Paramount Skydance CEO David Elliosn is breaking his silence on the antitrust lawsuit that seeks to to halt his company’s takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, arguing in a New York Times op-ed that politics is at the root cause of the issue.
“I believe that anyone who oversees a news organization — I am chief executive of Paramount, which owns CBS — shouldn’t put a finger on the scale, especially on matters involving his own company,” he writes. “So, when California’s attorney general, 11 other state attorneys general and, a day later, the Writers Guild of America sued to stop the deal, I stayed quiet. I quickly learned such restraint has costs. While I was silent, others were happy to write my story for me. No more.”
Ellison writes that he believes his pending ownership of CNN is behind the suit. It hasn’t helped that President Trump has said cited CNN repeatedly when discussing the deal, though Ellison does not mention the President in his column.
“I believe this fight is not really about market share… I believe a plainer worry sits beneath the briefs and the news releases: the news. The issue is whether I can be trusted as a steward of Warner’s CNN. There has been speculation about my politics, my loyalties, my intentions,” Ellison writes. “Unfortunately, I can’t give anyone a view into my heart and mind, but I can share this: I have regularly voted for candidates of both parties; I hold some views that would be called conservative and others that would be called liberal, just like most Americans; and when it comes to our news operations, I do not aspire to lead these companies to bend their newsrooms to my views. I believe that news should be based on facts and truth.”
He goes on to repeat comments he has made elsewhere, about news divisions needing to be fair and down the middle, reflecting a wide range of points of view.
“And it requires independence. Our journalists will continue to answer to the facts and to all the people they serve — not to any party or cause,” he continued.
Ellison goes on to reiterate the commitments that he is making to keep production flowing if the deal goes through, and notes the competition from tech giants that has battered legacy Hollywood studios.
“A deal this size is lived out in public, and I have felt every bit of that,” he writes. “I don’t ask to be taken at my word; the commitments are in writing, and the work will be on screens where anyone can judge it.”
