We’ve well established that the AT&T–>Time Warner–>Discovery series of media mergers were some of the dumbest, most pointless “business” exercises ever conceived by the extraction class.
The utterly senseless saga burned through hundreds of billions in debt, saw more than 50,000 people lose their jobs, killed off numerous popular brands (like Mad Magazine and HBO), created oceans of animosity among creatives, and resulted in a Max streaming service that’s arguably dumber and of notably lower quality than when the entire expensive gambit began.
The brunchlord in charge of much of that dysfunction, Time Warner CEO David Zaslav, has seen absolutely zero accountability for this chaos, and, in fact, has been broadly rewarded with a series of massive compensation packages that in absolutely no way reflect his competency.
Zaslav, like most media execs in streaming, is all out of any sort of original ideas. And the kind of stuff that truly pleases customers (low prices, higher quality, improved customer support, better feature sets) costs money and erodes quarterly earnings.
The streaming market has also hit a subscriber growth ceiling, so they’ve shifted to more “creative” ways to please Wall Street, like more and more ads, endless price hikes, weird new restrictions, and a crackdown on password sharing; you know, all the annoying stuff traditional cable did that ultimately resulted in a collapse of the industry at the hands of streaming and piracy.
But execs like Zaslav have also been banging the drum for more pointless media industry consolidation for a while. Such consolidation generates some nice tax cuts and a short-earned stock valuation bump, but has been generally proven hugely corrosive to media diversity, consumers, labor, and product quality.
Biden’s tendency toward antitrust reform and a more skeptical take on big mergers is, of course, now dead as a doornail with Trump’s victory. And Zaslav, unsurprisingly, sees this as a big new opportunity for more disastrous industry consolidation.
When our consolidated media covers it, like this Hollywood Reporter piece, they can’t be bothered to make a single reference to the documented fact that such consolidation harms markets, consumers, workers, or product quality. In fact, they can’t even be bothered to mention that Zaslav himself just oversaw one of the most hated and destructive media mergers in recent history.
Instead, such “reporting” mostly just involves parroting what Zaslav said on an earnings call:
“Discussing “outright consolidation of an industry that is in a generational disruption” during the company’s third-quarter earnings conference call on Thursday, Zaslav said: “We have an upcoming new administration. It’s too early to tell, but it may offer a pace of change and an opportunity for consolidation that may be quite different, that would provide a real positive and accelerated impact on this industry that’s needed.”
Trump’s last administration pretty mindlessly rubber stamped big mergers in telecom and media without even seeing the details, and his “antitrust enforcers” even personally helped companies justify harmful mergers using their personal phones and email accounts. Trump’s FCC also took a hatchet to what was left of media consolidation limits, primarily to help right wing propaganda shop Sinclair Broadcasting.
The Trump DOJ did sue to thwart the AT&T Time Warner merger, but it was found later that it was because he wanted to hurt CNN and help Rupert Murdoch, not because of any actual interest in the real-world harms of the deal. Trump and his cult have convinced rubes that they care about media consolidation; but what they care about is protecting and amplifying right wing and corporatist propaganda posing as news. Anybody believing otherwise has a head full of cottage cheese.
Now that Biden and Lina Khan are no longer caring about antitrust reform or merger scrutiny, the mergers are going to get stupid. Particularly in sectors already dismantled by consolidation like media and telecom.
It’s not difficult to predict streaming’s next chapter under Trumpism, because most of the executives came over from cable TV, where they were financially incentivized to learn absolutely nothing from history. At every step of the way, the high costs of this dysfunctional pseudo-productive performance art is inevitably borne by either lower level workers or customers.
So streaming’s next phase will involve a lot more mergers, creating oceans of debt, resulting in higher prices, layoffs, and even worse quality. Consumers will then flock back to piracy, at which point all the regulators and companies responsible for the mess will blame everything but themselves (Gen Z! VPNs! The dastardly wokes!), and the cycle will repeat itself all over again as streaming gets disrupted in turn.
