Well sports fans, you got your wish. Are you happy now?
Back in the early-to-mid 2010s, when the cable bundle still seemed to rule the world of entertainment, and particularly in the immediate aftermath of CBS and the outfit then known as Turner Sports teaming up to retain the former’s rights to the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, a number of sports-focused media watchers wondered about the possibility of CBS and Turner’s then-owner, Time Warner, merging. From a sports perspective, it seemed to make sense: while Disney, Comcast, and Fox all had both broadcast and cable outlets to air sports, CBS had a broadcast network but its only suitable cable outlet was the poorly-distributed CBS Sports Network, while Turner had perhaps the best non-ESPN collection of sports rights on cable, but no broadcast network. I felt this was a simplistic, myopic analysis that didn’t take into account the whole picture of how well the two companies might fit together – most obviously, Time Warner-owned HBO and CBS-owned Showtime were the top two names in premium television networks, plus you’d have the separate news operations of CBS and CNN – and that became even more so when CBS re-merged with Viacom and picked up a real base of cable networks again, including Nickelodeon which has a long-standing competition with Warner-owned Cartoon Network, as well as reuniting with the Paramount movie studio, one of several major studios alongside Warner Bros. I actually thought Fox’s brief dalliance with buying Time Warner made more sense, even from a sports perspective.
Well, last week, the merger of the two companies closed, with the merged company having no trace of either company in its name, operating under the Skydance name inherited from the media company David Ellison originally picked up before buying first Paramount and now Warner Bros. Discovery. In most corners of the Internet, the reaction has generally been a sense of dread, partly over the prospect of lost jobs and draconian cost-cutting to pay down the massive debt the Ellison family has racked up in these transactions (not to mention the debt inherited from WBD), but also what some fear is the real purpose of the transaction: turning CNN into right-wing propaganda, once Bari Weiss, the person Ellison installed as head of CBS News who promptly pushed the division into being more conservative-friendly and less critical of Trump, gets her hands on it. Certainly Paramount Skydance was the only company interested in keeping WBD’s cable networks in the fold; WBD planned to split into separate companies for its studios and networks before Ellison began his hostile takeover attempt, and when WBD courted Netflix as an alternative, that transaction would have involved only the studios portion of the split. What might once have been one of the biggest stumbling blocks to a CBS-Warner merger, negotiating the potential merger of CBS News and CNN and the potential regulatory hurdles presented by it, not only wasn’t a problem for the Trump FCC and DOJ, but the whole reason why it happened.