Donald Trump says the new owners of Paramount have promised him that they’ll give him $20 million in free ads. Is that true?
Up until now, reporters haven’t been able to directly ask the new owner of Paramount.
But when they got the chance on Thursday, at a press conference at Paramount’s Manhattan headquarters, David Ellison wouldn’t confirm or deny Trump’s assertion.
“We are not going to politicize anything today,” he said, pointing reporters to a previous non-denial of Trump’s claim that his Skydance Media had previously supplied to US lawmakers.
OK. How about this one: Brendan Carr, the Trump-appointed head of the Federal Communications Commission, says the new owners of Paramount have promised to “root out the bias that has undermined the trust in national news media.”
What are some examples of that bias at CBS, and how do the new owners intend to fix that?
David Ellison doesn’t want to talk about that, either:
“I do not want to politicize our company in any way, shape, or form,” he told me when I asked him about his company’s agreement with the FCC.
Are you getting the picture? Let me spell it out for you: Ellison, who formally took control of Paramount on Thursday, and Shari Redstone, who sold the company to Ellison, had to make all kinds of concessions to get the deal done. That includes a $16 million payment earmarked for Trump’s to-be-built presidential library.
But throughout that process, Ellison and his team declined to talk publicly about any of it. Now that the deal is done, they still don’t want to talk about it.
“We’re ready to move past the noise,” Ellison said Thursday.
That’s an understandable sentiment. But I doubt it’s going to work that way for the new owners.
There are a lot of people, including lawmakers like Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who will be scrutinizing Paramount closely for signs that the new owner is making changes designed to please the president of the United States and his allies. Wishing that those people don’t pay attention won’t make it so.
If you wanted to be fair to Ellison, you could say he’s in a no-win situation: If he confirmed Trump’s claim about a backroom payoff, he’ll create a storm with his employees and many of his viewers. If he denies it, he’s poking a bear who has a well-established track record of meddling with companies — on Thursday, for instance, Trump called for the CEO of Intel to resign.
You could also note that all kinds of corporate leaders have found themselves in similar positions right now — witness Apple CEO Tim Cook handing Trump a gold-and-glass bauble on national TV on Wednesday, while promising to invest in America, even if those promises may be a bit overstated.
A more cynical take might be that David Ellison has more reason than most corporate leaders not to upset Trump. His father, Larry Ellison, who is one of the richest men in the world and has bankrolled his son’s foray into media, does lots of business with Trump and might like to do more, including a potential deal to buy some of TikTok. That’s an expensive web of intertwined interests to disturb.
But it doesn’t matter why Ellison doesn’t want to talk about what he needed to do to get this deal done. The questions won’t go away anytime soon.
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