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A TV and cinema calamity could be disastrous for what you watch and what you know. Act now to stop that
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Opinion
Television
industry
A TV and
cinema calamity could be disastrous for what you watch and what you know. Act
now to stop that
Benedict
Cumberbatch, Alan Cumming and Benedict Wong
The
Paramount-Warner Bros merger is being fought in the US and UK. Britain’s
culture secretary knows the risks and can intervene. She should
Mon 27
Jul 2026 06.00 BST
Though it
has yet to become front-page news in the UK, you should know about the proposed
Paramount-Warner Bros merger. It threatens to inflict immense harm on the
British public. As actors and public figures who have spent our careers in the
arts in Britain – working with British crews, on British stages and sets – we
have a responsibility to the public who support, enjoy and consume the art we
make.
The UK is
being threatened by a media merger that would harm our workers, our culture and
the public – but we can stop it. We are encouraged by Lisa Nandy, the secretary
of state for digital, culture, media and sport, who recently sent letters to
Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros Discovery, as well as a statement to
parliament, indicating that she is “minded to intervene” in Paramount’s $110bn
takeover of Warner Bros.
She is
correct to investigate this major threat to the UK’s public interest. And she
will not be acting alone. This month, 12 US states, led by California, sued in
federal court to block the merger, warning that it would raise prices, shrink
the number of films made and degrade the quality of what audiences see. And
they just won a major victory: on Friday, Paramount agreed to delay the merger
until trial, which could be months. These states acted even after Washington’s
own justice department – despite the reported reservations of career staff –
waved the deal through.
Their
lawsuit confirms the danger; it cannot, however, do the UK’s work for it. US
courts fight on the antitrust front for US markets. The EU, which last week
conditionally backed the merger, also makes its own decisions. The UK’s public
interest, our public service broadcasting, our news plurality, the plurality of
voices British audiences hear, can only be defended here, by our own secretary
of state and the Competition and Markets Authority.
The fight
against this merger now runs on two fronts, and Nandy commands one of them.
Should her department decide to intervene, it may prove one of the most
important decisions any culture secretary has taken for UK film, television and
media in a generation.
This is
why. We have spent our lives working in this industry. We know what it looks
like from the inside: the sound stages at Leavesden, the crews who move from
production to production, the editors and camera operators and costume
designers whose names scroll past in the credits at the end of a film. These
are our cherished friends and colleagues, who create the shows we all love, who
produce the news that educates the public and film the sport events we enjoy
together. UK film and television are not just images on your screens; they are
the lives and livelihoods of thousands of workers and families, whose work
supports local economies. The industry supports more than 180,000 jobs,
generated £6.8bn in production spend last year alone and adds roughly £12bn a
year in value to our economy. It is one of the things the UK still does better
than almost anyone, and a cultural heritage we must protect.
We have
watched, with growing alarm, what consolidation does to the breadth and depth
of the work we produce: independent film acquisitions at the leading
independent film festival Sundance fell by half between 2019 and 2025.
Award-winning documentaries – films that won Oscars and topped festival juries
– have struggled to find commercial distribution because they touched subjects
the remaining handful of buyers found inconvenient. Every merger of this kind
narrows the funnel through which stories can reach audiences.
That is
precisely what makes the Paramount-WBD merger so dangerous. It’s why the
intervention of Nandy and her department matters so much.
Paramount
proposes to swallow Warner Bros Discovery in one of the largest leveraged
buyouts ever attempted, loading the combined company with an estimated $84bn in
debt. To service it, executives have promised investors around $6bn in
“synergies”. In plain English, that means redundancies, cancelled productions,
fewer films commissioned and fewer risks taken.
We have
seen this before. When Discovery merged with WarnerMedia in 2022, it shelved
finished films and cut thousands of jobs; when Skydance merged with Paramount
last year, it laid off about 2,000 people. Now the same executives are making
the same promise, and UK crews, producers, talent and audiences will pay when
the bill comes due.
But jobs
are mostly a matter for the Competition and Markets Authority, whose review
should end in a full phase 2 investigation. The job of the Department for
Culture, Media and Sport goes further: to determine whether the merger is in
the public interest. It most certainly is not. In her statement to British MPs,
Nandy cited the need for a sufficient plurality of views in news media and a
sufficient plurality of individuals controlling media enterprises. She has also
highlighted the potential impact on streaming services, content homogenisation
and children’s television. The Enterprise Act protects something we should all
care about: who decides what we get to watch, and what we get to know.
Consider
the breadth of what this single company would hold. Channel 5, one of our five
public service broadcasters, which serves the evening news to people without
the cost of a subscription. CNN International, which Ofcom research in 2018
found UK viewers rated above every other TV news source for quality, accuracy,
trustworthiness and impartiality. The CNN and CBS news archives – among the
world’s most important broadcast news collections, with more than 4.25m videos,
images and media spanning nearly half a century of history. If one commercially
interested owner controls access to both, they control the raw material of our
historical memory.
One owner
controlling this much of the news, and the truth, endangers the public in a way
no ordinary consolidation does. When separate owners run separate newsrooms, a
story judged inconvenient by one can still reach audiences through another.
Fold those newsrooms into a single company, and one boardroom’s commercial
anxieties – or political debts – determine what millions of people see and what
they never learn existed.
And we
know something about this particular proprietor’s intentions. Paramount’s chief
executive reportedly told Donald Trump that he would make “sweeping changes” to
CNN if the deal went through. When the buyer of the world’s most trusted
international news channel makes editorial promises to a politician, a British
secretary of state is entitled – and, really, obliged – to ask questions before
the ink dries.
Nandy has
been scrupulous in noting that no final decision has been taken. Good. It is
important to take the time to get this right. But the case for a full public
interest intervention, with Ofcom assessing plurality and reporting back, is
overwhelming.
Actors
are often told to stay out of legal arguments. We understand the instinct. But
we have spent our lives on enough UK sets, worked alongside enough UK crews and
watched enough brilliant work from the UK struggle to find a buyer to know that
this is not someone else’s argument. It is ours. Nandy has opened the door to
intervention. She must walk through it, for the sake of everyone who makes UK
television and film – and everyone who watches it. If she does not, we will be
left without the ability to protect our industry and our culture from this
consolidation. We must not push the public’s interest aside; we must stand up
for it and block this merger.
Alan
Cumming, Benedict Cumberbatch and Benedict Wong are actors working in the UK
and Hollywood
A Setback for the MAGA Media Takeover
Opinion
Michelle
Goldberg
A Setback
for the MAGA Media Takeover
July 27,
2026
Michelle
Goldberg
By
Michelle Goldberg
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/27/opinion/media-ellison-paramount.html
Opinion
Columnist
In April,
the attorney Norm Eisen was on his way into the Supreme Court as part of the
legal team fighting to preserve birthright citizenship when he got a text from
the actor Mark Ruffalo.
Along
with several others in the entertainment industry, Ruffalo was searching for
some way to stop the pending merger between Paramount and Warner Bros., which
would leave the MAGA suck-up David Ellison in charge of two of the big five
major movie studios, as well as HBO Max and CNN. After acquiring Paramount,
CBS’s parent company, in 2025, Ellison delighted Donald Trump by installing the
anti-woke editor Bari Weiss atop the network, throwing “60 Minutes” and other
programs into crisis. Variety wrote that his rising empire “skews alpha male,”
raising fears that he’d “entwine the studio’s content more closely with MAGA
messaging.” Ellison’s willingness to cater to the president — he threw a party
in Trump’s honor in April — is almost certainly why Trump’s Justice Department
approved Ellison’s bid for Warner Bros., reportedly overruling career officials
who worried it would violate antitrust law.
Should
the merger go forward, many in Hollywood worried the new media behemoth would
greenlight fewer TV shows and films, especially those that displeased Ellison’s
Republican allies. CNN might become an ersatz Fox News. “Any kind of
documentaries that are holding power to account will never make it to the
marketplace,” Ruffalo told me.
No one
was quite sure how the consolidation could be thwarted. In Hollywood, said
Ruffalo, the mood was both fatalist and opportunistic. When Trump stormed back
into office, he seemed, for a moment, like a cultural as well as a political
conqueror, ushering in a much-discussed vibe shift. When his corrupt Justice
Department greenlit the merger, Ellison’s success seemed inevitable. Besides,
many in the industry were deeply wary of Warner Bros.’ other suitor, Netflix,
which they feared would put fewer movies in theaters. With Ellison about to
become one of the most powerful men in movies, many seemed reluctant to cross
him. “Most of Hollywood, I hate to say it, they just laid down,” Ruffalo told
me.
Eisen, a
lawyer who’s emerged as a sort of attorney general for the anti-Trump
resistance, thought there was a path to stopping the merger, and saw an
imperative to try. “Classically, one of the things that you see in a
backsliding democracy is the autocrat’s favored cronies seizing oligarchal
control of the media,” he said. That’s how things had played out in Russia,
Turkey and Hungary, and now it seemed that the same dynamic was coming to
America. What happened next, however, demonstrates the importance of not
surrendering to authoritarianism prematurely.
In a
phone call on the Supreme Court steps, Eisen drafted an open letter denouncing
the merger and celebrating reports that state attorneys general were
scrutinizing it, tacitly encouraging them to take Paramount to court. Some
leading Hollywood figures, including J.J. Abrams, Damon Lindelof and Ben
Stiller, signed on. A Times guest essay that Ruffalo helped write said,
“Despite appearances, the end of this story hasn’t been written.” He was right:
This month, buoyed by a growing movement, 12 Democratic attorneys general sued
to stop Ellison’s Warner Brothers takeover, arguing that it violated antitrust
law.
“Historically,
it’s unusual for the states to take the lead on antitrust enforcement actions,”
reported Variety. But the case was strong enough that last week, a California
judge issued a temporary restraining order putting the merger on hold. And on
Friday, Paramount, which had hoped to close the deal this month, agreed to
postpone the merger until next June or the end of the trial, whichever comes
first.
“I think
it’s seismic,” the media reporter Oliver Darcy, founder of the influential
newsletter Status, said of the delay. “And it certainly puts into question
whether this deal will cross the finish line.”
Obviously,
Ellison could still prevail. But at the very least, the delay is likely to cost
him a lot of money. When Paramount was competing with Netflix to take over
Warner Bros., it sweetened its offer with a so-called ticking fee, in which
Paramount agreed to pay Warner Bros. shareholders about $7 million a day if the
deal isn’t closed by Sept. 30. Should the deal drag on until next June,
Paramount could be out almost $2 billion.
The
lawsuit could also put pressure on Paramount to settle, perhaps by spinning off
CNN and making guarantees that would protect jobs in Hollywood. In an interview
with Status, Rob Bonta, California’s attorney general, said it wouldn’t be
enough for Ellison to just give up control of CNN, but that such a move would
“definitely have value.”
The mere
possibility that the deal could be defeated, said Ruffalo, has strengthened
resistance in Hollywood. After Paramount announced its pause, SAG-AFTRA, the
union that represents actors, broadcasters and recording artists, finally voted
to oppose the merger. There’s a growing understanding, said Ruffalo, that if
you let yourself be cowed by MAGA, “you’re doomed. If you fight, at least you
have a fighting chance. And they’re losing their grip on power. They’re losing
their grip on their narrative.” As Trump looks ever less indomitable, so does
his dream of remaking American culture in his image.
That’s
the lesson for Eisen, too: that Trump is beatable if you take a page from his
playbook and flood the zone with opposition. In Trump’s second term, Eisen’s
60-person outfit, Democracy Defenders, has been involved in some of the most
consequential legal battles against Trump: protecting birthright citizenship,
ending Trump’s “weaponization” slush fund, blocking the Justice Department’s
attempt to subpoena election officials in Georgia, and stripping Trump’s name
off the Kennedy Center.
“They’re
all about the defense of our democracy,” said Eisen. “And in some ways, the
Paramount/Warner Bros. case is as important as any of them.”
Has Trump destroyed the president-press relationship forever?
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Has Trump
destroyed the president-press relationship forever?
While Donald
Trump's aggressive actions have fundamentally broken traditional White
House reporting norms, historians and political analysts argue the
relationship is not destroyed "forever" but has permanently shifted
into a more adversarial, transactional era.
The debate
over whether this damage is irreversible has been intensely reignited following
his highly contentious appearance at the White House Correspondents' Dinner,
where he openly attacked the journalists in attendance.
The Case
That the Norms Are Destroyed
Many media
analysts argue that the foundational "gentlemen's agreement" between
the presidency and the press corps is completely gone.
- Systemic Hostility: Trump has weaponized
institutional tools, such as having the Department of Justice aggressively
seek the phone records of journalists to unmask confidential
sources.
- Shutting Out Access: High-ranking
administration figures, such as defense officials, have routinely
restricted or completely shut the press out of traditional updates.
- Total Disregard for Forums: Rather than using the
White House press room or established media forums to validate public
information, the administration treats the press purely as an adversarial
platform.
The Case
That This Is a Cyclical Evolution
Historians
caution against viewing this friction as entirely unprecedented, noting that
American presidents have historically turned on the press when politically
convenient.
- Historical Precedent: Past presidents like
Theodore Roosevelt actively used and then publicly attacked
"muckraking" journalists once they no longer served his
legislative agenda.
- Permanent High Friction: Media experts suggest that
instead of "destruction," the press is adjusting to an era of
"destabilizing unreliability" where official doctrine and
personal social media statements conflict.
- Continued, Tense Engagement: Despite the overt
hostility, the relationship persists because both sides rely on each
other; Trump continues to seek the media spotlight to control the
narrative, and media outlets continue to cover him heavily
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