California AG Rob Bonta’s Paramount-WBD Debacle Sparks Political Chaos

Antitrust litigation is not meant to be a vehicle for partisan politics, yet that is increasingly how it appears to be used—from Donald Trump’s first-term effort to block AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner to California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s attempt to stop Paramount from buying Warner Bros. Discovery, the successor to Time Warner.

That is a troubling way to manage an economy, and it benefits no one.

Politicians themselves can look especially weak when they build their reputations around cases they ultimately lose.

The supposed beneficiaries—the American people—do not gain much from that kind of political theater, either.

Warner’s repeated appearance in this bipartisan spectacle offers a useful explanation.

The company has consistently struggled to deliver strong results on its profit-and-loss statement.

It never really has.

That is why AT&T, after prevailing against Trump’s effort to derail its purchase of the Hollywood studio behind HBO and CNN, eventually sold the entire operation in a deal that created Warner Bros. Discovery.

It is also why WBD CEO David Zaslav—despite his success cutting costs and delivering major wins in film—was ultimately compelled to sell the company to Paramount Skydance, the new conglomerate led by independent producer David Ellison and his father, technology billionaire and Trump ally Larry Ellison.

Trump argued that combining AT&T with WarnerMedia—including HBO, CNN, several cable networks and a streaming service—would create a monopoly harmful to consumers. That argument largely ignored the company’s limited ability to compete with Big Tech and Netflix. The administration’s real target appeared to be CNN, which is why courts rejected the antitrust case and allowed the transaction to proceed.

Bonta, a liberal politician who gained far greater national attention through this fight, appeared to revive the same monopoly argument Trump had previously advanced.

AT&T could not turn WarnerMedia into a successful business, and Warner Bros. Discovery’s latest structure failed to produce the hoped-for results, either.

Scoring a few points 

For several months, Bonta nevertheless enjoyed sustained publicity by warning that two struggling companies were poised to dominate the media industry.

Regulators in the European Union and the United Kingdom, meanwhile, moved to approve the merger as quickly as the Trump administration, despite their opposition to the former president’s broader agenda.

Bonta’s larger objective, critics would argue, was to appeal to the growing progressive wing of his party by emphasizing Larry Ellison’s close relationship with Trump and declaring that the Ellisons’ media company would not be allowed to control the airwaves on Trump’s behalf.

But politics has limits, as both Trump and now Bonta have learned.

As my father used to say, Bonta’s central mistake was beginning to believe his own rhetoric.

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For weeks, he highlighted on X the role of progressive actor and activist Mark Ruffalo in inspiring the lawsuit, apparently seeking additional credibility with his left-leaning supporters.

Ruffalo, for his part, now seems to spend nearly as much time discussing antitrust policy as he does making movies.

Like Bonta, he might have been better served by saying less.

This may have been the deciding factor, my sources say, in the AG’s decision to agree to settlement terms so favorable to Ellison that it’s hard to believe that Bonta brought the case in the first place. 

Ruffalo spewed lots of garbage about these companies having the power to upend the media ecosystem and eclipse Netflix and Big Tech.

But his bizarre and ­unsubstantiated assertions that Larry Ellison, who is Jewish, aided “genocide” in Gaza because Larry’s software giant Oracle provides technology to ­Israel was a bridge too far. 

Note that California’s 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. 

Also notice the tide turning after Ruffalo’s noxious Ellison-Israel comment.

Jewish groups condemned the blather publicly, but behind the scenes Hollywood’s significant pro-Israel contingent told Gov. Gavin Newsom, his likely successor Xavier Becerra and LA Mayor Karen Bass that they weren’t happy with a rising star in the party taking cues from the likes of Ruffalo. 

Money talks in this instance, and the Hollywood establishment was threatening to withhold it. 

For the state’s political apparatus, it was a no brainer.

Did they really want a state AG with weird, half-baked ideas about antitrust, Israel and who knows what else upending the media business? 

As one person involved in AG’s deliberations put it: “I can’t tell you how much that Ruffalo statement hurt Bonta’s effort.” 

Bonta, meanwhile, got his 15 minutes of fame but little more.

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’t play well if and when he tries to run for governor. 

A victory for common sense, you might say.

Let’s hope it’s also a wakeup call for the antitrust enforcers while our monthly bills for Netflix, Amazon Prime and YouTube continue to go through the roof.