Many people have weighed in on Paramount’s agreement to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery — media analysts, power brokers, political commentators, competitors and, of course, lawyers. For a transaction of this size, that is expected and appropriate. The one person you haven’t heard from is me.
There is a reason for that. I believe that anyone who oversees a news organization — I am chief executive of Paramount, which owns CBS — shouldn’t put a finger on the scale, especially on matters involving his own company. So, when California’s attorney general, 11 other state attorneys general and, a day later, the Writers Guild of America sued to stop the deal, I stayed quiet. I quickly learned such restraint has costs. While I was silent, others were happy to write my story for me. No more.
The states claim this deal will give one company too much influence over theatrical releases and cable operators, while the W.G.A. argues that our combined market power will hurt writers. Both suits imagine a Hollywood that no longer exists — an industry ruled by a handful of legacy studios.
Add up every hour Americans spend watching television, and a combined Paramount-Warner would account for less than 20 percent of all watch time — competing every day against Netflix, Amazon, Apple, which are all companies whose resources dwarf ours. Include YouTube’s user-generated content in that math and our share would drop to around 13 percent. A combined company would account for just 18 percent of the domestic box office over the past 12 months and only 22 percent on average over the past two years. Those are not the numbers of a company that can dictate what audiences watch or what writers get paid.
I believe this fight is not really about market share. If it were, it wouldn’t have been reviewed or approved by regulators reflecting 65 countries, including the United States, the European Union and China. I believe a plainer worry sits beneath the briefs and the news releases: the news. The issue is whether I can be trusted as a steward of Warner’s CNN. There has been speculation about my politics, my loyalties, my intentions.
Unfortunately, I can’t give anyone a view into my heart and mind, but I can share this: I have regularly voted for candidates of both parties; I hold some views that would be called conservative and others that would be called liberal, just like most Americans; and when it comes to our news operations, I do not aspire to lead these companies to bend their newsrooms to my views. I believe that news should be based on facts and truth.
Great news organizations like CNN and CBS News are here to tell it straight down the middle. That requires newsrooms that reflect the whole world, not one side of it. And it requires independence. Our journalists will continue to answer to the facts and to all the people they serve — not to any party or cause. These were founding principles for both CNN and CBS News, for legends like Ted Turner and Edward R. Murrow, and it is exactly that kind of independence that has always fueled the greatness of “60 Minutes.”
There is much ground to recover. By Gallup’s latest measure, just 28 percent of Americans trust the news — the lowest ever recorded. The temptation is to say the problem lies elsewhere. Our obligation is to look inward and say: We can do better. We are in a moment when Americans trust few institutions, but journalists haven’t always helped their case by refusing to engage with critiques.
Trust can’t be argued back, but it can be earned back — story by story, day by day. In an age when so much of what fills our screens is machine-generated or engineered to enrage, journalism from real reporters matters more than ever. That is the work I intend to pay for, patiently, for a long time.
Which brings me to what we aim to build. The Paramount-Warner deal began with the movies. I have loved film since I was old enough to sit still for one, and scenes from the movies have shaped who I am: a boy riding a bicycle silhouetted against the full moon, twin suns setting over the desert, jets dogfighting off the California coast. Behind each of those moments stands real money, real risk and hundreds of brilliant artists who tell stories and who count on movies to keep them employed.
That machinery is in trouble. Hollywood is losing ground to technology platforms whose algorithms reward the loudest voices. The work is leaving, especially from California — where I grew up and where I’m raising my family — draining the deepest pool of creative talent ever assembled.
I understand that promises from an executive in the middle of a merger invite skepticism. So judge us by the year we just had.
Since I took over Paramount, we have nearly doubled our theatrical slate from eight films last year to 15 and greenlit 40 new or returning series for Paramount+, our streaming service. You can expect 90 series from our television studios in 2026. We raised our content investment by $1.5 billion. We did that before the deal was signed and any lawsuit was filed, because making more is the whole point of the company we are building.
The commitments we have made for the proposed Paramount-Warner extend that trajectory: 30 theatrical films a year; 170 television series annually, for our own platforms and for our competitors’; more than $30 billion in annual content investment. I have learned better than to promise hits. In my own career, “G.I. Joe: Retaliation” met financial expectations, “Top Gun: Maverick” exceeded them and “Terminator: Dark Fate” fell short. I am proud of all these films, but nobody can dictate what audiences will love. What I can promise is the work, and more of it.
A deal this size is lived out in public, and I have felt every bit of that. I don’t ask to be taken at my word; the commitments are in writing, and the work will be on screens where anyone can judge it.
Hollywood’s story can have a happy ending only when we connect with our audience. It’s the audience — the American people — who have the final say in whether a movie succeeds or fails, whether a news organization thrives or withers and therefore whether our industry succeeds or fails. I want to build a company with the strength and resources to deliver for those audiences who turn to us, for the storytellers who rely on us and for the country that dreamed this all up.
David Ellison is the chief executive of Paramount Skydance.
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