Warner Bros Discovery Merger Idiocy Continues With Another Big Round Of Layoffs

Everyone thinks America's favorite pastime is baseball. In reality, it's mindless mergers and acquisitions that promise boundless new synergies," then deliver a parade of harmful consolidation, job cuts, closures, chaos, and competitive harms, all buried under a giant mountain of bullshit.

If you recall, AT&T's massive $200 billion acquisition of DirecTV and Time Warner wound up being a monumental disaster, resulting in countless layoffs and the closure of popular brands like Mad Magazine.

After AT&T execs failed spectacularly at pivoting to streaming video and online ads, AT&T spun off Time Warner into an entirely new company, Warner Media. Warner Media then immediately turned around and announced a blockbuster merger with Discovery, creating the creatively named Warner Brothers Discovery.

Despite a series of acquisitions and name changes, the deal has been a giant, monumental, dysfunctional turd from the very beginning, showcasing all of the worst aspects of our nationwide obsession with mindless stock-fluffing mergers, acquisitions, and megadeals.

As usual with these kinds of deals, it's the lower-level employees and customers who continue to pay the bill. Hoping to prove the amazing synergies of the deal, the freshly merged company has been consistently cancelling shows and pulling any show from its streaming catalog (like many episodes of Sesame Street) because it's too cheap to pay residuals.

They're also super excited to sock their customers with a wide array of price hikes, given the company's CFO believes services like HBO Max and Discovery+ are underpriced." And they just keep implementing round after round of layoffs. Such as over at Warner Brothers Television, where around a quarter of the entire staff are being fired. Many of the layoffs involve closing projects intended to amplify up and coming voices:

While they were not specifically diversity programs exclusively for participants from historically excluded backgrounds, the Warner Bros. Television Workshop was regarded as an important pipeline of opportunity for such artists looking to break into the business. The writers' workshop had been in existence for more than 40 years...

Again, there's zero real evidence that the coagulated pile of freshly merged media companies are actually building something better than had already existed years earlier. They're largely just engaged in a performative dance that serves no real function outside of goosing stock value, trimming tax burdens, and fattening executive compensation and deal making" resumes, while lower level employees, consumers, and product customers get slapped in the face. Repeatedly.