California Attorney General Rob Bonta said Monday that Paramount must create a News Editorial Independence Board for CBS News and CNN as a condition of settling the multi-state antitrust suit that had delayed its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery.
An independent monitoring trustee, along with an internal compliance monitor, will oversee whether the combined company keeps those commitments.
Bonta, who led a 12-state coalition that sued in July to block the roughly $110 billion deal, announced the settlement at a Los Angeles news conference. He said the board is meant to support “continued editorial independence” at the two news organizations and to “ensure independent, objective, fact-based reporting.”
According to an NPR story, the board is expected to set guiding editorial and journalism principles for the combined company’s news channels. Some accounts describe it as a panel of working or retired journalists, with limits on partisan affiliation and fixed terms. The consent decree would also require Paramount to release at least 30 theatrical films a year (rising later in the five-year term), invest an extra $1.5 billion in U.S. film production over five years, and accept financial penalties—and possible divestiture remedies—if it falls short.
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| Rob Bonta |
Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery now expect the deal to take effect in early October. Bonta stressed that the pact is not an endorsement of the merger. “This settlement is not a vote of support for this merger,” he said. “I don’t think these companies should merge.”
Critics, including some fellow state attorneys general and media advocates, argued the states should have demanded a CNN or CBS News divestiture rather than an oversight board. Connecticut Attorney General William Tong said his office had wanted full divestiture and was “deeply disappointed that we could not do more.”
The lawsuit had alleged that combining Paramount’s studios, CBS, and Paramount+ with Warner’s studios, HBO, CNN, and other cable networks would concentrate too much power over film, television, and news.
A federal judge in California had already found the deal likely to violate antitrust law and set a trial for March. Paramount pressed for a settlement before an Oct. 1 “ticking fee” would have raised the acquisition’s cost. Federal regulators under the Trump administration had already cleared the transaction. The remaining state challenge was the last major legal obstacle.