from the enshittify-ALL-the-things! 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 to 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.
Our good friend Cory Doctorow wrote a whole new book about it.
After paying Trump his $16 million bribe, Trump’s billionaire friends, the Ellisons, recently finalized their $8 billion merger of CBS and Paramount over the summer. And, like clockwork, the new, bigger, shittier company is getting close to laying off thousands of employees:
“Major job cuts have been expected even before the Skydance Media-Paramount Global deal closed, as part of Ellison and his team’s goal of slashing upwards of $2 billion in costs. Previously, the company had been targeting layoffs by early November. The new round of cuts is expected to eliminate around 2,000 jobs in the U.S., with additional layoffs internationally.
This new round of layoffs comes after CBS/Paramount fired around 3.5% of its staff back in June in preparation for the merger. And it comes as the Ellisons are throwing around money in media like never before, including $7.7 billion to grab MMA rights, a whopping $150 million for Bari Weiss’ shitty right wing blog, and billions more to nab partial control of TikTok.
I’m sure the longstanding employees at CBS and Paramount are particularly thrilled about the Ellisons overpaying for Bari Weiss’ blog, then promoting a woman with no real experience in journalism to be the new head of CBS News. As we’ve noted, that effort to bring even more right wing trolling and billionaire-ass kissing to a fairly saturated media market is likely to be a major headache.
The Ellisons, in their bid to dominate U.S. media, also have their eye on acquiring whatever is left of Time Warner, which is expected to cost them somewhere around $60 billion. Historically these kinds of media domination plays never end well (just ask AT&T), so you can expect significantly more layoffs as this weird combination of fail-upward brunchlords and nepobabies try to navigate a tumultuous market they don’t really understand.
It used to be that companies planning for harmful, pointless mergers had to at least make a fleeting effort to justify the pointless consolidation. But during the Trump era all you have to do is kiss the idiot king’s ring and any and all pointless consolidation gets the green light. All of the costs of those harms will, of course, be borne by consumers and employees in the months and years to come.
And because we’ve let our journalism and media consolidate in the hands of just a few billionaires — the media’s coverage of itself generally doesn’t honestly reflect any of this, propping up billionaire efforts to keep making the same mistakes over and over again for some tax cuts and a temporary stock boost.
Filed Under: consolidation, debt, enshittification, journalism, layoffs, media, mergers, prices, trump
Companies: cbs, cbs news, paramount
