By FishbowlLA Staff
A one-week window after last Friday’s fortnight catch-up, and the two biggest media stories in the country both ran straight through courtrooms and boardrooms with L.A. addresses. A federal judge in Oakland slammed the brakes on the Paramount–Warner megadeal even as Brussels waved it through; Disney handed out pink slips for the third time this year; and the local TV crowd gets its own trophy night at the Skirball on Saturday. Here’s the week.
The Paramount–Warner deal gets cleared in Brussels and frozen in Oakland — in the same 48 hours
We told you two weeks ago that the writers’ guild and a dozen state attorneys general had dragged the $111 billion Paramount Skydance–Warner Bros. Discovery merger into a Northern California courtroom. This week that fight got real. On Monday, July 20, U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín — sitting in Oakland — granted the temporary restraining order sought by California AG Rob Bonta and the 12-state coalition, freezing the deal in place. The 14-day order can stretch to 28, and she set the preliminary-injunction hearing for August 3. Translation: the largest merger in Hollywood history cannot close for at least two weeks, and possibly a good deal longer.
The whiplash came 48 hours later. On Wednesday, July 22, the European Commission approved the same transaction, extracting one concession — Paramount agreeing to wind down its United International Pictures distribution joint venture in Europe within 13 months of closing. So within a single week the deal collected its most important international green light and its most serious domestic roadblock. For the thousands of Burbank and Century City staffers whose jobs ride on the outcome, the message is the usual one: hurry up and wait, now with a firm date on the calendar.
Disney runs it back: a third round of 2026 layoffs hits Nat Geo, Pixar and ABC News
If it feels like Disney has been trimming all year, that’s because it has. On Tuesday, July 22, the company launched its third round of layoffs of 2026, cutting several hundred jobs across its television, sports and film businesses under the “One Disney” restructuring that CEO Josh D’Amaro has been steering since spring. The heaviest blows landed at National Geographic, where the largest single share of roughly 100 eliminated Disney Entertainment Television positions came down, and at Pixar, which shed about 150 jobs up at its Emeryville studio.
The cuts reached the news side, too: around a dozen positions at ABC News, plus reductions at ESPN tied to the network’s absorption of NFL Network. It follows a January marketing consolidation and an April round of roughly 1,000 — three bites at the same apple in seven months. For a company that anchors so much of the regional media economy, from Burbank soundstages to the Glendale creative campuses, each “streamlining” memo lands a little heavier on the local job market.
Local TV’s big night: the L.A. Area Emmys hit the Skirball on Saturday
While the trades chase mergers, the people who actually cover this city get their own trophy night. The 78th Los Angeles Area Emmy Awards — the Television Academy’s salute to locally produced programming — take over the Skirball Cultural Center this Saturday, July 25. PBS SoCal paces the field with a record 29 nominations, followed by KABC/ABC7 with 21, Univision’s KMEX with 20, Telemundo’s KVEA with 18, KNBC/NBC4 with 15 and Spectrum News 1 with 10.
There’s a somber undertow to this year’s ballot. Because the eligibility window covered all of 2025, the live and breaking-news categories are dominated by coverage of the January firestorms that tore through Altadena and the Palisades — the kind of round-the-clock local reporting that doesn’t win national headlines but keeps neighborhoods informed when the sky turns orange. It’s a useful reminder, amid all the merger math, of what the L.A. newsrooms still standing actually do.
That’s the week
Merger lawyers on one coast, antitrust regulators on another, and a room full of local-news lifers at the Skirball to close it out. Hear something we should chase — a newsroom move, a format flip, a hire, a quiet exit? Drop us a tip; FishbowlLA is always listening.