‘Minded to intervene’
This just in from CNN’s Ivana Kottasová in London: “The British government indicated on Tuesday that it may challenge Paramount Skydance’s planned takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery.”
“Following engagement with the parties and independent research, my department has today written to the current and proposed owners of Warner Bros Discovery on my behalf to inform them that I am minded to intervene,” the British culture minister Lisa Nandy said in a statement.
“In the UK,” Kottasová explains, “the term ‘minded to’ is used by government officials to announce they will make a move before taking the legal steps to do so.”
Nandy says she has not made a “final decision on intervention at this stage.” The companies now have a week to respond to her letter.
But if Nandy moves forward, it will be a significant hurdle for Paramount to overcome. The UK’s media regulator, Ofcom, would be tasked with assessing the deal, on top of the Competition and Markets Authority probe that’s already underway. Ofcom would be looking at issues like media plurality and freedom of expression.
The regulators would have “up to 40 days to report back,” Reuters notes. “Once they do, Nandy would then decide whether to clear the deal or refer it for a further investigation, which can last up to 24 weeks.”
A Paramount spokesperson responded just now, “We are grateful for the continued constructive engagement with all interested government bodies and relevant authorities, including in the UK. We are confident that our proposed transaction does not pose any media plurality issues in the UK and remain confident in our stated transaction timeline.”
As you know, Paramount is banking on taking control of WBD in the third quarter of this year, meaning by the end of September. Corporate meetings about how to integrate WBD have been taking place for months already.
If Paramount doesn’t close the deal at the end of the third quarter, a deal-sweetener kicks in, adding 25 cents per share per quarter to the cost of the deal until it is approved.
That would add $627 million to the cost of the overall deal each quarter, or roughly $7 million per day.
In other words: The clock is ticking.
The UK has long been one of the two big wildcards during this process. The other: Attorneys general in states like California and New York. Appearing on MS NOW over the weekend, California AG Rob Bonta repeated his statement that “there are red flags in the air everywhere” with Paramount-WBD, and “the transaction has not cleared regulatory scrutiny.” Bonta added, “We’ll make a decision in the coming weeks.”
>> When Jacob Soboroff asked about Matt Belloni’s recent report that Bonta “wants Paramount to sell CNN,” Bonta said, “I don’t know where that comes from, to be honest.”
“Today Axel Springer announced that it had cleared all regulatory hurdles and that three years of ownership limbo are over,” Dominic Ponsford reports in Press Gazette Daily. “The Telegraph finally has a new owner. Editor Chris Evans, who led an employee revolt against Abu Dhabi-backed Redbird IMI, seems genuinely pleased about his new paymasters, saying: ‘We also share the same vision and the same ambition.’”
With the Supreme Court handing down the final opinions of its term this morning, I asked CNN’s legal affairs correspondent Paula Reid — who will be live on air reporting and explaining the rulings — for a behind the scenes look at how the reporting actually happens.
“It truly takes a village to cover SCOTUS opinion days,” Reid says, with Supreme Court reporter John Fritze, chief Supreme Court analyst Joan Biskupic and a team of editors all involved.
Fritze, Reid and the editors virtually huddle on a conference call, “and when the opinions are handed down, John tells us what the opinion is,” she says. “Once we all agree on the call that we are comfortable with our understanding of what the Justices are saying, I tell the control room I am ready and we go live to break the news” while editors post the headline online.
“Simultaneously,” Reid says, “we have interns running a physical copy of the opinion all the way across the lawn to hand to me so I can read it myself on-air. Before COVID that is how we got the news of the opinion – the famous ‘running of the interns’ – but now the opinions are transmitted electronically as well so we are not relying entirely on the speed of our intern.”
Reid says the most important thing “is to be prepared with an understanding of all the possible outcomes, so you aren’t surprised and can move quickly to translate the opinion to the audience.”
While the live TV and web coverage unfolds, Biskupic stays in the courtroom, and afterward she brings “a ton of color about the dynamics between the Justices — that has really been interesting this term with some tension coming to the surface,” Reid says. “The Court makes this whole process really hard, but nobody does it better than CNN.”
Chief Justice John Roberts “fought for decades to overturn Humphrey’s Executor,” and yesterday he succeeded, CNN chief Supreme Court analyst Joan Biskupic writes, assessing the landmark ruling to curtail independent federal agencies.
The ruling “will inevitably have consequences for business in the media, entertainment technology space, with the FTC and FCC taking active roles in regulating those areas (not to mention the SEC, among other agencies),” THR’s Alex Weprin writes.
Weprin notes that Justice Neil Gorsuch’s concurring opinion “cites FCC Chairman Brendan Carr’s public criticism of ABC late night host Jimmy Kimmel as evidence that the agency may have too much power.”
>> Carr quipped on X, “Always thought you could get cited in Supreme Court cases the easy way or the hard way.” If you know, you know…
“Alan Dershowitz said Monday he was not surprised that the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal in a defamation lawsuit against CNN. He argued, however, that the justices missed an opportunity to clarify First Amendment law and signaled they will eventually revisit the landmark standard governing libel claims by public figures,” Newsmax’s Solange Reyner reports.
That’s the standard set by New York Times v. Sullivan in 1964. The court “has repeatedly turned away previous attempts to overturn the Sullivan ruling,” NBC’s story notes, and only two justices, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, showed interest in hearing Dershowitz’s case…
Rupert Murdoch’s editors have a message for Trump and his inner circle: “Hunter Biden-style sleaze is just as slimy when the Trump boys do it.”
This new editorial highlights yesterday’s front page NYT story about Trump’s billion-dollar mining deal in Kazakhstan, among other examples of “sweetheart deals.”
This stuff is “business-as-usual in Third World banana republics, but these slimy practices have now been normalized in the White House, to the shame of the nation,” The Post says…
It was a familiar complaint from the president yesterday: “The news doesn’t talk about it.” But there’s a good reason why. “It” is a mathematically impossible claim.
“I’m reducing drug prices by 200, 300, 400%,” Trump said. “Nobody even talks about – the news doesn’t talk about it.”
So, blaming the press for not parroting his faulty math. As CNN’s Daniel Dale has pointed out previously, a cut of 200% “would mean that Americans would be paid money to acquire their medications, which is not happening…”
A reporter and photographer for WBBM, the CBS station in Chicago, “were attacked near the Adler Planetarium during a shoot on Monday afternoon,” the station reports.
Thankfully the journalists were not injured, but they were accosted by two men who shouted racial slurs; smashed the photographer’s camera; and smashed the windshield of the news truck. Three people were later arrested. CBS said “we are shocked and horrified by this crime and we are grateful that our journalists are safe.”
The Guardian this morning announced plans “to create dozens of new jobs as part of its global project to reach audiences in new ways, and expand its audio and visual journalism.” The move will see 55 new roles across The Guardian’s newsrooms over the next year, with about 20 of those roles in the US.
Sneak peek: Since you read this newsletter, you surely read Mediaite, as well. The site is an indispensable source for media junkies. Later this morning editor-in-chief Joe DePaolo is announcing three new hires and sharing that he’s hiring for at least three more.
“In an era of digital media retraction, Mediaite is continuing to grow,” DePaolo says. Kathianne Boniello, a 20-year veteran of The New York Post, is joining as weekend editor; Stephanie Kaloi is a new staff writer who will lead Mediaite’s One Sheet newsletter; and Jason Cohen is joining as chief digital strategist.
Cohen calls himself a “viral politics clipper,” a skill that’s very much in demand these days. DePaolo says “his X account has been a must-follow in recent years,” and now “Jason will be bringing his unique finds and angles straight to Mediaite reporters and readers.”
One of the WSJ’s main homepage headlines this morning: “Comcast’s NBCUniversal Spinoff Gives Hollywood Its Next Major Deal Target.”
While execs say NBCU “will have the wherewithal to thrive on its own and invest in the business, much of Wall Street thinks it will become an acquisition target before long,” Joe Flint writes.
CNBC’s Lillian Rizzo and Alex Sherman suggest some reasons to think otherwise, including the tax implications for any acquirer. “Rather than an immediate transaction, Comcast may be looking years ahead,” they write.
Trader enthusiasm notably dimmed as the day went on yesterday; Comcast soared almost 25% in premarket trading, but ended the day up just 4.5%. Still, up is up, and the stock received some upgrades this morning…
>> “Brian Roberts lost out on an opportunity last year to merge NBCUniversal with Warner Bros. Discovery. But the process” helped get him “thinking about what NBCUniversal would look like on its own,” Bloomberg’s Kelcee Griffis and Hannah Miller wrote.
>> NBCUniversal “is considering gaming and entertainment franchises for growth after the split,” sources told Reuters, while Comcast’s cable business “could see technology investments tied to data centers and AI.”
>> Deadline’s Ted Johnson took a look at what the split faces “on DC’s Trump-influenced regulatory road.”
Two very different new releases are off to a strong start with preorders. Dave Portnoy’s “Cancel Me If You Can” and Julia Angwin and Ami Fields-Meyer’s “On Courage: How to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear.”
“On Courage” received the Rachel Maddow seal of approval; she was so impressed by it that she volunteered to read the audiobook version.
“Reporting this book on how to fight authoritarianism had a surprising effect on me: I became more hopeful,” Angwin wrote alongside this NYT guest essay/preview of the book, “The State of American Resistance Is Stronger Than You May Think.”
Objection.ai, from Peter Thiel-ally Aron D’Souza’s “private AI tribunal” that launched this spring to evaluate reporting and push back on bad press, “was unceremoniously taken down, not long after The Intercept’s interview with D’Souza,” Tekendra Parmar reports.
D’Souza says the move follows receipt of “many customer requests for more complex investigations (with much higher willingness to pay).” “As such, we decided to focus the team on retooling the website,” D’Souza told Parmar. The Intercept has more on that here…
>> Last night the House overwhelmingly passed a bill “designed to provide greater protections to children online — a bipartisan vote that came despite deep divisions between the House and Senate and rebukes from kids’ safety advocates,” Gabby Miller reports. (POLITICO)
>> Google says Gemini is “now offering its personalized Nano Banana-powered image generation feature to a broader audience,” meaning “all eligible users in the U.S. can access the feature for free.” (TechCrunch)
>> In a new paper titled “A Pragmatic Approach to AI Governance in America,” Google says “it is exploring new ‘value exchange models’ with publishers.” (Press Gazette)
>> WhatsApp “is set to let people chat without having to reveal their phone number — by exchanging unique usernames instead.” (BBC)
>> “Australia’s consumer watchdog is suing Amazon, alleging that the U.S. retailer relied on unfair contract terms to introduce advertising to more than 850,000 local streaming customers.” (WSJ)
This edition of Reliable Sources was edited by Dave Goldman and produced with Liam Reilly. Email us your feedback and tips here.