Iowa AG Brenna Bird Makes Silly, Empty Legal Threats To Try And Save Larry Ellison’s Paramount Merger

As we've been noting, billionaire Larry Ellison's effort to dominate what's left of corporate media is facing some headwinds after 12 states filed an antitrust lawsuit against his planned $111 billion merger between Paramount and Warner Brothers. As we've also noted, this is a giant turd of a deal, the debt from which will indisputably result in mass layoffs, higher prices, and shittier overall product.

We know this because it's what happens every time U.S. media giants merge; particularly when Warner Brothers is involved. It's not something for economists or pundits to even debate. Large scale media consolidation is uniformly, indisputably bad for labor, markets, and consumers. There's not a major U.S. industry where the impact isn't very clearly obvious.

But the state AG lawsuit introduces all sorts of costly new delays for Ellison, which has resulted in a sort of PR desperation at the company. That has included repeatedly insisting that anybody who criticizes the merger (or Ellison) is somehow antisemitic". It's also involved heavily lobbying a parade of high-profile people to try and convince the 12 state AGs to settle the case before next March's trial.

That includes Iowa AG Brenna Bird, who wrote an editorial over at the right wing propaganda website DailyWire stating she was planning on suing California to try and stop the merger. To be clear there's no indication she's actually filed any legal paperwork or has any coherent standing to get legally involved, but she's super keen to have you think she's doing something important all the same.

The editorial is full of all sorts of silliness, including the observably false claim that more media consolidation somehow magically improves market competition (you can observe 50+ years of U.S. history to answer that question for yourself). She also leans heavily on this claim by Paramount that if they're allowed to merge, they'll create 30 big movies a year:

A successful Paramount-Warner Bros. merger would change that. Netflixdominatesthe market for streaming. Paramount+ and HBO Max together aresmaller than Netflix, smaller than Disney, and smaller than Amazon. The merger could create a company to compete: an estimated $6 billion in savings to reinvest, and a public commitment to release at least 30 movies in theaters every year. More movies mean more entertainment - and more competition means lower prices."

As you may have observed from any of the hundreds of major U.S. mergers anytime in the last five decades, pre-merger promises by company executives are utterly worthless. They're even more worthless in an era where we've defanged most of our public-protection, consumer, and labor regulators under the pretense this would somehow result in unbridled free market innovation.

Amusingly, Bird also tries to claim that California (which she singles out but is joined by 11 other state AGs in the suit) has introduced delays that would have somehow magically have instead gone toward lowering streaming video prices:

Now think about what California's delay is doing. Beginning in October, Paramount is contractually obligated to pay Warner Bros. roughly $7 million a day for as long as this transaction sits in limbo, and the trial that 12 state attorneys general have engineered will not even start until March 2027. That money could have lowered streaming costs but instead is being burned on a lawsuit that federal antitrust enforcers and 68 regulators around the world already concluded was unnecessary."

It should go without saying that no, Paramount would have not just magically lowered streaming video prices if not for the AG lawsuit. That's just... not even a coherent claim?

Most of the regulators around the world rubber stamped the deal because it has no meaningful impact on their local economies. 12 states sued to stop the deal because literally every time Warner Brothers is involved in a merger, it results in untold thousands of Americans losing their jobs, prices getting higher, and the remaining company getting steadily more enshittified. Again, this is not a debate.

The idea that letting media further consolidate - at the hands of a Trump-allied anti-democratic billionaire like Larry Ellison no less - somehow results in mystical new utopias for everyday Iowans is a very curious delusion. For Bird, the fact that the Trump DOJ (long since purged of every last person who actually believed in antitrust) claimed the deal would be good for Americans was evidence enough:

The Department examined this deal market by market and found a benefit in each one. In streaming, it concluded the combined firm is likely to increase competition by giving consumers a more robust competitive alternative" to the dominant players."

I suppose Bird thought meaninglessly injecting herself in the debate over media consolidation would somehow move the needle for an oligarch, but it's mostly just sad. I also think the endless PR and lobbying lengths Paramount has been willing to go to in order to sell this shitty deal to the public provides its own evidence as to why you probably don't want to give Larry Ellison any more power.

Pressure continues to build for the state AGs to settle the lawsuit and allow the merger to proceed. When and if that happens, the high debt load of the deal will result in thousands of people losing their jobs, consumer prices will soar ever higher, conditions won't be meaningfully enforced, and whatever's left of Paramount/Warner Brothers under the management of weird brunchlords like Bari Weiss will produce more and more lowest-common-denominator offshored crap in the pursuit of impossible scale.

And when that happens, because it always happens, all the people rooting for consolidation and less regulatory scrutiny will very suddenly and curiously be nowhere to be found. All that will be left is a bunch of trash and some carnage, like the circus very abruptly packed up and left town.