Paramount’s final countdown

Today was the unofficial, internal deadline for Paramount’s takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery since the “ticking fee” takes effect tomorrow.

But that’s mostly a moot point now. In the week since the state attorneys general settled with Paramount, David Ellison and his inner circle have been making final preparations ahead of the merger, including a bond offering to help fund the $110 billion transaction.

Ellison and co. intend to complete the merger next week, sources told CNN. The new name of the combined company could be announced as soon as tomorrow. (This THR piece has some ideas about what it could be called.)

The judge who was overseeing the antitrust case, Araceli Martínez-Olguín, still has to sign off on the settlement.

And there is still a ton to do. All four of these Bloomberg headlines are just from the past 24 hours: “Paramount Draws $109 Billion of Demand for High-Grade Bond Deal” … “Paramount Pitches $6 Billion of Cost Savings to Contain Leverage” … “Paramount Deal Delay Fuels Fears of Costly $52 Billion M&A Debt” … “Paramount Streaming Chief Exits Ahead of Warner Bros. Deal.”

The departure of that streaming chief, Cindy Holland, is just the beginning of the C-suite turnover. Paramount plans to announce its leadership team for the combined company in the coming days so that staffers know who’s in charge on “day one,” in corporate parlance.

That means, among other things, that we’ll hear more about Paramount’s intentions for CNN and CBS News.

Holland’s departure “clears a path for Casey Bloys, the HBO chairman, to assume the top programming position for the company’s streaming services after Paramount completes the Warner Bros. purchase,” the NYT’s John Koblin wrote yesterday.

Holland was candid about the decision in a memo to colleagues: “As David readies for the next phase of his vision, we’ve discussed my role and the future of the combined businesses. David is optimizing for HBO stability as we move into this next chapter, and I fully support that.”

“Optimizing for HBO stability” by keeping Bloys in place. As Joe Flint wrote in today’s WSJ, “Ellison was concerned that losing Bloys would damage the HBO brand, which is a crucial part of the company’s streaming strategy.” And “additional shake-ups are expected in the days ahead once Paramount gets official court approval of the settlement, which could come as early as this week.”

Bloys, by the way, will be on stage tomorrow with Lucas Shaw at the Bloomberg Screentime conference, which gets underway today…

Writing in the Los Angeles Times this week, Stacy Perman said Ellison will “have to work hard to repair badly frayed relations with Hollywood talent who fiercely opposed the consolidation of two historic studios as a bad deal for workers.” Plus, he’ll have to “wrestle down an astonishing $80 billion in debt accrued as a result of this highly leveraged merger.”

Perman quoted Gabriel Kahn, a professor at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, who said, “I don’t envy David Ellison. You bought this ship, now you’ve got to sail it. And you’re facing threats on all fronts: bad will, everybody rooting for you to fail and operating a business in an incredibly uncertain, challenging time. At the same time, you are going to have to mortgage everything to make these debt payments.”

Puck’s Kim Masters encountered many similarly pessimistic sources for her latest column. But she also found an agent who sounded (anonymously) pragmatic: “To me, this is somebody who wants to make movies, believes in theatrical, and financially will back that up. It’s a low bar, but a lot of us think that’s a good thing. We’ve been so battered, and Warner Bros. has been so disrupted and shaky.”

The two men vying to be the next governor of California, Democrat Xavier Becerra and Republican Steve Hilton, will face off on CNN tonight at 9 p.m. Eastern, 6 p.m. Pacific. The one-hour debate will be moderated by anchors Jake Tapper and Dana Bash and take place at CNN’s Burbank studio. Eric Bradner has a curtain-raiser here…

>> Deadline’s Dominic Patten is out with a new Q&A with Hilton.

Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch is leaving the company after seven years to join Mattel as its new CEO. In a memo to staffers, Lynch called the move “bittersweet,” writing that “there is no doubt that we transformed Condé Nast for a new era.” I shared the full memo on X.

Although he’s stepping down from the top job, Lynch said he will stay on the Condé board “and remain deeply invested in the company and its future.” Mike Perlis, the company’s lead independent director, will serve as interim chief executive while Condé searches for a new CEO…

>> TheWrap’s A.J. Katz tweeted: “Lynch jumping from Condé Nast to Mattel might seem like an odd move — until you consider just how much Mattel wants to be an entertainment company these days.”

Millions of taxpayer dollars have already been spent on Trump’s new TV ads, and millions more have been allocated. As of last night, AdImpact estimates that at least $2.5 million has been spent on airtime, and the total amount is even higher. Because the spots have been classified as a “public service announcement” rather than a traditional political ad buy, the exact spending is not publicly disclosed or verifiable.

CNN’s Kristen Holmes reports that Customs and Border Protection has allocated $20 million for the ad campaign. Here’s our full story, exploring the bipartisan criticism of the propaganda…

As soon as Trump launched the government’s AI-powered portal, “America.gov,” yesterday, people began putting it to the test. After putting the portal through its paces, CNN’s Daniel Dale wrote that “one of the things it’s reasonably good at is debunking Trump’s own lies.”

“We asked the America.gov chatbot about numerous false claims the president has made in recent months, including one he uttered at the Tuesday launch event itself,” Dale wrote. “The chatbot flatly and correctly noted that many of these Trump claims are not true — including assertions he has made about elections, the economy, immigration and foreign affairs.”

Andrew Kirell writes: Sen. Eric Schmitt’s blunder while questioning Jack Smith yesterday was also a classic illustration of how the MAGA media ecosystem operates in a completely different reality.

Schmitt called Smith a “dirtbag” and accused him of perjury, citing texts supposedly placing him at an Atlanta Hawks game to suggest he colluded with Fani Willis, who prosecuted Trump in Georgia. Except Smith had watched the Iowa Hawkeyes that night — in Maryland.

That “embarrassing moment,” as CNN’s Aaron Blake described it, somehow became a victory to MAGA media.

Schmitt appeared on “The Charlie Kirk Show” shortly afterward, where host Andrew Kolvet heaped praise on him. “You called him out on this NBA game… in Atlanta,” he said. “It was a great moment, so good for you.”

And over on X, Benny Johnson was among “multiple right-wing engagement-farming accounts that tried to recast the moment as a dramatic narrative in which Smith is left floored by Schmitt’s line of questioning,” Rolling Stone’s Jack Crosbie wrote. Johnson falsely claimed Smith was caught committing perjury and left “stunned.” Sean Hannity touted the senator for putting Smith “on the spot.” Both later deleted their posts.

VF’s Aidan McLaughlin said it best: This was an “extraordinary example of our alternate universe media ecosystem: senator accuses a prosecutor of perjury because the senator got confused about a basic fact, but gets applauded by propagandists anyway for the ‘great moment.’”

A US appeals court has upheld a ruling for Thomson Reuters “in its copyright dispute with former legal-research rival Ross Intelligence,” Blake Brittain reports for Reuters News (which is owned by Thomson Reuters).

The court “rejected Ross’ argument that its search engine made fair use of material from Thomson Reuters’ Westlaw platform, a first-of-its-kind ruling by a U.S. appeals court in a wave of high-stakes copyright cases over AI training,” Brittain writes.

>> Why it matters: The case “is the first copyright dispute over AI training to be heard by a US appeals court, though unlike those disputes, Thomson Reuters’ case does not involve generative AI…”

Google “has been paying roughly 100 digital publishers for how much their content contributes to AI-powered answers to search and other products,” signaling “a further shift by the company toward paying publishers for content that shows up in its powerful search engine,” Alix Coutures and Catherine Perloff report for The Information…

>> Disney is undertaking its third round of layoffs this year. (Variety)

>> David Fincher is opting “not to renew his deal at Netflix,” per Lucas Shaw. (Bloomberg)

>> Hachette Book Group is naming Ben Sevier its next chief executive. (Ash Wu)

>> Max Read is guest-hosting the NYT’s “Hard Fork” podcast when it returns in early October. (X)

>> Correction: On a couple of occasions recently, I incorrectly used “Rep.” in reference to Thom Tillis’ title. Tillis’ correct title is “Sen.” My apologies.

Trump is trying to will the name “super intelligence” into common parlance. Yesterday he ordered “all executive branch departments and agencies to use the term ‘super intelligence’ instead of artificial intelligence” as he attempts “a forced rebrand for an industry he has tightly embraced even as Americans grow increasingly wary about the rapidly advancing tech,” CNBC’s Kevin Breuninger reports. Mark me down as skeptical that this will stick…

>> Trump said yesterday that top tech executives “had signed a new commitment aimed at better ‘self-policing’ their companies’ AI models, arguing that the light-touch approach represents the best way to balance safety concerns with his desire to accelerate a technology that he’s dubbed ‘Super Intelligence,’” Hadas Gold and Adam Cancryn report. (CNN)

>> “X made nearly 500 accounts from journalists, economists, academics and other public figures inaccessible in Turkey in the past week,” Inci Ozbek reports, noting that while X “didn’t specify why it had blocked the accounts, social media in Turkey has been flooded with posts on the fund crisis, including those criticizing the government’s handling.” (Bloomberg)

>> “OpenAI has launched a set of new AI assistants called Dots, as the company looks for new ways to commercialise its technology and tackle a growing threat from rivals including Meta that have recently launched their own ‘agents,’” George Hammond reports. (FT)

>> Speaking of OpenAI, “ChatGPT now has 1.2 billion weekly users,” Jay Peters writes, noting that number is “up from the 1 billion weekly users milestone ChatGPT surpassed in July.” (The Verge)

Early reviews are in for Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Tom Cruise-led satirical black comedy, “Digger,” which hits theaters on Friday. So far, the reviews are not great, averaging 44 on Metacritic and 52% on Rotten Tomatoes. In one scathing review, TheWrap’s William Bibbiani writes Iñárritu’s “smug, self-aware social commentary plays like a bad ‘SNL’ sketch with delusions of grandeur.”

This edition of Reliable Sources was edited by Andrew Kirell and produced with Liam Reilly. Email us your feedback and tips here.