By FishbowlLA Staff
The biggest LA media story of the week wasn’t about a newsroom. It was about a zip code. Paramount’s owner let it be known he is prepared to move the company out of California, the state’s attorney general answered with a word you don’t usually see in a press statement, and while that played out downtown, the July ratings book handed a Pasadena public radio station the best number in its history. Here’s the week.
Ellison floats moving Paramount out of California. Bonta calls it blackmail.
David Ellison raised the possibility of moving Paramount’s operations out of California during a meeting with the company’s leadership team, according to a source familiar with his thinking who confirmed the plan to Axios on Tuesday, August 11. The threat was first reported by Semafor and then Puck. The terms, as reported: if California Attorney General Rob Bonta will not come to the table on the 12-state antitrust suit blocking the Warner Bros. Discovery takeover by September 30, Paramount begins planning its exit on October 1. Tennessee, Texas and Georgia have all been discussed as destinations.
October 1 is not an arbitrary date. That is when a $7-million-a-day ticking fee starts accruing to WBD shareholders for every day the deal stays unclosed — a meter that turns a legal delay into a nine-figure problem by Thanksgiving. Bonta did not blink. “In a span of weeks, Paramount agreed to halt the merger until a court decision or until June 2027, asked for a November trial, and is now back with another attempt to blackmail the state into letting an illegal deal through,” he said Tuesday, adding that Paramount “has lost the plot as it continues to lose in court.”
The local irony is thick enough to slice. The same week Ellison’s exit planning surfaced, California’s film commission announced it had awarded Paramount and CBS more than $37 million in tax credits to shoot two television series in the state. Sacramento is writing checks to keep production in Los Angeles while the man who owns the studio shops for a new headquarters. And for the crews, the assistants and the below-the-line workers who have spent eighteen months being told to wait for clarity, “we may not be here at all” is a new and worse kind of uncertainty. The op-ed war is escalating too: Ellison argued in the New York Times on August 4 that the state’s case is political; Bonta answered in Deadline on Monday that it is a straightforward antitrust matter.
The July book: LAist 89.3 posts the biggest share in station history
Nielsen released the July PPM ratings on Monday, August 10, covering the June 25 to July 22 survey. The headline out of Los Angeles: public news/talk “LAist” 89.3 KPCC climbed from a 3.3 to a 3.7 — what ratings analyst Chris Huff called the largest share the station has ever posted. Audacy’s alternative 106.7 KROQ rose 3.0 to 3.4, while iHeart’s Alt 98.7 KYSR held flat at 3.1.
The other line in that book is the one they’re reading closely at Audacy. News 1070 KNX has now gone 3.5, 3.2, 3.0 across three consecutive months, and the sports format spun off onto the FM signal in May — 97.1 The Fan — is still sitting at a 0.2. Split a heritage all-news franchise across two dials and the theory is that both halves grow; three books in, the AM side is shrinking and the FM side hasn’t shown up. Meanwhile the noncommercial station down the road in Pasadena, whose parent was floating buyout packages not that long ago, is out-sharing the commercial news operation outright. That is not a rounding error. That is a shift in who Angelenos turn on when something is happening.
Two LA signals are about to change hands as Salem heads private
Salem Media Group reported second-quarter results on Wednesday, and the numbers describe a company being tidied up for a sale. Net revenue fell 15.2% to $45.9 million from $54.2 million a year ago. The net loss narrowed to $3.4 million, or 11 cents a share, from $17.6 million, or 55 cents — but most of that improvement is a smaller non-cash impairment charge, $4.8 million this quarter against $25.2 million in the same quarter of 2025. Operating expenses came down to $40.2 million from $51.2 million.
The more consequential line is the timing. Salem’s board and shareholders have already approved the sale of the company to WaterStone, a Christian nonprofit foundation, at $1 a share, with regulatory approval the last real condition. The company still expects that deal to close this month, which would make these Q2 results one of the last earnings reports Salem ever files publicly. In Los Angeles that transaction covers 99.5 FM KKLA and 870 AM KRLA, “The Answer” — two long-running signals in the Christian teaching and conservative talk lanes that would pass from a public company answerable to shareholders to a foundation answerable to a mission. Whether that changes what goes out over the transmitter is the open question, and nobody at Salem or WaterStone has said.
That’s the week
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