the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
March 2, 2026
On February 26, Netflix bowed out of the bidding war, setting up Paramount Skydance to purchase Warner Bros. If approved, this will give the right-wing billionaire Ellison family control over even more of the U.S. media landscape.
The merger of Paramount Skydance with Warner Bros is bad news for the movie industry and its workers. While David Ellison claims there will be “synergies” between the two, the new company will carry 90 billion dollars in debt. Making the payments on that debt means cuts—at least 6 billion dollars worth according to Ellison, after he already imposed big cuts on Paramount Skydance just a few months ago. This means layoffs, and less money to make quality movies or shows.
As one producer commented: “It’s like a shotgun wedding with your dumb cousin: I fear for the health of the kids.”
This merger is also a step toward even fewer people controlling more of the information we get. David Ellison already pushed CBS News, owned by Paramount, to put a more conservative spin on the news. He appointed “anti-woke” activist Bari Weiss as head of the show, and she promptly canceled a segment on the brutal prison in El Salvador where the Trump administration sent people they deported. Now Ellison will also control CNN, which is part of Warner Bros. Ellison’s father also just purchased a big share of TikTok.
Trump is certainly involved in all this. David Ellison is his close political ally and was even his guest at the State of the Union. Trump has made his hatred of CNN known for years—those hosts he named personally must now fear for their jobs.
Just the weekend before all this went down, Trump called on Netflix to fire one of its directors who had worked in the Obama administration. And the same day that Netflix dropped its bid, its CEO just happened to have met with officials at the White House. We can surely expect even more Trump-friendly coverage in the news.
Beyond Trump, this is one more step toward a small handful of billionaires owning almost every source of information people rely on. Sergey Brin and Larry Page, founders of Google, are two of the world’s richest billionaires. In the last few years, Elon Musk bought Twitter—now X. Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post. Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta bought Instagram. Add in the Ellisons’ portfolio of TikTok, Paramount Skydance, and Warner Bros. According to Forbes, these are the six richest people in the world, who now control a huge share of all the sources of information available.
Of course, these billionaires hope to profit from the media companies they own. But on top of that, they have every interest in controlling what the rest of us see.