On MS NOW's On the Line with Alicia Menendez, Angelo Carusone notes how CBS is a warning for what could happen with the Paramount takeover of Warner Bros and CNN
Carusone: “They push out prominent critics. ... They kill stories that they don't like. ... And then they put in place propagandists.”
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From the July 13, 2026, edition of MS NOW's On the Line with Alicia Menendez
ALICIA MENENDEZ (HOST): Here to discuss, Media Matters President Angelo Carusone. I mean, the fact that he is just saying the quiet part out loud is really the tell there.
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS PRESIDENT): Yeah. I mean, he's totally announcing it. And I think there's two things of note in his comment. One is the we. And the second is what he means by normal path, because the we here seems to be not just him, but the Ellisons, the people that are about to take over Warner Brothers. And that's a bit of a reveal. And as you noted, the second part is the normal path comment. And we already, we have a sense of what that looks like because they've already taken over CBS News, and Trump's already talked about the media. Normal path has a body count of journalists behind it. People that get fired, pushed out stories, that get killed. I think Hegseth sums it up once when he from the podium, when he said the sooner the Ellisons take over CNN, the better. This was when he was critical of some of their coverage about Iran. So we know what their, what the plan is here. They're not trying to hide it.
MENENDEZ: The story. It's it's not just your average acquisition. I think it's really easy for people to sort of interpret this as a as a business story. It's about who holds power over our news, who holds power over our entertainment, and then what that power and the use of that power means for our democracy. We've already seen that. Ellison's handiwork at CBS News, they placed Bari Weiss at the helm. What could our media landscape look like if this merger is, in fact, successful?
CARUSONE: I mean, we've already seen small pieces of this. They push out prominent critics, right? They kill stories that are that they don't like, which is they start to narrow what's available. And then they put in place propagandists or stories that align, that reinforce the narrative that the administration is telling. We're not connecting the harms of the realities to, to what policies are to individual's lives. So that's the first part. The second part, and this is the part that gets scary, it's not just to look backwards. I know we're talking about TV and broadcast here. We're not even getting into any of the entertainment stuff, which is really the, the big, the big get here that they're going to have. But it's that they also just took over TikTok. And we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that this deal, okay, is not just going to be run by the president's friends. It was financed by Gulf monarchs, and it's leveraged to the to the gills at $80 billion of debt. What do you think is going to get cut first when they have to start turning a profit or improving their books? They're going to gut out the news operation. So not just manipulate it for political purposes, but gut it and hollow it out to the point that it's just nothing more than a shell. So that's what's at stake, not just journalism and legacy journalism, but the distribution mechanisms that they already control. They're going to have an even more expansive footprint there.
MENENDEZ: I think about the fact, Angelo, that you started your career in part by holding media figures to account and getting folks who ran newsrooms and big organizations to listen to consumers. We're so far past that point. I wonder where you think a lawsuit factors into actual accountability?
CARUSONE: So I think that this, you know, I'm usually a naysayer or at least a realist. And this is we're in a tough, we're in a slog here. It's an uphill climb, but there's a provision in the deal in the Paramount deal that says that they have to pay the Warner Brothers shareholders $650 million, about $7 million every day after October if the deal is not completed for any reason whatsoever. And one thing we already know from these deals is that the same group of states, or a similar group of states already won an injunction slowing down Nexstar's takeover of local news. And in Bonta's announcement, he made a reference to this sort of TRO, this restraining order. If this thing doesn't close by October, Paramount is going to be on the hook for $650 million every quarter. That's real teeth. So in this one narrow sense, the states, which by the way, used to, they enforce antitrust activities well before the federal government did well before the Sherman Act Law was -- Antitrust Act was passed. So this is it, nd I think to me, the wrap up is not just in this one moment. It's how we I have to think more broadly, the old ways that we built and organized power and leveraged power are gone. And what this moment requires is not just durability, but the ability to look ahead and think about new ways to build and organize power. That's the moment we're in.