By FishbowlLA Staff
A week with David Ellison’s fingerprints all over it. The new Paramount Skydance regime spent the first days of June detonating “60 Minutes” on one coast and filing for permission to swallow Warner Bros. Discovery on another — two stories, one owner, and a whole lot of Angelenos wondering who they’ll be working for by fall. Amid all that, the L.A. Times found a quieter way to make news: it pressed play on a new podcast.
CBS fires Scott Pelley as the Bari Weiss “60 Minutes” hits the fan
The slow-motion takeover of CBS News under editor-in-chief Bari Weiss snapped into open warfare this week. At a Monday staff meeting introducing new executive producer Nick Bilton — a technology writer with no newsmagazine pedigree — veteran correspondent Scott Pelley reportedly accused Weiss of “murdering” the broadcast. By Tuesday he was gone, with Bilton’s termination letter citing “remarkable incivility and contempt.” Pelley joins a purge that has already claimed correspondents Cecilia Vega and Sharyn Alfonsi and 30-year producer Tanya Simon.
None of this is technically an L.A. story — the bloodletting is happening at the CBS Broadcast Center in New York. But the hand on the knife is local. CBS News belongs to Ellison’s Paramount Skydance, the Santa Monica-adjacent colossus that has been reshaping every property it touches since the merger closed last summer. What happens to a legacy newsroom when its new owner prizes ideological “balance” over institutional memory is precisely the question Hollywood’s own surviving newsrooms are watching, because they may be next in line.
Paramount Skydance files in Brussels to take over Warner Bros. Discovery
The same week it was losing anchors, Paramount Skydance was busy trying to get bigger. On June 2 the company formally asked the European Commission to clear its roughly $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, setting up a July 7 deadline for Brussels to approve the deal, demand divestitures, or open a full investigation. Regulators are also expected to scrutinize the financing under the EU’s Foreign Subsidies Regulation, given the Gulf sovereign-wealth money backing Ellison’s bid.
For Los Angeles this is the story under all the other stories. Combine Paramount and Warner Bros. and you fuse two of the largest studio employers in the region — two lots, two film libraries, two sets of below-the-line crews who already weathered a brutal production slump. Antitrust lawyers will argue about market share in Brussels; the people on the Burbank and Melrose lots will be doing math about whose job is redundant.
Read more at Media Play News →
The L.A. Times turns up the volume with “The De Los Podcast”
A rare bit of expansion in a contracting business: on June 3 the Los Angeles Times launched “The De Los Podcast,” extending its three-year-old De Los vertical for Latino culture into weekly audio. Made with the studio Sonoro and hosted by De Los editors Fidel Martínez and Suzy Exposito, the show opened with “In the Heights” breakout Leslie Grace and has Cypress Hill’s Sen Dog and Empress Of in the queue.
It’s a small launch, but a telling one. While the trades chronicle one media empire’s demolition work, the Times is quietly betting that the future of a 144-year-old newspaper runs partly through earbuds — and that the fastest-growing slice of its audience would rather hear Latinidad discussed than read a section about it. In a week this grim, a paper adding a show instead of cutting one counts as good news.
Read more at Podcast News Daily →
That’s the week
Two of these stories share an owner; the third is the antidote. Hear about an LA media move, a newsroom shake-up, or a hire we should be watching? Send tips to FishbowlLA — we read everything, and we keep our sources close.