from the fake-news dept
U.S. media mergers always follow the same trajectory. Pre-merger, executives promise all manner of amazing synergies and deal benefits. Post-merger, not only do those benefits generally never arrive, the debt from the acquisition spree usually results in significant layoffs, lower quality product, and higher rates for consumers. The Time Warner Discovery disaster was the poster child for this phenomenon.
It’s a silly, hollow game. With streaming growth saturated and executives all out of original ideas, the only way to goose quarterly earnings and generate new tax breaks is “growth for growth’s sake” consolidation. Such consolidation creates the illusion that these are savvy deal makers creating innovative new things, but as we’ve seen repeatedly this sort of media consolidation is mindlessly corrosive.
Right on schedule, Larry and David Ellison’s $8 billion acquisition of CBS is following this well-tread path.
The massive debt incurred from this and other deals (like the $7.7 billion bid for exclusive MMA rights, and the $150 million acquisition of Bari Weiss’ weird troll blog) is already resulting in a wave of layoffs as the company tries to cut costs, which (surely entirely coincidentally appear to be disproportionately impacting women and minorities):
“Eight on-air correspondents and hosts were given their pink slips – and all of them are women, with half of them people of color. According to three sources with knowledge of the situation, a male correspondent was initially included on the layoff list but was removed after he appealed directly to the new editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, leading to another female correspondent being added to the list at the last minute.“
Nice. Classy. We’ve noted how Bari Weiss, a “contrarian” right wing opinion troll who has failed upward into her new job at CBS News (despite no serious experience in actual journalism), was hired by Ellison to ensure that CBS is nicer to far right wingers like Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu (the softening of the latter’s ongoing war crimes being clearly important to Larry and Bari alike).
While Weiss is busy firing black and female employees and journalists, she’s apparently under the impression that she’s important enough to warrant a $10,000 a day security detail:
“Page Six hears that as staffers watch their colleagues pack up their desks, they’re also learning that the security detail for new CBSNews boss Bari Weiss costs the company five figures every day. Insiders tell us that eight bodyguards surround the Free Press founder at all times, and she’s shuttled around in a caravan of SUVs, much like the president and vice president.”
Weiss is busy eyeballing new CBS news hosts to replace the ones she already fired, and most of them (unsurprisingly) appear to be coming over from Fox News. Folks like Weiss will vehemently deny this (possibly even to herself), but the Ellisons’ goal here is to demolish whatever was left of CBS’ already pretty flimsy journalism, and turn the outlet into yet another right wing propaganda mill (see: Sinclair, Fox News, Breitbart, Newsmax, OANN) financed by profits from the infotainment arm (again, much like Fox).
That’s the plan, anyway. There’s no indication that this weird assortment of fail-upward brunchlords, nepobabies, and authoritarian apologists will actually succeed. The media market for billionaire ass kissing is pretty saturated (see: WAPO), U.S. media is an unforgiving and ever-changing mess being endlessly disrupted by new media and piracy, and we all saw what happened when AT&T tried to buy their way to modern media domination (spoiler: they fled screaming toward the exits after setting billions on fire).
It’s far more likely this effort stumbles around drunkenly for a few years, before the entire mess is offloaded to some clumsy new suitor in a few years allowing the pointless cycle to begin anew.
Filed Under: bari weiss, consolidation, david ellison, journalism, larry ellison, layoffs, media, mergers, propaganda
Companies: cbs, paramount, skydance
