President Donald Trump has zeroed in on Paramount, the weakest of American media titans, to administer a lesson in sontaku, the Japanese art of “obeying in advance” or “following unspoken orders.”
Paramount’s CBS claimed the decision to cancel Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show was “purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night. It is not related in any way to the show’s performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount.”
The Wrap summarized the latest capitulation from Paramount and speculates about the company’s motivation and its weak position:
CBS’ announcement on Thursday evening that “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” will conclude next year, after its 11th season on the network, comes three days after the host accused the network’s parent, Paramount Global, of paying a “big fat bribe” to President Donald Trump by settling his lawsuit over a “60 Minutes” segment broadcast during the presidential campaign.
Colbert leveled that charge because Paramount is seeking to finalize an $8 billion merger with Skydance Media, creating the impression that it bowed to pressure from Trump in order to smooth the way for that transaction. But the FCC still has not approved the deal, and the cancellation of Colbert — a leading, nightly critic of Trump — comes as the deadline ticks toward the expiration of the merger.…Although the economics of late night television have shifted, as evidenced by other cuts relating to rival shows and the cancellation of CBS’ “After Midnight,” the decision to drop Colbert is, at worst, further capitulation to Trump to silence one of his loudest and most famous critics and a damning blow to free speech.
At best, it’s a “lights out” moment for network television. Taking CBS at its word, if the highest-rated show in late night is such a money loser that it has decided to scrap a franchise launched when David Letterman joined the network in 1993, then what does that mean for the rest of broadcast TV?
Paramount is headed by 70-year-old heiress Shari Redstone, who is battling thyroid cancer, restive shareholders, and her own indecision over selling the company to David Ellison’s Skydance.
Redstone is likely exhausted after spending the past decade battling for control of the company:
Ms. Redstone, 69, presides over a vast media empire that includes Paramount Pictures, MTV, Nickelodeon and CBS. But her rise to the top was not simple.
For years, Ms. Redstone toiled away at National Amusements, the theater chain that doubles as a holding company for Paramount. A lawyer by training, she demonstrated an early aptitude for the media business but was overshadowed by her aging father, who refused to relinquish control even as his mental capacity waned.
As the family business began to falter, Ms. Redstone began to assert herself more. She thwarted an attempt by Philippe Dauman, one of her father’s lieutenants, to sell a stake in Paramount Pictures in 2016. One of her allies, Bob Bakish, became his permanent replacement as chief executive.
Two years later, she won another battle. Leslie Moonves, whose programming prowess earned him the nickname “the man with the golden gut,” led a revolt against Ms. Redstone, urging a Delaware court to strip her family of its company control. Ms. Redstone prevailed after Mr. Moonves was accused of sexual harassment and forced out of the company. (Mr. Moonves has denied allegations of nonconsensual sex.)
Unfortunately, by the time she had claimed full control of her late father’s empire, Paramount was only a shadow of what it had once been:
Paramount’s portfolio of cable networks has been battered by the same cord-cutting and advertiser weakness that have afflicted its industry peers and is facing analyst-estimated subscriber losses of nearly 25 percent over the next two years. Wall Street is unconvinced that Paramount’s money-losing streaming business will ever be able to compete with the likes of Netflix. Paramount+ has a 6 percent share of the revenue market, while Netflix has 47 percent and Disney’s streaming services have a combined 23 percent.
Paramount’s movie studio has done its best to revive aging franchises like “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” and keep “Mission: Impossible” running, but it ranks last among Hollywood’s five legacy film companies in domestic market share and posted an operating loss of $143 million for the first nine months of this year.
Despite those headwinds, Paramount has made some progress. The streaming service has 63 million subscribers globally, and the company’s Pluto TV free streaming service generates more than $1 billion in annual revenue, up from $70 million when it was acquired in 2019.
There are also financial pressures at National Amusements. Historically, the bulk of the holding company’s profits have come from dividends on the Paramount stock it owns, roughly 10 percent of that company. But financial pressures forced Paramount to sharply reduce its dividend, cutting into profits at National Amusements.
Now, National Amusements is incapable of generating cash, according to a May estimate from S&P Global Market Intelligence, and owes about $25 million in annual interest cash payments.
Why is Ms. Redstone willing to sell her controlling stake in the company? It may come down to the pressures facing both National Amusements and Paramount. As Rich Greenfield, an analyst at LightShed Partners, put it in a recent client note, “Paramount has a bleak future ahead.”
Enter David Ellison, CEO of Skydance and son of Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison.
Trump has said Ellison “will do a great job” at the helm of Paramount but the merger has yet to secure approval from Trump’s FCC.
And the same Variety article that headlined Trump’s praise of Ellison, also documented some tension between the two:
Meanwhile, David Ellison met with Trump at two recent UFC events (on April 12 and June 7), which the Skydance CEO failed to disclose in violation of FCC ex parte rules, according to an FCC filing by tech company LiveVideo.AI (which claims it made “a superior bid” over Skydance to acquire National Amusements Inc. and Paramount and is opposing the Skydance-Paramount deal). At the June 7 UFC fight, Trump and Ellison engaged in “a heated exchange which required White House and UFC officials to intervene” before the encounter concluded “with a firm handshake,” according to the filing, citing video recorded at the event.
Yes, you read that right, Ellison has been sitting cageside at The Ultimate Fighting Championship to get face time with the president.
As I’ve covered previously, The UFC is owned by Hollywood power broker (and major Democratic party insider) Ari Emanuel, who has used the fight promotion to get very close to Trump while maintaining his status as a Democratic insider.
In fact, Trump’s recent announcement that the White House will host a UFC event next year may be his way of “encouraging” streaming companies (including Paramount, but also Warner Bros. Discovery, Amazon, Disney, and Netflix) to bid heavy for the UFC’s media rights which are currently up for acquisition.
Ellison’s cageside appearance upset already dejected CBS staffers who connected the dots between Elison’s conversation with Trump on a Saturday night and Trump’s renewed attacks on 60 Minutes the next day:
‘It’s dejecting for reporters and producers to see one day before the president attacks “60 Minutes” – again – for doing accurate and fair journalism,’ the source in CBS’s Manhattan newsroom said.
‘Anyone who believed Ellison might be a breath of fresh air after [Shari] Redstone and have the backbone to run a principled news organization is feeling pretty naïve today’, they continued, referring to the billionaire daughter of the late Sumner Redstone.
At least one other source told Status how Ellison went on to socialize with several members of the president’s inner sanctum that night, after being spotted at a ringside table with Trump’s team.
Topics touched upon during these talks, however, remain unknown – but Trump took to Truth Social the very next day to renew his war of words with CBS while saying his lawsuit was just.
Most pundits who have addressed Paramount/CBS and their concessions to Trump have focused on the implications for corporate media and its coverage of the President, which are indeed deeply troubling, but I am also very curious to know if Trump’s decision to renew his attacks on CBS were undertaken as something of a favor to Ellison. Was Trump attacking CBS to increase the pressure on Redstone to sell to Ellison?
But let’s get back to the consequences for the press. The Washington Post reported on the impact inside CBS:
The breaking point came on a Saturday night in the middle of May. CBS President George Cheeks called news division chief Wendy McMahon with a suggestion: “It’s probably time.”
Two days later, McMahon announced her departure.The forced resignation marked a turning point: The network of Edward R. Murrow, which stood against McCarthyism and once defined American broadcast journalism, was capitulating to White House pressure as its corporate owner sought approval for a lucrative merger.
The cascading effects of President Donald Trump’s decade-long war on the media had helped topple McMahon, as her corporate bosses struggled to navigate how to respond to a lawsuit from a president who had fundamentally reshaped the relationship between the press and power in America.
Variety had more on the impact at 60 Minutes:
Bill Owens, just the third executive producer in the show’s nearly six decades on air, abruptly quit, saying he no longer had the freedom to run the newsmagazine in the best interests of its journalism and its viewers. On Sunday, correspondent Scott Pelley took the rare step of detailing this off-camera drama for viewers, telling them that Paramount had begun to take what staffers perceived as an undue amount of influence on “60 Minutes” editorial processes.
And Puck reported on the team Ellison has in mind to run CBS News under his ownership:
David Rhodes, the onetime CBS News head and current executive at Sky in the U.K., is in talks to take over CBS News if/when the Skydance acquisition of Paramount closes, per three sources familiar with the negotiations. As with all of these things, talks could still fall apart. But if David Ellison and his Skydance team sign Rhodes and close a pending deal to acquire The Free Press, the center-right media brand founded by Bari Weiss, the plan would call for Rhodes to manage and operate CBS News day-to-day alongside Weiss as an ideological guide of sorts.
Yes, that Bari Weiss, the woman Yasha Levine calls “The Toady Queen of Substack”:
Bari is a real operator and a genius suck up to power. She came from an affluent suburb, her parents own the upscale Weisshouse furniture store. Bari first came to public attention while a student in Columbia, where she led a campaign to cancel teachers critical of Israel and tried to get Joseph Massad, a Palestinian professor, fired. She then went on to quickly rise through the ranks of zionist activist journalism — first starting out at Jewish outlets like Tablet, then writing op-eds and reviewing books for the Wall Street Journal, where she worked directly under Bret Stephens, the arch-neoconservative now known simply as “bedbug,” and then getting beamed up to the New York Times op-ed department. Her Times job was what you’d call a Trump first term DEI hire. She was picked up to generate controversy and serve up conservative opinion to the libs. While at the Times, she constantly got glowing profiles from her liberal colleagues — and even got dressed for a photoshoot by Vanity Fair. People who know Bari say that she has real charisma — and she’s used that gift to ingratiate herself to power. And she seems to have a special way with billionaires. “She doesn’t just speak to the 1 percent. She speaks to the one-hundredth of 1 percent. And they’ll listen,” Frank Luntz, the Republican pollster, explained the Bari Method to the New York Times’ Matt Flegenheimer.
I should also mention Trump’s close relationship to David Ellison’s father Larry (especially since The New York Times reported last year that Larry would be the real power behind the merged Skydance/Paramount).
Oracle, the source of Larry Ellison’s vast fortune, is widely believed to be Trump’s first choice to take over TikTok, should he succeed in forcing its Chinese owners to surrender control, per The Intercept:
Larry Ellison has been at Donald Trump’s side since he took office last month. The man Trump referred to as “one of the most serious players in the world” was front row at the inauguration, and then watched as the president signed an executive order on artificial intelligence — a major business interest for tech giant Oracle.
And Ellison, Oracle’s billionaire co-founder, was sitting next to Rupert Murdoch in early February when Trump created a fund to facilitate the purchase of TikTok. His presence was no accident.
Last month, after the Supreme Court upheld a law banning TikTok, Oracle emerged as a leader in the race to take control of the Chinese-owned short-form video platform.
While the campaign against TikTok was led by China hawks in Washington, it was the ire of pro-Israel activists that perhaps best explains why Oracle is such a natural choice to take over the social media app.
The campaign to ban the app kicked into high gear after Hamas’s October 7 attack against Israel. The timing spurred talk that the push for a ban wasn’t just about American national security, but Israel’s too. Politicians even tied their campaigns against TikTok to alleged Hamas propaganda being hosted on the platform.
Oracle, which had already taken control of some of TikTok’s day-to-day operations, had taken a firm pro-Israel stance and, according to an Intercept investigation, clamped down on pro-Palestine activism inside the company.
While the TikTok play currently appears to be stalled, Paramount’s settlement with Trump is under Senatorial scrutiny:
Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts), Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) sent a letter Monday morning to (Skydance) chief executive, David Ellison, asking him to address Trump’s claims of a side deal.“Is there currently any arrangement under which you or Skydance will provide compensation, advertising, or promotional activities that in any way assist President Trump, his family, his presidential library, or other Administration officials?” the senators wrote. “If so, what is the nature of this arrangement? What will you or Skydance provide, and what have you discussed receiving in return from the Trump Administration?”
I doubt Ellison will be intimidated by the feckless trio of Warren, Sanders, and Wyden any more than by Sen. Adam “RussiaGate” Schiff’s tough talk on the topic.
Ironically, Shari Redstone considers Trump a friend and has taken many steps to please him:
Redstone has done her best to curry favor with Republicans. “She’s right of center, but not by any means extreme,” according to one person who knows her. “She’s generally interested in news being as accurate as possible. People are a mix of things. She’s very supportive of race relations and things that would be called DEI. She’s not dogmatic, and she’s not a party regular for anyone at all.”
In January, Paramount hired Trump fundraiser and lobbyist Brian Ballard to help see the company through the rocky merger-approval process. Ballard Partners is also working for big tobacco companies in a fight against unlicensed vape products. Perhaps hoping a Republican government would be more likely to sign off on her plan, Redstone, through the company PAC, gave slightly more to Republican candidates than to Democrats in the most recent full-year cycle, according to opensecrets.org. And Redstone might have hoped for some goodwill from Trump, who once called to offer words of support amid her fight to get rid of former company management before he was ever a presidential candidate.
“He would call and tell her to keep up the good fight,” according to the person who knows her. “I think she feels personally appreciative of that.” (Another possible connection: Mark Burnett, producer of The Apprentice, sold Survivor to CBS.) Redstone and Trump have even lunched together. “Part of what is surprising is that he is giving CBS such a hard time when Shari is on one side and [Larry] Ellison is on the other,” that source said. The Oracle cofounder appeared in February at the Oval Office and is an ally of Trump.
Speaking at the New York Times DealBook Summit in 2016, just after Trump won the presidency, Redstone told interviewer Andrew Ross Sorkin, “I’m actually really optimistic for someone to come in and unify the country. I think he listened to a lot of voices around this country that people weren’t listening to about some of the challenges that we have, and I’m hopeful that he’ll surround himself with really good people and start to solve some of the problems we have.” In 2019, Redstone discussed launching a right-wing news channel to take on Fox News, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
At the center of Redstone’s dilemma is a news division that is at odds with both her mission to make peace with Trump and her life’s work fighting antisemitism. Redstone’s passion for Israeli causes has caused friction with news operatives for years. “She has no interest in understanding life in the Palestinian world,” one person told me, claiming Redstone did not understand journalism. A source close to Redstone denied this, saying she cared about innocent people on all sides of war. (Redstone declined to comment for this story.)
Redstone has weighed in on news coverage numerous times in recent months, including sticking up for anchor Tony Dokoupil after he challenged Ta-Nehisi Coates on air. Coates had been on CBS Mornings to discuss his book The Message, which is about censorship and includes a section on Israel and Palestine (Vanity Fair excerpted a portion of the book). But the interview got heated and Dokoupil was accused of not meeting editorial standards. (Dokoupil didn’t respond to a request for comment sent via a CBS PR representative.)
Unfortunately for Redstone, Trump is strictly transactional and his response to weakness is to exploit it for every advantage.
