned the opinion section to the right. Then he slashed the nonpartisan factual reporters on the Washington Post staff. Now Trump admits his abuses of power. He openly demands the DOJ probe and indict anyone in his way. A list of enemies that has grown so much in the first year that it almost looks ridiculous or comical on your screen, except when you remember that he's trying to to jail these people. It includes reporters and Democrats and even some of his former cabinet. He's taking the same approach to federal funding and this kind of media oversight. He admits a partisan, self interested demand for payback. He wants friendly media coverage. He wants it to keep his side in power, even if it's a new Republican running in 28. And he wants that in exchange for approving deals the way he wants them or for his own grift and crypto for his family. It's all blatantly out in the open. He might get in trouble for it and others might get in trouble for it if there are independent investigations in the future. But for now, this is business as usual in Trump's swamp of Washington. Now, Donald Trump's first term had a lot of amateur plots that kind of faltered. He has now proven, though more ruthlessly effective in this, his final term term. As one street smart poet famously put it, not a relief pitcher. I'm the closer, the Mariano of the Marriott. If money talks, the whole world bout to hear me out. Well, money's been talking. The rich are certainly getting heard and free speech and a free press for everyone else. Well, they're clearly trailing at this point in the game as CNN seems to be on the way to getting the CBS treatment. I want to bring in a very special expert we invited for exactly this discussion. Matt Bellany is the founding partner of Puck News. He is now known across Hollywood and Wall street and Washington for his many say, must read newsletter, what I'm Hearing and his podcast, the Town. Welcome.
- [34:32]
D
Thanks for having me.
- [34:34]
B
I tried to mention the context because the journalism part, while some of us might be interested in it, is not the and yet Ted Sarando said it's what Trump cared about. And David Ellison seems to think it will help him on his path. You are an insider, you're nonpartisan. What do you see happening here?
- [34:56]
D
Well, clearly the Ellison family knows they have a connection to Trump. Larry Ellison is a longtime Trump donor. He is, I think, a friend of the president. And it's not Larry that is running this studio conglomerate day to day. It's David, his son. But David, who is less politically ideological, has really taken to understanding that they have an in here. And he's got two years and change to do what he wants without much federal interference. And he is absolutely taking advantage of that. He's cozying up to whoever he needs to cozy up for. You showed the Lindsey Graham photo, but there are many visits, visits to the White House. There are many meetings. There's many, you know, they had an interaction at a UFC match. And the thinking both in Hollywood and Washington is that the Ellisons have the upper hand here to do both this deal and potentially other deals as long as Trump is happy with the news product that they are putting out.
- [35:59]
B
Do you view it as almost for them a small balance sheet commitment with a large return on investment, that for people who don't care about how journalism works, they say, well, we just have to mollify them over here and then we get to do what we want everywhere else?
- [36:18]
D
Oh, absolutely. I mean, the Ellisons are not the Murdochs. The Murdochs are in this because they feel an obligation to have a conservative voice throughout the media that they believe is speaking to the consumer that is not fed by any other media outlet. The Ellisons do not have that feeling. What they say, they say this is a business decision. They are speaking to what they call the 70% of Americans that are center left and center right. They feel like the media right now is mostly center left and they are trying to shift that. They are trying to shift CBS News and we believe once they take over CNN they will also try to shift cnn. Now many others believe that what they're really trying to do is make this more a Trump friendly media operation. And if that's the case, Trump will allow them to do whatever they want in the other aspects of the business that actually matter to them. David got into this to make movies. He did not get into this because he wanted to control cnn. But CNN is proving to be very helpful in getting his other goals accomplished.
- [37:28]
B
But your reporting is they will want to make fast visible changes to cnn.
- [37:34]
D
I believe they will, yes. And we don't know whether that's going to be a wholesale firing of people. We don't know if that's going to be putting Bari Weiss above both outlets, CNN and CBS News. She's taken over CBS News and definitely moved that organization to the right. But it will be something similar.
- [37:54]
B
Here's what David Ellison says about all this. Take a listen.
- [38:00]
D
CNN is an incredible brand with an incredible team and we absolutely believe in, you know, the, the, the independence that needs to be maintained. Obviously for those incredible journalists. Editorial independence will absolutely be maintained. It's maintained at cbs, it'll be maintained at cnn.
- [38:16]
B
When he says it is maintained at cbs, he's giving away the gain, isn't it?
- [38:22]
E
Yeah.
- [38:22]
D
I don't believe that he sees this as an independence issue. He's not going to be calling the control room and telling them do this, don't do this on any particular broadcast. He's going to empower leaders that have a more center right or right sensibility and they are going to effectuate the changes there. That's news management. You put the person in charge who you believe will put in place what you want. The vision of the.
- [38:50]
B
Well, let me jump in though. Not that you're saying otherwise, but the problem isn't whether it's left, right or center. The problem would be if it is going in any direction as an exchange or deal with the government.
- [39:05]
D
Yes. And he's never going to Say that. And all we have to go on is what his actions suggest. And his actions suggest that the changes being made at these outlets are changes that conform to what the current administration would like to see. And Trump has made comments about Bari Weiss. He's made comments about David Ellison, called him a fine young man or something like that. He has done things that suggest whatever the Ellisons are doing, whether expressly or as a coincidence, the president likes what they are doing. And because of that, that the president has taken his foot off of any pressure that might be put on a deal that don't forget is $111 billion. This acquisition, the largest deal in the history of media. It's taking five legacy studios down to four, raising all kinds of antitrust red flags. And every indication we get from the federal government is that they are going to let this go.
- [40:14]
B
So let's talk Hollywood. You're steeped in it. People love movies, and people in this country and around the world love American movies. There's a lot of great art, but this has been a great thing, a unifying thing. And when it comes to also creative expression, it's been a place for ideas and protests of despots in this country and around the world. Is it, is it bad for Hollywood to have this level of consolidation, both for jobs, which you've talked about a lot in your reporting, and if I may be so bold, for artistic expression?
- [40:51]
D
Well, certainly the Hollywood community believes that when you take a buyer out of the equation, is certainly a buyer as big as Warner Brothers Discovery, which owns the Warner Studio and HBO and all of these amazing platforms that create art, that the opportunities for creators are going to be diminished. And the Ellisons are not saying that. They're saying that it's ultimately going to create a stronger company that will be able to compete with the tech powers like Netflix and Apple and Amazon and ultimately lead to more content. But when you take a buyer out of the equation, probably every history of every merger has shown that there are fewer opportunities in the short term. So that's one thing. The other here is that don't forget that this deal is likely going to include investors from Saudi Arabia, from Qatar, from Abu Dhabi, perhaps even the Chinese. This is a deal that could see Saudi Arabia having a big stake in the company that owns CNN and owns these movie studios. And that could put a chill on some of the content that is now they're saying that's not going to happen. They're saying that all these investors will be passing investors, but we don't know that and we don't know if they will have board seats. We don't know if they will have any line of communication. Usually when you put up billions of dollars to invest in a company, you want to have some say in how that company is managed and we'll see how that plays out.
- [42:18]
B
Yeah. And especially one with a debt load where you're going to care if the things are working or not. Whether you got the future of all news in Hollywood or you have a junk bond. I mean, these are big questions. You know, I'm out of time. So I didn't even get to ask you what, what giant mega podcast mergers you're considering for your empire. We'll get into it next time.
- [42:38]
D
All right, Matt, thank you. I appreciate it.
- [42:40]
B
Matt Valenty, who knows this issue well, you can check out his podcast, the Town. We'll be right back. I got to sit down with a legend, Tom Hanks, speaking of Hollywood and movies. And we discussed that as well as progress in America, his iconic roles. And I just want to share with you, we put the audio of this up as a bonus audio podcast. So if you go to the Beat on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts, open that podcast app on your phone, put in Melbourne or the Beat, you can subscribe and you'll get all of our politics and news plus the long new 40 minutes with Tom Hanks. I also want to let you know tonight Ms. Now is covering this Georgia special election. That's the seat currently held by mtg. We have Velshi on it tonight, so stay tuned. They got you covered on the weeknight Now, Lifelock, how can I help?
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