Paramount is clearly getting nervous about the growing opposition to its $111 billion merger with Warner Brothers, which is being intensely criticized for dodgy overseas funding, its dire impact on journalism, and the inevitable mass layoffs, consumer price hikes, and shittier overall product that always results from debt-fueled mega-media consolidation.

There’s a certain desperation creeping into their arguments as state regulators send signals that they’re considering filing an antitrust lawsuit. Top Paramount lawyer Makan Delrahim recently sat down for an interview with the billionaire-owned LA Times (non-paywalled alternative), and insisted that opposition to the company’s terrible merger spree is somehow antisemitic:

“Let’s be honest,” he told the Times. “There’s a lot of fear-mongering, particularly from people in Washington, D.C. They are running a political campaign. Some of these people are trying to inflict harm on this transaction, really because of their own antisemitic views. Regulators and law enforcement officials will see right through that.”

That is, of course, a whole lot of bullshit. Delrahim is trying to pretend that opposition to the deal stems from the fact that billionaire Trump-donor Larry Ellison, who has retooled CBS News to be more friendly to Benjamin Netanyahu, is Jewish. But if there’s any personal ire directed at Ellison as it pertains to the deal, it’s that he has a generational track record of being a foundationally terrible person.

The real-world concerns about the deal have focused on things like the fact it’s heavily financed by Saudi Arabia and China. And there’s fifty years of history showing that deals like this (especially deals involving Warner Brothers) routinely result in mass layoffs, higher prices, and both a shittier company and a less healthy film and television production market.

This sort of mindless consolidation is generally just a shell game performed by the extraction class and the kind of people obsessed with scale that have no genuine, original ideas. It’s utterly senseless, extractive, and destructive, as we all saw with the disastrous AT&T–>Discovery–>Warner Brothers mess (and the AOL Warner Brothers mess decades earlier).

Quick refresher: Delrahim was Trump’s DOJ “antitrust enforcer” during his first term. Delrahim “enforced antitrust” by doing things like rubber stamping Sprint’s merger with T-Mobile, which immediately resulted in more than 8,000 layoffs and an abrupt end to what passed as price competition in U.S. wireless.

These are, you’ll be surprised to learn, bad faith actors who aren’t actually interested in the public interest, product quality, happy workers, healthy markets, healthy companies, or much of anything else beyond short-term financial gains, tax breaks, control, and outsized higher-level executive compensation.

Ellison and Delrahim don’t have to worry about the Trump DOJ or FCC interfering in the deal. But their desperation suggests they are definitely nervous about negative public perception, European regulatory approval, and the hints being sent by state attorneys general that they’re cooking up a collaborative antitrust lawsuit that could either block or dramatically extend the project timeline.

Early last year, when America’s measles outbreaks were still being counted in three-digit numbers, we talked about how RFK Jr. and his misinformation campaign were making things worse. A lot of focus has been on Kennedy’s anti-vaxxer views, and for good reason. If people would just get the MMR vaccine, and had done so in the last couple of decades while Kennedy has been on his anti-vaxxer crusade, none of this would have happened. We eliminated this disease more than two decades ago. It’s back because of vaccine skepticism and Kennedy, now Secretary of HHS, is perhaps more responsible for that skepticism than any other human being on the planet.

But his misinformation campaign didn’t focus solely on attempts at discrediting a good, effective vaccine against measles. He also spouted bullshit when it came to treatments for the disease. One such example was him touting, in March of last year, a combination of Vitamin A and cod liver oil as treatments for measles. It’s not the first time Kennedy advocated for this, either. He’s been at it since the beginning of the outbreak, and even before. In the wake of his public advocacy for those treatments, others picked up the story and ran with it, notably podcast-bruh Joe Rogan.

The result? According to one study, a massive uptick in Vitamin A poisoning.

The researchers detected two fascinating (albeit alarming) surges in interest. The first occurred in the wake of a March 4, 2025, Fox News interview with Trump’s Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. During the interview, the infamous anti-vaxxer touted cod liver oil supplements and vitamin A as viable treatments for measles. A second series of spikes surrounded two late March podcast appearances by certified physician and noted vaccine skeptic Suzanne Humphries, who promoted the same two questionable remedies. Neither of Humphries’ interviews involved a government official, but one did occur on the chart-topping podcast of Joe Rogan.

“Between January [1] and March [31,] 2025, America’s Poison Centers reported a 38.7% increase in vitamin A exposures,” the new study noted, citing data published by the poison center about 12 days after Humphries’ appearance on Rogan.

Now, the Harvard study focused strongly on the correlation between media mentions of Vitamin A, online searches from the public indicating interest in such treatments, and the uptick in those diagnoses of Vitamin A poisoning. But, frankly, that misses much of the point. It’s been the public advocates like Kennedy who have fueled this fire, leading other charlatans to get spots on media outlets such as Rogan’s, where they get to further disseminate all of this terrible advice. The fish stinks from the head down and, right now, the head of American health is Kennedy.

The study’s authors did at least make mention of how this is all made worse by having untrustworthy clowns in charge of American healthcare, though not by name.

“Our findings underscore media’s influence on health-seeking behavior during public health emergencies like the measles outbreak,” the researchers noted, “which is particularly concerning when guidance from trusted sources is unclear and may encourage detrimental behaviors.”

We’re on pace to break last year’s measles case count by a long shot and it’s exactly because of misinformation peddlers like Kennedy and cavalier media like Rogan’s podcast being willing to signal boost it all that we’re in this mess.

As of this writing, America has had about 86% of the number of confirmed cases of measles this year as we had last year… and we’re only at the midway point of the year. Infectious diseases don’t spread linearly. They typically spread exponentially, which is exactly what happened last year. The public being actively misinformed, on purpose, is why.

Flock Safety doesn’t seem to care about anyone. Not its customers, not those captured by its cameras, not even the legislators trying to find a balance between safety and privacy.

Flock started out by pitching its cameras — with built-in license plate readers — to the kind of people with money to blow on unproven tech and the willingness to use it to keep unwanted people (read: not white) out of their neighborhoods. It soon expanded past the gated community market, courting cops who wanted to use the tech to track unwanted people (read: not white) who might be driving around in cars and existing.

As always, both parties (Flock/cops) claimed the tech was essential to capturing the “worst of the worst” — auto thieves, wanted felons, sex offenders, etc. And, as always, real-world use cases were more along the lines of oh, you know, tracking down women seeking abortion options or letting cops keep tabs on their ex-wives.

The problem with Flock isn’t necessarily unique to Flock. It’s a problem almost every third-party contractor creates. When thing go poorly (and they have gone very poorly for Flock recently), no one seems to know who’s responsible for removing the unwanted tech, much less who actually has the authority to shut a surveillance system down.

This has created a problem that has no immediate solution. When Dayton, Ohio shut down its Flock cameras, it had no idea whether contract termination meant the cameras were actually shut off. Worse, law enforcement officials didn’t seem to know either. A fix was needed, and Dayton found a cost-effective way of keeping Flock from operating the unwanted cameras until when (or if!) it decided to roll into town to remove them.

Jason Koebler has the details for 404 Media:

The city of Dayton, Ohio has covered its Flock automated license plate reader cameras with black trash bags in part because police there are unsure whether the cameras are still active and the city also doesn’t seem to know whether it is allowed to take the cameras down. The move comes after months of resident outrage, a scandal in which the city was sharing Flock camera data for immigration enforcement apparently on accident, and a $30,000 audit into how the cameras are being used.

You can see the problem. While the city may have terminated the contract and the PD stating it won’t use the cameras, there’s no real “OFF” switch on the end user side. Because the cameras aren’t truly owned by the city, it has to wait around for Flock to come get its boys. And even though the Dayton PD’s access portal may be dead because it’s parted ways with Flock, that doesn’t mean hundreds of law enforcement agencies around the US don’t have access to the cameras the city has determined can’t be used.

This isn’t speculation. This is something that has already been observed by other municipalities.

Cities are not sure what their contracts state how to extricate themselves from those contracts, or whether the cameras are recording (and where that data is going). This uncertainty highlights the problems associated with using private, third-party surveillance infrastructure. Last week, for example, the mayor of Menominee, Wisconsin said that Flock cameras in the city “have been activated without city council approval.”  

That’s some shady shit right there. But it’s not even the shadiest thing Flock has done in terms of (1) supposedly deactivated cameras and (2) garbage bag-covered cameras. Late last year, the city of Evanston, Illinois covered Flock cameras in garbage bags until Flock came to remove them. Then this happened:

The city previously ordered Flock to shut down 19 cameras (18 stationary and one flex camera that can be attached to a squad car) provided by the company and put its contract with Flock on a 30-day termination notice on Aug. 26. The company took down 15 of the 18 stationary cameras by Sept. 8, only to reinstall all of them by Tuesday. This was apparently without authorization from city officials, who sent Flock a cease-and-desist order to take them back down.

What the actual fuck? And yeah, one might be inclined to chalk this up to a simple misunderstanding, but only if one isn’t familiar with Flock’s general disregard for municipal laws:

Company communications with state transportation agencies obtained via public records requests, and interviews with more than half a dozen former employees, suggest that in its rush to install surveillance cameras in the absence of clear regulatory frameworks, Flock repeatedly broke the law in at least five states.

One state in particular seemed to be hit particularly hard by Flock’s lawless expansion efforts:

In South Carolina, State Transportation Secretary Christy Hall told Forbes that since spring 2022, her staff has found more than 200 unpermitted Flock cameras during routine monitoring of public roads.

Hence the garbage bags. It appears Flock is willing to activate cameras it’s been instructed to deactivate. And that’s when it’s not installing cameras illegally or thumbing its nose at removal orders by reinstalling cameras it has just removed.

Private companies who pull this sort of shit would be shut down, if not banned, by cities if it involved anything other than cop tech. Somehow, Flock manages to ride this out by claiming to be a cop’s best friend, even as its pretending local laws and regulations don’t apply to it.

I would encourage cities looking to rid themselves of Flock cameras to go one step further: just pry them off the poles and toss them in the nearest dumpster. If Flock wants to retrieve its equipment, it can be directed to the nearest landfill. Or, if cities don’t feel comfortable doing this themselves, they can always host a few foreign exchange students to help ensure Flock cameras remain inoperable until removal.

It seems hardly a day goes by when another state doesn’t try to keep young people off the Internet. These attempts not only violate their First Amendment rights to interact with lawful speech, but everyone else’s as well, because the things platforms would need to do to comply with these laws inevitably impinge on everyone else’s rights to interact with online expression freely.

Fortunately challenges have been brought against many of these laws, and most have even been enjoined. Unfortunately, however, many of these injunctions have wound up appealed to the Fifth Circuit, which seems to be where the First Amendment goes to die. Even just on the online speech front there was NetChoice v. Paxton from a few years ago, challenging a social media regulation law, where the Fifth Circuit summarily ignored clear precedent in order to uphold the law, which the Supreme Court—yes, this Supreme Court—then had to undo with its combined Moody v. NetChoice decision and some shadow docket action (that challenge still lingers, waiting for the Fifth Circuit to eventually take another swing at it). And then just last year the Fifth Circuit undid two injunctions in age-gating laws in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton and NetChoice v. Fitch, which this time the Supreme Court did not fix, and just last week did the same to the Texas App Store law, letting it go into force despite the injunction the district court had earlier granted in CCIA v. Paxton.

With the challenge to Louisiana’s unconstitutional age-gating law now before it in NetChoice v. Murrill, it seemed worth trying to see if the court could at last be convinced to join most other courts that have considered age-gating laws and see the constitutional infirmities with them, and so this week the Copia Institute—the think tank arm of Techdirt—filed an amicus brief to try to do so. In it we made three basic points: age-gating laws like Louisiana’s actually harm young people, they also harm everyone else, and, if this one were allowed, it would open the door to lots of other similar laws that would cause even more harm.

With regard to young people themselves, we first reminded that even young people have First Amendment rights, and that the Supreme Court has long held that the state has no role to play in deciding what ideas are suitable for them to encounter, which Louisiana is trying to do with this law. Even its tortured definition of a social media platform, which manages to exclude plenty of social media platforms (and, as the district court found, is unconstitutionally vague about which are covered or not), shows the state being selective as to which ideas were acceptable for young people to encounter.

Furthermore, as Australia’s experience with its social media ban for young people is illustrating, cutting young people off from social media causes explicit harm. Already there is evidence of young people experiencing isolation and being cut off from news, two ways young people are being hurt, which Louisiana now wants to risk for young people who they claim they are ostensibly trying to help. Louisiana’s law conditions access to covered social media platforms on parental consent, but it ignores that not every young person lives in a safe home with a caring parent who could give that consent. In fact, there is all sorts of offline harm that young people may be facing, including at home, which being cut off from social media means now being cut off from the help they may need to deal with it.

They also would face increased risk of identity theft from having to upload sensitive documents to try to verify their identity, as would everyone who now needs to provide them in order to be able to access any covered social media platforms. In its brief Louisiana argued that its age requirements were “nothing new, nothing costly, and nothing that compromises privacy.” But it is actually all three. As we explained, online age verification is nothing like the offline age verification we have used for such things as refusing to sell young people cigarettes—in general, young people could still enter the store and buy other things. We also noted the elevated identity theft risk, which news story after news story about database hacks shows is not a hypothetical concern. And then there is the privacy angle, because there is no way to ask, “How old are you?” without also inherently asking, “Who are you?” Given that the right of free expression also includes the right to express oneself anonymously, which the Supreme Court has recently emphasized, the latter is a question no one should be obligated to answer to be able to speak, and yet, with a law like Louisiana’s, everyone, young people and adults, would have to.

It’s also not just Louisiana’s law that we need to worry about. The problem is that if the courts can look past the constitutional problems with this one, then it can look past the constitutional problems with any of them, including ones that are even more onerous or restrictive. So even though Louisiana’s may not currently reach every user of every platform, it offers no comfort to anyone, for several reasons, with one of them being that even if the law just affects some social media platforms, it will still have chilling effects on anyone who might have used them for any purpose. As we explained to the court, the Copia Institute is in the business of expression and uses social media platforms to spread its expression. But if a law like Louisiana’s can go into effect, it could eliminate those platforms, large swaths of their users, or even the ability of the Copia Institute to use them at all. In other words, even though we write about age-gating laws, if they are allowed to go into effect we may lose the ability to tell anyone.

It’s important that laws like these remain enjoined, but maintaining a preliminary injunction is a separate area of concern raised by the Fifth Circuit’s recent jurisprudence, which keeps undoing sensible preliminary injunctions of laws like these unconstitutionally burdening speech rights. First, it should be enough for plaintiffs to anticipate that they will be harmed by such laws and seek preliminary relief enjoining them before they have had to directly experience such obviously inevitable expressive harm. Furthermore, courts are supposed to consider several factors in deciding whether to grant a preliminary injunction, including the likelihood of success of one of the parties and the risk of irreparable harm if the injunction is not granted. As even Justice Kavanaugh telegraphed in NetChoice v. Fitch, NetChoice is also likely to prevail in its constitutional challenge here.

But more importantly, the potential harm of perhaps unduly enjoining this law while the litigation challenging it continues pales to the harm of not doing so. If Louisiana’s law remains enjoined the status quo will be preserved, and no one will be any worse off than they were yesterday, last week, last year, or last century. As we also pointed out, the online interconnectivity of social media has existed in some form for upwards of forty years, dating back to pre-Internet dial-up bulletin board services in the 1980s. Generations of young people have grown up online since then and turned out fine.

But more importantly: the Constitution does not have an off switch. If these laws really do offend constitutional rights—as they clearly do—then they should not be able to offend them for even a moment. The Constitution protects rights every hour of every day, and there is no constitutional mechanism that allows them to be unilaterally taken away from everyone, even temporarily.

In January 2011, a man in Tahrir Square held up a handwritten sign that read “Facebook: against every unjust.” Fourteen years later, almost to the day, Mark Zuckerberg sat in a place of honor at the inauguration of Donald Trump, ahead of the incoming cabinet. Same exact platform. Radically different relationship to power.

That contrast is the starting point for a piece I’ve spent the last month working on, published yesterday at Liberalism.org, exploring the intersection of decentralization and democracy: Enshittification, Despotification, and the Open Internet. It tries to explain how the internet technology we were told would liberate us is now being used as part of an authoritarian crackdown on rights and freedoms — and, more importantly, why that outcome was arguably built into the architecture from the start.

The key argument builds on Cory Doctorow’s encapsulation of how centralized systems get enshittified — big companies take control of chokepoints to extract ever-greater value from users — but extends it to show how those same chokepoints become targets for political manipulation as well. It also makes the case that infrastructure choices are far from neutral — they shape the incentives that determine who ends up with power:

What changed was that the underlying incentives of that centralized architecture had time to work. Centralized systems create chokepoints. Chokepoints, once they exist, attract everyone with an interest in squeezing them: companies looking to extract more value from users, governments looking to extract compliance from companies, and political movements looking to extract influence from both. In 2011, Facebook hadn’t yet figured out how lucrative those chokepoints would be, or how much leverage they offered to the powerful.

By 2025, everyone had figured it out.

This is the part most debates about tech and democracy miss. The real question is whether the underlying architecture creates incentives that concentrate power or that distribute it. It’s not about whether technology is inherently good or bad, liberating or oppressive. Architecture shapes incentives; incentives shape outcomes. And once you’ve built a chokepoint, the attempts to capture it will be relentless, because the payoff for whoever controls it just keeps growing.

That’s the Doctorow half of the argument — enshittification, the corporate extraction playbook. But the piece extends it into territory Doctorow didn’t name: despotification, the political analog, where the same chokepoints that enable corporate extraction also enable authoritarian control:

The problem of centralized systems is that they create an irresistible temptation to control and exploit. Users who found value early on feel stuck: they can leave, but doing so means abandoning their community. That lack of easy exit creates lock-in, and lock-in enables enshittification.

And the same chokepoints that let companies extract value also let governments extract power. Those seeking control hunt up and down the network stack for leverage, and centralized providers concentrate it.

Call this despotification: the political analog of enshittification, where the same chokepoints get exploited to extract compliance from platforms—and ultimately to gain control over what people can say and hear.

The temptation of those in power to twist the knobs to their liking became irresistible. This took many forms: X downranking posts with links to external sites, Amazon choosing which products to show you as the promoted results, Instagram choosing which content deserves to be sent to you as a reminder notification, Substack choosing which newsletters to suggest to you. Each of these choices can be tweaked in ways that enable greater usage, engagement, and revenue, and not necessarily in the interests of the users.

But the piece doesn’t just diagnose the problem — it argues that none of this is inevitable. The same way democracy requires active defense, so does a genuinely decentralized internet:

Decentralization, like democracy itself, is something we have to fight for. Absent deliberate effort, the default trajectory runs toward centralization, because centralization is convenient, and convenience wins in the short term.

Which means the decentralized alternatives have to be genuinely better, not just philosophically purer. The centralized platforms won the last round because they removed friction. They didn’t ask users to manage config files or understand network topology—they said “click here and it works,” and most people took that deal. Any decentralized successor that requires users to become their own sysadmins will lose the same way the last generation of open protocols lost.

What’s different now is that we’re closer than we’ve ever been to having decentralized systems that are actually more convenient and more empowering, where the user experience is competitive with the centralized incumbents, and the democratic benefits come built in rather than bolted on. The goal is to build systems where those two things point in the same direction.

There’s a lot more in the full piece, including a section on how this same chokepoint logic is already being embedded into the infrastructure of whatever comes next — and why the architectural decisions being made right now will matter as much as anything that happened with social media.

The Luminar Neo Bundle includes a one time purchase of the software, an introductory course on how to use it, and 6 add-ons. Luminar Neo is an easy-to-use photo editing software that empowers photography lovers to express the beauty they imagined using innovative tools. Luminar Neo was built from the ground up to be different from previous Luminar editors. It keeps your favorite LuminarAI tools and expands your arsenal with more state-of-the-art technologies and important changes at its core. Meanwhile, the recognizable Luminar design is retained, making Neo simple to use and fun to explore. It’s on sale for $80.

Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

History is written by the winners, they say. But it can also be written by losers.

Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. In response, he told everyone the election had been rigged, if not actually stolen. He said some of this to his faithful MAGA followers the morning the election results were to be certified. The rest is, as they say, history. His supporters stormed the Capitol building for the sole purpose of preventing the election from being certified. They broke into the building, assaulted police and federal officers, forced the Senate into hiding, and walked off with whatever souvenirs they could.

Many of these insurrectionists were ultimately arrested, charged, and convicted for their crimes. When Trump was elected president for a second time, one of the first things he did was issue pardons to the people who broke the law on his behalf back in 2021.

As awful and self-serving as that move was, it wasn’t the end of it. Playing both sides of a lawsuit, Trump managed to secure a revenge fund via a “settlement” by the IRS over the leaking of his tax files years earlier. Trump claims it’s an “anti-weaponization” fund meant to soothe the nerves of supposedly politically persecuted members of his MAGA flock with cash rewards for criminal acts.

Of course, he didn’t say exactly that, but everyone knows how this $1.776 billion slush fund is going to be used. The court handling the lawsuit seeking to dismantle the fund knows it as well. Whether or not it can find a way to shut it down remains to be seen. There’s not a whole lot of precedent on transparent self-dealing by a sitting president, mainly because most presidents (and their cabinets) are generally a little more careful to obscure their true motives.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is continuing to erase history it doesn’t like. This project started far from the White House, forcing national parks to take down anything that presented America as anything less than perfect. This effort, however, takes place on the administration’s home field. Rather than simply allow history to exist, the DOJ is proactively deleting evidence of the agency’s past actions.

A review by NBC News found that the vast majority of press releases pertaining to Jan. 6 defendants have been removed from the DOJ website as of Friday evening.

The move to wipe hundreds of press releases from the official government site is the latest attempt by the Trump administration to reframe the Jan. 6 siege and to paint the rioters who participated in it as victims.

It’s not like the DOJ or administration gave anyone a head’s up that this purge would be happening. It took regular people noticing it for the government to respond. And respond it did, as only this administration can: by gleefully admitting it was engaging in the sort of memory-holing we used to condemn foreign autocracies for doing.

Washington Post journalist Meryl Kornfield pointed out the “quiet” disappearance of January 6 indictment press releases from the DOJ’s website. The DOJ’s “Rapid Reponse” X account jumped in immediately to gloat about its destruction of the public record:

Nothing “quiet” about it.

We are proud to reverse the DOJ’s weaponization under the Biden administration. We will do everything in our power to make whole those who were persecuted for political purposes. This includes stripping DOJ’s website of partisan propaganda.

There it is: yet another middle finger to Americans from an administration that claims no one loves America as much as it does. Sure, press releases may contain statements from government prosecutors that contain as much opinion as facts, the rest of the releases generally just state the facts as dryly as possible so there’s little room for interpretation.

The question is where the DOJ goes from here. Is it willing to start destroying court records and/or placing these under seal where they’re inaccessible to the general public? Will it deliver a fresh set of non-facts to replace all of the history it’s erasing?

While this makes it more difficult to trust the DOJ to maintain its own records, it doesn’t change the fact that most things on the internet are forever, whether you want them to be or not. What’s been deleted has already been archived. Even if this government is willing to block sites like the Internet Archive from preserving history as it happens, it can’t keep dozens of other people from preventing this administration from simply wishing all of its wrongdoings into the internet cornfield.

Lawfare is just one site that’s making sure the permanent record remains permanent since this administration is objectively opposed to letting its history speak for itself. The results of its ongoing efforts to prevent Trump, et al. from simply pretending this never happened can be accessed here.

What’s detailed in the deleted documents isn’t evidence of “partisan propaganda” or “DOJ weaponization.” What happened actually fucking happened. The DOJ is supposed to handle federal crimes and it did exactly that. The truth is that Trump supporters committed several crimes in an effort to undermine — if not actually destroy — the democratic process. This was one of the darkest moments in American history. It should never be minimized, much less discarded just because it makes the people in power (and the people who support them) look as awful as they actually are.

These are the acts of a dictator and his enablers. It’s the antithesis of the independence that’s going to be celebrated by the same people who are busy destroying everything this country is supposed to stand for. It’s not something to be tolerated. And it should never be forgiven.

There’s just an exhaustingly long list of reasons why the $111 billion planned acquisition of Warner Brothers by Larry Ellison and Paramount is very, very bad. Bad for consumers, bad for labor, bad for journalism, bad for democracy, and bad for markets.

For one thing, it’s financed by a bunch of murderous overseas autocrats. The massive debt load from deals like this always result in mass layoffs, higher prices for consumers, and corner cutting, resulting in a steadily shittier company, worse overall products, and a less healthy media. There’s also issues with Ellison trying to buy up all the news outlets and turn them into (even worse) right wing coddling bullshit and agitprop machines helmed by incompetent bad actors like Bari Weiss.

So it’s great timing for former Democratic California Attorney General Bill Lockyer to pop up over at The Hollywood Reporter to give a pathetic defense of the deal that pretends none of this is happening.

Trade mags are generally terrible. Most of the merger coverage at places like The Hollywood Reporter, Deadline, and Variety go comically out of their way to avoid acknowledging these giant deals are always bad. As in, it’s not any sort of actual debate. There are fifty years of very clear history on this subject, recently culminating in the giant turd that was the AT&T–>Discovery–>Warner Bros disaster.

But here comes the 85-year-old Lockyer, who pretends to care about antitrust reform, right before he insists that people should ignore all of the terrible problems with Paramount’s latest deal. One of the central themes in his piece is that Paramount and Warner Brothers have to merge because it’s the only way they can compete with Netflix, Amazon, and Apple:

“Traditional studios are no longer competing only with one another. California cannot and should not ignore that reality. Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery are competing against global technology platforms and streaming giants like Netflix, Amazon, Apple and others with enormous financial resources, diversified revenue streams and worldwide reach.”

That’s simply not how any of this works.

A Trump-allied oligarch and his nepobaby kid taking on a mountain of debt doesn’t magically result in a company that’s healthier and more competitive. All the debt costs are offloaded onto the back of workers, consumers, and product quality. These mergers always result in a less healthy company than ever, regardless of whatever silly smoke David Ellison is trying to blow up the ass of Hollywood elite.

It’s possible Lockyer is engaged in a DC policy paid advertorial on behalf of Paramount, though the Hollywood Reporter doesn’t offer any sort of financial conflict of interest disclosure, so one just has to assume Lockyer, like so many Democrats, doesn’t have any idea what he’s talking about when it comes to things like modern politics in the authoritarian era, or modern antitrust reform.

Though given Lockyer’s personal history of approving harmful consolidation (like his office allowing the Hearst Corporation-owned San Francisco Examiner to acquire its competitor the San Francisco Chronicle in 1999) or weak-kneed settlements or antitrust policy failures (Microsoft, Sutter Health), it’s maybe not surprising that he thinks one of the worst mergers in media history should be approved.

Lockyer’s also quick to shoot down concerns that Ellison’s domination of media is any sort of real world problem:

“Some have raised broader concerns about media ownership, editorial influence or political viewpoints, as the combined company would own both CBS News and CNN. This debate will undoubtedly continue to dominate talk shows and social media. I, too, worry about plutocratic dominance of media markets. But merger enforcement should remain focused on competition and the potential for consumer and worker harm — the core pillars of antitrust — not political disagreements over content or viewpoint.”

But this isn’t 1997. It’s now impossible to untangle corrupt authoritarian domination of media, and their relentless dismantling of media consolidation limits, from broader antitrust arguments (though I know there are centrist Democrats and MAGA “antitrust enforcers” who would very much like to). There are vast harms caused by the destruction of what’s left of journalism and public interest media, and any “antitrust reform” that doesn’t factor in media audience welfare and the health of electoral consensus in the age of Elon Musk and Larry Ellison enabled fascism isn’t reform, it’s patty cake.

Meaningful DOJ Antitrust reform would be nice, but it can’t fix things alone. We need an FCC that also actually cares about media consolidation. And it might be nice, as Gigi Sohn has long argued, to begin looking at meaningful media ownership diversity requirements in a bid to protect minority and independent journalism.

But we don’t have that. We have an FCC actively waging a war of censorship on anybody critical of an unpopular autocrat. We have a DOJ actively encouraging harmful consolidation at the hands of technofascist billionaires keen on pummeling the electorate with right wing agitprop. And an opposition Democrat party with weak knees and zero credibility on antitrust or media reform.

Trump and friends are self-serving autocrats dead seat on dismantling whatever’s left of meaningful competition and opposition. That Netflix, Comcast, Disney, and Apple still exist isn’t any consolation if the obvious ultimate end goal is zero restrictions on total consolidation. Instead of proudly advertising he doesn’t understand current political and market realities, Lockyer should probably just enjoy retirement.