CBS Hosting Dinner Praising Trump And His Love Of The First Amendment

from the lying-liars-and-the-lies-they-tell dept

Talk about pathetic.

CBS has announced that the now-Larry Ellison owned network will be hosting a lavish dinner this week praising Donald Trump and his (nonexistent) dedication to the First Amendment. The dinner will be hosted at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington, which the State Department claimed in December 2025 was being renamed “The Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace.”

Truly banana republic type shit.

Oliver Darcy got a hold of the original invite for the dinner, and it’s everything you might expect:

Trump is, as regular Techdirt readers may recall, arguably the worst president in a century when it comes to trampling press freedom, free speech, and the First Amendment. When the administration isn’t trying to destroy comedians for telling jokes about the president, it’s busy crushing whatever was left of public media in the U.S., or threatening the broadcast licenses of networks that do basic journalism.

CBS management doesn’t care about any of that, of course, because it’s owned by billionaire right wing Trump ally, Larry Ellison. And Larry and David Ellison are desperate to have the government sign off on their job-destroying merger between Paramount and Warner Brothers. The Warner Brothers board is voting to approve the deal on the same day as the dinner.

Despite some pretense that the Trump DOJ is doing its due diligence to review the deal, there’s little real doubt that the feds will rubber stamp the transaction. The real question mark rests with a likely antitrust lawsuit from a coalition of state attorneys general to block the transaction.

It’s worth noting that Larry Ellison’s son David couldn’t attend a hearing last week on the massive problems with the Paramount Warner merger due to a purported death in the family (nobody seems able to determine who died), but he was able to make an appearance at Cinemacon a day earlier to make all sorts of empty promises about how wonderful the merger will be:

“David Ellison…made a unexpected appearance at CinemaCon, the annual gathering of theater owners. He took the stage to reassure exhibitors they have nothing to fear, whether it be the new regime at Paramount, or his pending acquisition of Warner Bros.”

They of course have everything to fear. The massive $108 billion in debt from the Warner Brothers deal will inevitably result in mass layoffs, price hikes, and sagging product quality due to the need to cut corners to service the debt. This is before we even talk about the layoffs already happening at CBS.

It’s simply not up for debate: this happens absolutely every single time folks like the Ellisons delude themselves into thinking mass consolidation does anything useful outside of generate tax breaks, drive short-lived stock boosts, and let guys like David Ellison pretend they’re “savvy dealmakers.”

Pre-merger promises about release windows (or anything else) are absolutely meaningless. But with just a handful of people at the top financially disincentivized from learning anything from history (including the three previous disastrous Warner Brothers mergers), the dysfunction just repeats itself indefinitely. We’ve seen merger dysfunction and chaos before, but this one has the potential to outdo them all.

Filed Under: consolidation, corruption, david ellison, dinner, donald trump, first amendment, free speech, journalism, larry ellision, media, mergers, regulators

Companies: cbs, paramount, warner bros. discovery