The AT&T Time Warner and DirecTV mergers were a monumental disasters. AT&T spent $200 billion to acquire both companies thinking it would dominate the video and internet ad space. Instead, the company lost 9 million subscribers in nine years, fired 50,000 employees, closed numerous popular brands (including Mad Magazine), and stumbled around incompetently for several years before giving up.
But that was just the start.
After its tactical retreat, AT&T spun off Time Warner into an entirely new company, Warner Media. Warner Media then immediately turned around and announced a blockbuster merger with Discovery, creating the creatively named Warner Brothers Discovery.
This new company has been a blistering mess as well. Executives there have been so cheap they’ve refused to pay residuals to creators, shuttered numerous popular programs they didn’t want to pay for, and engaged in round after round of additional layoffs to achieve promised “synergies.” Hundreds of billions of dollars later and the end result is a shittier product and, well, chaos.
It’s been a wonderful example of the blistering stupidity of the “growth for growth’s sake” mindset, the perils of mindless consolidation, and our obsession with completely pointless megadeals that genuinely only benefit investors and higher level executives. Everybody else, from artists and employees to consumers, gets screwed in the form of layoffs, higher rates, or lower quality product.
Enter Congress, where a teeny, tiny number of lawmakers think maybe somebody at the DOJ might want to at least review the approval process that helped create the deal. They’re not calling for the merged companies to be broken up, though they are asking that the process that resulted in this dumb mess maybe inform future reviews:
“We also hope that the competitive consequences resulting from the WarnerMedia-Discovery merger inform updates to the merger guidelines to ensure that the guidelines reflect the needs of workers, consumers and content creators in the media and entertainment industry,” the letter said.
The letter was signed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.); Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.), ranking member of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Administrative State, Regulatory Reform and Antitrust; Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus; and Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas).
Of course it won’t. Nobody will learn anything from this process. Outside of baseball, massive pointless mergers are the top American pastime. There are just countless examples of how consolidation and monopolization through megadeals harms all of the things American policymakers claim to be dedicated to (free markets, free choice, competition, innovation, creating jobs).
This complete apathy to the harm of mindless consolidation occurs as countless folks in Congress make TV appearances claiming to support things like “antitrust reform.” In part because it’s happening in the less sexy media policy space, where regulators have effectively been defanged and issues often get overlooked given the current myopic DC fixation on “Big Tech.”
When it comes to taking media consolidation seriously, a small handful of Senators saying “maybe somebody should do something about this” is about as close to competency as it gets.
