Category: News

The judge overseeing the state attorneys general challenge to the Paramount-Warner Bros Discovery merger did not issue a ruling Friday on an emergency motion to pause the transaction, but said she would do so by July 22.

U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín heard arguments from both sides in an 80-minute hearing in Oakland. The states are seeking a temporary restraining order that would bar the companies from closing the deal for up to 28 days. That would be a prelude to a further ruling on a preliminary injunction, which would perhaps pause the transaction indefinitely, or until the legal process plays out.

Jeffrey Kessler, representing Paramount, told the judge that the transaction will not close by July 22, which is Wednesday. That is around the time that the European Union is expected to issue its decision on the $110 billion transaction.

Much of the hearing was devoted to argument on how narrowly the market for theatrical and cable distribution should be defined, as the states claimed that they had shown that the transaction on its face is illegal.

But timing is also top of mind in the litigation. Kessler also told the judge that they were “prepared to stipulate we won’t close for 28 days,” but Paramount also wants what is essentially a mini trial that would ensure that there would be a ruling on the preliminary injunction before September 30. As part of its agreement with WBD, Paramount agreed to pay a $7 million per day ticking fee if the transaction does not close by then. The states oppose that scheduling plan.

California attorney general Rob Bonta and 11 other states filed suit to block the merger on Monday. They claim that the transaction is “presumptively unlawful,” likely to substantially lessen competition in the markets for wide release theatrical distribution, anticipated top grossing film releasing, and basic cable channel licensing.

The AGs claim that the merger will lead to “higher prices and degraded quality,” as a combined Paramount and Warner Bros will be able to extract a greater portion of box office revenue from exhibitors.

They also argued that the transaction was presumptively illegal by pointing to market shares. Paramount-WB represent about 27% of the box office, per the state attorneys general, and will control more than 30% of big-budget theatricals for wide release. When it comes to cable, the combined company would control more than a quarter of all basic cable channels by revenue, per the lawsuit. The transaction will not only put two legacy film studios under the same corporate owner, but Paramount will have amassed a collection of basic cable outlets, ranging from MTV and Nickelodeon to TNT and Cartoon Network.

Kessler called the state AGs’ market figures misleading. He argued that they don’t account for the impact of distributors like Amazon MGM or for unexpected successes like Obsession, “made for a million dollars that comes out of nowhere and earns over $450 million I think so far this year.”

He also pointed to F1, contending that the state AGs did not account for the “dramatic theatrical success” of that movie even though it came from Apple, not one of the five major legacy studios. But the attorney for the state AGs, James Weingarten, pointed out that F1 was distributed by Warner Bros.

Kessler accused the states of dismissing the impact of streaming, arguing that the growing market “compels the increase in production for theatrical. It compels it because it is the only way streaming can succeed.”

Paramount has said that under the merger, it will boost theatrical output to 30 films per year. Kessler said that the company is making the commitment “because it has to.”

As for cable, Kessler said that the collection of channels from the merged company would be “complementary, and there is no increase in bargaining power.”

Cable distributors take both packages of channels from Paramount and Warner Bros Discovery, and “if they’re combined, they’re going to take both packages. There’s no change in the competitive dynamic.”

Weingarten told the judge that the market definitions in the lawsuit do reflect the way that business is currently practiced, even if streaming has gained a foothold.

“It’s no good for a theater owner with 38 or 45 or a hundred theaters to say, ‘But Netflix,’ or “But Amazon.’ They can’t stop showing a blockbuster or an anticipated blockbuster and say, ‘We’re just going to put Amazon or Netflix up on the screen instead. That’s not a substitution for them.”

While there may be breakout hits, he said, there is a market for anticipated top-grossing movies. “The point is there are some movies that get the budget, the marketing, the name brand. We all know, whether we call them blockbuster, tentpole or whatever, these are the lifeblood of the industry.”

He also challenged the notion that Paramount won’t gain bargaining leverage in basic cable.

“It is intuitive and clear that if one company owns 50 of the 100 channels, they will have excessive bargaining leverage, and there will be anti-competitive effects in their negotiations with the cable companies and the satellite distributors,” he said.

A federal judge has denied a group of consumers a preliminary injunction to at least temporarily block Paramount‘s proposed merger with Warner Bros. Discovery.

The judge, Araceli Martínez-Olguín, said that she is taking Paramount’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit under advisement.

The lawsuit was filed in April, one of the early legal challenges to the merger.

This week, attorneys general from California and 11 other states filed their own antitrust lawsuit, and Martínez-Olguín will take up their motion for a temporary restraining order at hearing on Friday.

In her remarks, the judge said that the consumers had failed to meet the threshold to order an immediate halt to the $110 merger.

“A preliminary injunction is an extraordinary remedy that may only be awarded upon a clear showing the plaintiff is entitled to such relief,” the judge said at the hearing. “Here, plaintiffs fail to meet that standard. Plaintiffs have not offered any evidence and this have not made a clear showing of a likelihood of success, nor to they make a clear showing of irreparable harm.”

In April, five pay-TV and streaming services subscribers filed a lawsuit challenging the merger, claiming, among other things, that the acquisition would increase prices and diminish the diversity of viewpoints. The lawsuit also seeks the divestiture of Skydance’s acquisition of Paramount Global last year.

In its filing seeking dismissal of the case, Paramount’s legal team argued that the plaintiffs — Pamela Faust, Len Marazzo, Lisa McCarthy, Deborah Rubinsohn and Gary Talewsky — do not have standing. They also argued that they failed to state a plausible claim of competitive harm from the merger.

Joseph Alioto, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs, argued that all that they had to show was “a threat to injury.” He cited the price hike for Paramount+ subscriptions after Skydance acquired the studio last year.

He argued that with the debt load that Paramount will take on with the acquisition, “there is no way they can get that unless, among other things, they raise the price.”

Paramount’s lead attorney, Jeffrey Kessler, said that “price increase cannot be attributed to merger seeking to enjoin because that merger has not been completed yet.” He told the judge that there was “no injury identified for these plaintiffs” in the lawsuit.

The judge also rejected plaintiffs’ request for expedited discovery. Alioto said that private plaintiffs “don’t get special privileges,” or access to merger materials, unlike the state of California or other government entities.

UPDATED with CNN plans, 3:34 PM: ABC News and NBC News said Thursday afternoon that they will carry Donald Trump‘s primetime address tonight only on their respective streaming sites, ABC News Live and NBC News Now, and not their broadcast networks.

CBS News has yet to reveal its coverage plans. The address is expected to begin at 9 p.m. ET/6 p.m. PT.

Among cable networks, CNN said that it also will not carry the speech live but will run it on CNN.com and its All Access streaming platform.

NBC News said it will air a special report on the network after the speech. ABC News will monitor the speech and will break in for a special report depending on developments.

The broadcast networks do not always carry a presidential primetime speech upon White House request, as decisions were made to bypass Joe Biden and Barack Obama addresses as well.

A CNN spokesperson said that the network “will cover the president’s speech as a news event, and monitor it for news developments, providing analysis and commentary from CNN experts who cover elections, intelligence and the FBI.”

PREVIOUSLY, 10:06 AM: The broadcast networks have yet to announce whether they will preempt programming and carry President Donald Trump’s primetime address to the nation on Thursday evening, but it’s no surprise why the matter is still under discussion.

All week, there has been the expectation that Trump plans to focus on intelligence claims about the 2020 presidential election, and use it as a rationale for passage of the SAVE America Act. The topic puts the networks on the spot — devoting the primetime airwaves to potentially unsubstantiated and unfounded claims that the 2020 election was “rigged,” even though courts rejected dozens of the Trump campaign election challenges that year before the race was certified.

Trump announced his plans for the address Monday, and typically the networks would have some announcement by now.

“Without free and fair elections, you don’t have a country,” Trump told reporters earlier this week when asked to preview his address.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Thursday that the speech will be about the integrity of elections, but she did not reveal the extent to which the president would delve into elections of the past.

“It will shock you if you have an honest eye listening to the president tonight, and everything he is saying will be backed by facts and evidence that will be provided this evening,” she said. Responding to a CBS News correspondent, she said, “I hope CBS will take this speech,” underscoring the extent to which plans have not been finalized.

The broadcast networks carried Trump’s primetime address April 1 about the war in Iran, but his July 4 speech on the National Mall, billed as a rally, did not get the same treatment.

A speech about election security — with reports that Trump will cite intelligence of foreign interference — puts the onus on networks to aggressively fact check if the president returns to unfounded claims that the 2020 election was stolen. Those claims led to the January 6th attack on the Capitol, and Fox News eventually settled a lawsuit brought by voting company Dominion after its hosts and guests amplified allegations that the company was involved in rigging.

Moreover, such a speech may very well get into the politics of the midterms. Democrats see Trump’s efforts to pass the SAVE America Act as a tactic to suppress voting; the act would require documents like a birth certificate or passport in order to register to vote. There also is the fear that he’ll use the failure to pass the legislation — a scenario that seems likely — to try to sow doubt about the integrity of the midterms.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told reporters on Thursday, “Something is really wrong with this guy. I think he actually needs to be checked out. Why does he continue to focus on a conspiracy theory related to a 2020 presidential election that every rational person in the United States of America knows he lost?”

The three major cable networks — Fox News, CNN and MS NOW — also have not announced their plans, although it’s expected that they will have at least some coverage during the hour, as they will be in the midst of their typical primetime news programming.

Donald Trump lashed out at ABC and NBC, the two networks that chose not to carry his speech live on their broadcast platforms, as he delivered a 25-minute long speech full of claims that included China obtaining voter registration data and the “deep state” withholding that intelligence from him.

Without evidence, Trump claimed that ABC and NBC and others in the media “want to continue this fraud for whatever reason. They want to keep it going. They want to protect the radical left. They can’t have a great country, and that’s true. You can’t have a great country without free and fair elections. Fraud like this should mean a revocation of their licenses. They use our public multi-billion dollar in value airwaves for absolutely no money. They pay nothing. All we want is honesty in our elections and honesty in reporting.”

The networks had announced earlier in the day that they would not carry the speech, but would feature it live on their streaming channels.

CBS News did air the speech — albeit not in its entirety. But anchor Tony Dokoupil preceded the address by telling viewers, “Honestly, much of what the president has said on this topic is false.” He then explained why they were doing a special report, noting, “This speech will be made. It will be news. And it is our job to cover the news.”

Then he went to Major Garrett, who offered some context on what viewers could expect to hear. After CBS News cut away from the speech, Garrett noted that trump’s claim of non-citizens and dead people on the voter rolls was “unsubstantiated.”

Garrett said, “Tony, you have to ask yourself, what does that rhetoric about? Is that rhetoric about setting the stage for federal intervention in the midterms? I mean, we’ve had primary elections all this year. We’re going to have more in August. Those primary elections have been conducted under this system that the president said is catastrophically vulnerable. Yet he and all Republicans and Democrats have accepted the election.”

One of the most newsworthy claims — that China acquired 220 million voter records — was also addressed on the network by David Becker, of the Center for Election Innovation & Research. “It sounds bad when you hear about it, right? But the reality is, voter files in the United States are public.”

Trump’s threat of NBC and ABC is nothing new. he’s done that before. But ABC already has been ordered to put the licenses of its eight owned and operated stations up for an early renewal by the FCC and its chairman, Brendan Carr. Such a rare move opens up the stations to challenges to its licenses as the FCC determines whether they have served the “public interest.”

ABC is challenging the early license renewal, calling it an “extraordinary demonstration of power and coercion.” Carr has said that the early license renewal was tied to an investigation of the network’s diversity, equity and inclusion practices, but it was launched after Trump called on the network to fire Jimmy Kimmel.

The FCC also is investigating NBC-parent Comcast over DEI, but Carr has not said whether he would call for additional early license renewals.

Despite ABC and NBC not airing the speech, screen grabs were posted on social media showed that some Sinclair-owned stations did carry it as part of their National Desk. A spokesperson for the broadcast group did not immediately return a request for comment.

In the aftermath of the speech, networks devoted some time to fact checking, while some commentators referred to the newly released intelligence with some skepticism.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, posted on X, “It’s pretty laughable to watch Trump try and pretend accessing the voter file is the same thing as election interference. Any statewide candidate will tell you that information is publicly available to purchase — it’s not some huge breach.”

More to come.

EXCLUSIVE: A decade after Ava DuVernay‘s Oscar-nominated and Peabody Award-winning 13th debuted on Netflix, the filmmaker and the streamer are back together in the Constitutional business.

Spotlighting America’s long running and sometimes bloody battle with itself over who is a citizen and how much freedom they get, Duvernay’s documentary 14th is set to launch on Netflix later this year, I’ve learned.

“If 13th asked who gets caged, then 14th asks who gets counted,” DuVernay told Deadline of the upcoming documentary. “This is not a film about the past tense of freedom. I’m not interested in asking you to look back.”

Clearly revolving around the equal protection and citizenship-focused 14th amendment, which was ratified in 1868 in the turbulent era of Reconstruction and has been a contentious part of the American body politic ever since, the14th project from the Selma helmer has been in production discreetly for well over a year. Coming from Array Filmworks, 14th is produced by DuVernay, with longtime collaborators Spencer Averick, Tammy Garnes and Paul Garnes.

“The film asks what kind of country is being written beneath our feet now… while we’re busy believing the stories we’ve all been told,” DuVernay states, with a firm nod to the ongoing vitriolic MAGA attacks in and out of the courts on the 14th amendment’s birthright citizenship guarantee, as well as against immigrants and equity.

To that, the director/producer sits down in 14th with members of Congress present and past such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL), former GOP Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona, and California’s current senior Senator Alex Padilla. The film also features interviews with sitting Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden (who Donald Trump fired in May 2025), former President and Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund president and Director-Counsel Sherrilyn Ifill, UC Irvine School of Law Korematsu Center for Law and Equality executive director Prof. Robert Chang, activist and past Georgia gubernatorial contender Stacey Abrams. Spanning the ideological divide, DuVernay spoke with left-wing Twitch-based cultural critic Hasan Piker and conservative In Defense of Populism: Protest and American Democracy author Donald T. Critchlow too.

Along with 13th, Netflix has been the home of DuVernay’s Emmy-winning When They See Us series from 2019 about the injustices against suspects in the 1989 Central Park jogger rape case. The streamer also launched DuVernay’s 2020 Colin in Black & White limited series about NFL icon Colin Kaepernick’s formative years.

“Ava’s remarkable ability to bring history into conversation with the present made her last documentary, the seminal BAFTA-winning and Academy Award-nominated 13th, a cultural touchstone of the last quarter century,” says Adam Del Deo, Netflix’s VP of Documentary Film and Series. “With 14th, she delivers another ambitious and thought-provoking documentary with the depth, artistry, and humanity that have come to define her work. We’re proud to continue our creative partnership with Ava and bring this powerful film to audiences around the world.”

In many ways a continuum in DuVernay’s often probing career with projects like 13th and WTSU, the essence of 14th is also reminiscent of the remarks the filmmaker made in 2025 upon accepting Great Americans Medal from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. 

In front of a DC crowd, including Smithsonian chief Lonnie Bunch III and the museum’s Elizabeth MacMillan Director Anthea M. Hartig, DuVernay noted “History is not a weapon to be sheathed when inconvenient. It is not a bedtime story meant to lull us to sleep. It is a river, flowing… deep and often turbulent.”

Sounds like America.

Todd Blanche, Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer and his nominee to serve as attorney general, was grilled over his role in the Justice Department’s sign-off of Paramount‘s proposed merger with Warner Bros. Discovery.

“I was part of that decision,” Blanche told Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) at his Senate confirmation hearing on Wednesday.

In contentious questioning, Booker pressed Blanche on whether career attorneys at the DOJ’s Antitrust Division recommend closing the investigation into the merger. Paramount cleared a major hurdle in its effort to gain government approvals when the DOJ raised no objections in a statement on June 12. The Wall Street Journal reported several days later that career staffers were leaning toward a legal challenge to the transaction, but senior leadership closed the investigation before they had a chance to raise objections.

Blanche told Booker that he had “no idea” of the views of the career attorneys on closing the investigation, to which Booker asked him, “You were in charge of that department, yet you have no idea?” Blanche has been serving as acting attorney general and previously was deputy attorney general.

“I’m not sure what the view was with respect to closing it or not closing,” Blanche said.

Booker also raised ethics issues, citing a dinner that Paramount threw in April for the Trump White House and its CBS News correspondents at the Institute of Peace.

Booker noted that “on the same say that Paramount shareholders voted to approve the emerger, David Ellison, the head of the acquiring company, hsoted a dinner that you attended honoring the president of the United States. While you were at that dinner, the DOJ was still investigating a merger. Did you speak with Mr. Ellison on that evening?”

“No,” Blanche said.

“Did you discuss with anyone involved in that organization that evening the department’s ongoing investigations?”

“No,” Blanche responded.

Booker also asked him whether his attendance at the dinner created “an appearance of impropriety.”

Booker added, “I think that’s improper. That the connected and the powerful are getting a chance to rub shoulders. It would seem appropriate that you avoid those kind of appearances and dinners like that.”

Blanche said, “Every appearance or speech I give are cleared by ethics officials.”

Booker is the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary’s antitrust subcommittee. In April, Booker held a “spotlight forum” on Capitol Hill about the merger, drawing an extensive list of opponents but no Republican lawmakers.

Sen. Cory Booker questions Blanche about the merger between Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery”

Blanche: “I was part of that decision—”

Booker: “Yes, you were involved in that.”

Blanche: “You didn’t even let me answer, man. That’s incredible.” pic.twitter.com/cThSAeCvir

— CSPAN (@cspan) July 15, 2026

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