California Attorney General Rob Bonta has scored early wins in his fight to stop the proposed $110 billion merger between Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery, but the battle is far from settled — and it may not end the way anyone expects.
A federal judge has already put the deal on hold once, and the Writers Guild of America is pursuing a parallel lawsuit on a similar timeline. Bonta, leading a coalition of a dozen states, contends that merging two of Hollywood’s five major studios with two of its five major cable programmers would give the combined company control over roughly a third of the nation’s theatrical film and basic cable business.
That’s a case worth watching closely for Southern Californians, given how deeply the entertainment industry is woven into the region’s economy and identity. But history suggests that megadeals of this size rarely conclude with a tidy courtroom knockout. More often, they end in settlements, scaled-back court orders, or restructured proposals. Paramount has already demonstrated a willingness to accept delay after delay rather than abandon the merger outright.
That raises an important question: if some version of this deal ultimately survives, what should California require in return?
The remedies typically discussed in antitrust fights — forced divestitures, licensing restrictions, content firewalls — are the usual playbook. But they can be difficult to enforce and are often vulnerable to further litigation. One option that hasn’t received nearly enough attention is reshaping how the merged company is governed from the inside, specifically through its board of directors.
Should this case end in a settlement, a consent decree, or a court-approved version of the merger, California should push for the resulting company’s board to include labor representatives and public-interest voices with genuine voting power — not token advisory roles. That means seats for union members who write, produce and support this programming, along with representatives who can advocate for California audiences, readers and communities that lose access to independent journalism every time the media industry consolidates further.
The reasoning is straightforward. When one company dominates a market, the damage isn’t limited to higher prices. It can also mean lower wages, worse working conditions, and a narrowing of the viewpoints that reach the public, simply because there are fewer employers and outlets to turn to. These consequences don’t always show up in a standard antitrust analysis, but they are precisely the harms Bonta’s legal team has already flagged. His office’s court filings have raised concerns about newsroom cutbacks and the potential fallout for CNN and CBS News specifically.
Giving workers and the public actual voting power on the board would create an ongoing check on decisions about layoffs, programming choices and the range of stories being told — rather than a temporary condition that disappears once regulators move on to the next case.
This approach would also be less heavy-handed than the usual remedies. A full-scale divestiture can be a blunt tool that sometimes just creates smaller monopolies instead of solving the underlying problem. Embedding labor and public-interest representation directly into company governance allows for whatever legitimate business efficiencies a merger might create, while ensuring the people most vulnerable to its downsides have a lasting say in what happens next. Similar stakeholder governance models have already been used successfully by other companies both in the U.S. and internationally.
This isn’t a conventional fix for an antitrust case, but the risks posed by this merger aren’t conventional either. Combining two major news organizations with a large share of the country’s remaining scripted television market would reshape the media landscape well beyond the lifespan of any single court ruling.
Bonta has built credibility by taking this fight to court instead of settling for token concessions. Whatever comes next — a courtroom victory, a negotiated settlement, or a revised deal that lands back on his desk — he should keep governance reform on the table as a serious option.
Original source: CalMatters
