Can Paramount Skydance Save Hollywood From Itself?

Hollywood is not trying to stop a monopoly by blocking the Paramount Skydance merger with Warner Bros. It’s trying to protect one.If a monopoly means near-complete control over what gets made, promoted, and rewarded, then much of Hollywood and the cultural institutions around it operate under the ideological consensus of the Left and the Democratic Party. Why do the Obamas have a long-running production deal at Netflix? Why do the Emmys consistently elevate late-night hosts whose politics align with that consensus? Jimmy Kimmel, John Oliver, Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart? Do you think they’d ever nominate Greg Gutfeld, whose show often tops them all in ratings? If that isn’t an ideological monopoly, I don’t know what is. Why did major awards shows stay silent on Charlie Kirk? Why did so many artists cancel Kennedy Center appearances after its Trump-era changes, and why did multiple acts drop out of America 250 events?David Ellison and Paramount Skydance are attempting something brave and unprecedented: an outside challenge to that consensus. Their roughly $110 billion bid for Warner Bros. Discovery would give them control of a major studio, HBO/Max, CNN, and a large portfolio of cable and streaming assets. While there has been some resistance to the biggest mergers in recent history, we’ve never seen anything like #blockthemerger. Meet the new resistance, same as the old resistance. 12 state attorneys general, including California, have sued to block the deal. The Writers Guild of America has filed its own antitrust lawsuit. SAG-AFTRA has publicly opposed the merger, though it has not joined the litigation. Opposition also includes the Future Film Coalition (which leads the #BlockTheMerger campaign), Democracy Defenders Fund, Committee for the First Amendment, Free Press, the International Documentary Association, and the American Economic Liberties Project, among others. More than 5,600 industry figures have signed an open letter against the deal, including Mark Ruffalo, Jane Fonda, Javier Bardem, Elliot Page, Emma Thompson, Ben Stiller, and Cynthia Nixon.Paramount Skydance has, for now, delayed closing. Can they hold the line under this unprecedented pressure campaign? Hope springs eternal. But you won’t read about that point of view in any of the trades. They’re a monopoly, too. Most of them are owned by the same entity, Penske Eldridge. Just today, it was announced that the Hollywood Foreign Press, the former owners of the Golden Globes, are suing Jay Penske for $150 million. They are claiming Penske orchestrated their downfall so he could buy the Golden Globes. Jay Penske already owns Deadline, The Hollywood Reporter, Variety, Indiewire, Gold Derby predicting site, Rolling Stone, a virtual monopoly on the awards race from soup to nuts. Gold Derby shapes the nominees, the trades take ads from the studios and the Golden Globes hand out the awards. But wouldn’t you know, when Rebecca Keegan wrote a hit piece on me, she did so in the Hollywood Reporter, owned by Penske Eldridge. I was a vocal and prominent critic of Penske’s growing monopolistic power on the awards race and one of the few willing to speak out. With one hit piece, the Penske company took out both a competitor for ad money and a pesky nuisance for the brand. That is what you call a monopoly. A Climate of Fear and A Culture of SilenceI found out firsthand how monopolies work in Hollywood when I was canceled in 2024. The day a Hollywood Reporter story labeled me a “MAGA darling,” one studio pulled its ads from my site that day. The last thing they wanted was to be associated with an accused and condemned witch.It was shocking how many of them fell in line in robotic fashion, gripped with fear. The response was swift and uniform. Every writer on my site left to protect their reputations. Friends of fifteen years ended the friendship. My Oscars ticket was revoked. Jane Fonda’s Women’s Media Center fired me from their annual Oscars report. Screening and party invitations dried up. I was benched on Gold Derby.Worst of all, the lucrative studio ad buys for the Oscars and Emmys vanished. As it all collapsed, I remembered in 2012, an advertising strategist telling me I could be making far more money if I sold the site better. “You have no baggage to speak of,” she’d said.That was true then. I was one of the few independent Oscar sites left, and still am, known around town for being honest to a fault. I stayed independent even as the ad money made life more comfortable for me and my daughter than it had ever been.There was never any question why my career ended in Hollywood: I had been outed as a Trump voter. I was on the wrong side of Hollywood’s pro