Netflix and Paramount deals are both wrong for Warner Bros Discovery – and democracy

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Donald Trump wants CNN sold. He has said so repeatedly and publicly, demanding it “should be sold” in any deal involving Warner Bros Discovery. Now one of America’s largest media companies is racing to oblige him, while another looks to consolidate its power. Wednesday’s House judiciary hearing on streaming competition – where lawmakers voiced concern over the Trump administration’s influence and a potential merger’s toll on consumers – made clear just how dangerous both options are for free speech, audiences and democracy itself.

Netflix has bid $82.7bn for Warner Bros Discovery, only to be countered by a hostile $108bn takeover bid from Paramount Skydance, led by David Ellison, son of Trump’s ally Larry. Neither deal serves the public interest, and both are dangerous for the future of free expression. Both would produce an unprecedented concentration of power over what Americans watch and which stories get told.

They would do so at precisely the moment when the Trump administration is openly weaponizing merger reviews to extract editorial concessions from media companies desperate for regulatory approval.

This is not speculation; it is already happening. Paramount paid $16m to settle Trump’s meritless lawsuit against CBS last year. As it sought Federal Communications Commission approval for its merger, the corporation installed Kenneth R Weinstein, whom Trump once nominated as ambassador to Japan, as a “bias” monitor at CBS News, an extraordinary step condemned by an FCC commissioner, Anna Gomez, as “never-before-seen forms of government control over newsroom decisions” that “violate both the first amendment and the law”.

The ramifications of the merger for free speech were immediate. 60 Minutes producer Bill Owens resigned in April amid settlement discussions. The CBS News president, Wendy McMahon, quit weeks later. Stephen Colbert’s late-night show was cancelled prior to the Paramount-Skydance merger as an apparent offering to Trump to allow the merger. Now the same ownership group reportedly promises “sweeping changes” at CNN – exactly what Trump has demanded.

At first glance a more benign contender, Netflix presents an equally serious threat. Although CNN is currently excluded from the deal and would be spun off along with some of its old-line cable networks into a new entity, Discovery Global, the world’s largest subscription video platform has its own troubling history of bowing to political pressure. In 2019, for example, after removing a satirical news show critical of Saudi Arabia, Netflix’s CEO, Reed Hastings, defended the decision by saying: “We’re not in the news business. We’re not trying to do ‘truth to power’. We’re trying to entertain.”

This is a false binary. Entertainment shapes how people understand the world, often reaching audiences journalism alone cannot. Netflix’s record of yielding to political pressure cannot be dismissed as a dispute over entertainment, especially since the content most affected – satire, documentary and historical drama – is journalism-adjacent and has long functioned as a form of political accountability when news media are under pressure. When politically sensitive stories are removed, restricted or never commissioned in the first place, a vital channel through which societies test ideas, confront injustice and encounter dissent is lost, an effect that grows more consequential as press freedom weakens.

Furthermore, the hearing underscored that Netflix is not just another studio buying a competitor. It is big tech extending platform power into Hollywood’s studio system and into journalism itself.

Netflix threatens speech through market power, and Paramount Skydance threatens it through demonstrated capitulation. Both are bad. Giving the Ellison family control over both CBS News and CNN would place two of the country’s most influential news organizations under billionaire owners who have already shown they will suppress journalism to curry favor with the president. This is not abstract concern about ownership but rather a documented pattern of behavior.

We also know what consolidation does to the entertainment industry. After Disney acquired Fox, it cancelled a raft of films and, six years later, movie and theatrical releases remain at a decade-long low. Paramount cancelled the kids’ show Dora, a reboot of the popular Dora the Explorer, featuring a Latina girl, after its merger with Skydance. Since 2014, Netflix has repeatedly raised prices. It has also slowed production of content deemed “too political” and cancelled popular shows despite strong viewership. As creative markets consolidate, there are fewer buyers and distributors for challenging stories, making self-censorship across the entire market more likely.

Netflix operates fundamentally differently from traditional studios. Warner Bros, like Disney and Universal before their consolidation waves, licensed content to competitors. Netflix does not; it produces content solely for itself, keeps it behind a paywall and uses opaque algorithms to determine what rises, what disappears and what is never made in the first place. Under a Warner Bros Discovery deal, Netflix would also control HBO’s prestige programming and Warner Bros’ vast film library, all locked inside the platform’s algorithmic walled garden, where recommendation systems shape what more than 300 million subscribers worldwide watch. Netflix acquiring Warner Bros Discovery would eliminate one of the largest buyers of independent content while accelerating vertical integration to create what could be the largest entertainment company in the world.

The United States once recognized this danger. In 1948, the supreme court forced Hollywood studios to divest their theater chains in United States v Paramount Pictures, concluding that controlling both production and distribution concentrated too much power over culture and speech. Today, Netflix combines both but faces no comparable structural limits.

Both deals are unfolding amid the Trump administration’s unprecedented assault on press freedom, undermining independent agencies (including the FCC) and evading democratic oversight. Too many large media corporations have responded not by resisting, but by paying settlements, rolling back diversity commitments, manipulating editorial leadership and making pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago.

The FCC and the Department of Justice have both the authority and the obligation to reject deals that threaten the public interest and likely violate antitrust law. They must act now. Either acquisition would hand extraordinary power over speech and culture to massive corporations operating under coercive executive pressure. This is no deal for democracy.