By FishbowlLA Staff
Two courtrooms decided a good deal of this town’s media future in the space of 24 hours. On Wednesday a federal judge signed off on the deal that lets Paramount swallow Warner Bros. Discovery. On Thursday another one threw out the lawsuit in which the owner of Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Deadline and Billboard tried to make Google pay for the traffic it stopped sending. Meanwhile two Spanish- and English-language stations booked the mayoral debate, the FCC’s long squeeze on an ABC late-night show got a celebrity character witness, and a man who spent decades filming LA from a news helicopter wrote the piece nobody at the stations wanted to write.
The merger is cleared, and the promises are now binding
U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín approved the Paramount–states consent decree on Wednesday, a week after she pointedly declined to rubber-stamp it. “The Court finds the proposed consent decree represents a reasonable factual and legal resolution of the dispute,” she wrote. She acknowledged objections from outside groups that the settlement did not go far enough, but found they gave her no legal basis to reject a negotiated agreement. Both sides had filed briefs defending the deal earlier in the week, roughly seven days after Sen. Cory Booker asked the court to run its own inquiry.
So the terms LA read twice last Friday are now enforceable for five years: theatrical release commitments, additional domestic production spending, separate carriage negotiations for Paramount and Warner basic-cable channels, financial support for workers displaced by the merger, and an independent board meant to sit between the new owner and the newsrooms at CBS and CNN. The states, led by California AG Rob Bonta, had sued in July; talks over structural remedies — actual asset sales — failed before the September 21 settlement.
Closing could land inside two weeks, which is what CEO David Ellison had said it would take after final approval. The combined company’s org chart is already moving: Paramount said Wednesday that Mattel chairman and CEO Ynon Kreiz will become co-CEO alongside Ellison, HBO’s Casey Bloys is expected to run the merged streaming operation, and Cindy Holland left her job overseeing Paramount’s direct-to-consumer business the day before that. Two of the three names at the top of the new structure did not work at Paramount a month ago. Anyone in this town who has lived through a studio consolidation knows what the next calendar quarter sounds like.
The trades lose their case against Google
On Thursday U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta dismissed the antitrust suit that Penske Media — owner of Variety, Billboard, Deadline Hollywood and The Hollywood Reporter — and the education company Chegg had brought against Google. Their argument is the one you hear in every newsroom in this city: that Google effectively required them to let their work feed AI Overviews if they wanted to stay in the index at all, then kept the readers.
Mehta did not buy it as a matter of law. “Plaintiffs have pleaded only that they have an ‘expectation’ that Google will send them search traffic if they make their content available for free,” he wrote. “But an expectation is not an agreement. It is simply how a general search engine works.” He rejected the reciprocal-dealing theory too, finding no negotiated terms or mutual commitments that amounted to a trade of content for traffic. It is not clear yet whether either company will appeal.
What makes this more than a docket item for LA is who was watching. Smaller independent outlets — including The Desk‘s own parent company, which disclosed as much in its write-up — were hoping for a precedent they could use. Instead Mehta said the court was not “unsympathetic” to publishers, journalists and educators whose work gets repurposed without payment, and then told them that antitrust law is not a substitute for legislation. Google’s answer in the meantime is a pilot that pays some publishers to license content for AI answers; The Desk reports some smaller outlets are clearing less than $1,000 a month from it. If the publications that cover this business for a living cannot win this fight in court, nobody covering Los Angeles on a shoestring is going to.
KNBC and KVEA get the Bass–Raman debate
Comcast’s two LA stations will produce a one-hour debate between Mayor Karen Bass and City Councilmember Nithya Raman on Tuesday, October 13 at 7 p.m. — KNBC in English, KVEA carrying a Spanish-language translation, both of them free over the air and on streaming. Raman finished second to Bass in the June primary and the general is November 3. The announced subjects are public safety, homelessness, housing and economic development.
The moderator lineup is the detail worth noting: KNBC anchor Colleen Williams and chief political reporter Conan Nolan alongside KVEA anchor Alejandra Ortiz, in partnership with Loyola Marymount University. “Local journalism plays a critical role during election cycles,” said Todd Mokhtari, president and general manager of both stations. The simulcast also runs on NBC Los Angeles News and Noticias Telemundo California, which land on Xumo Play, Pluto TV, Amazon Fire TV Channels, The Roku Channel and Samsung TV Plus. That distribution list is its own comment on 2026: five streaming platforms named before anybody mentions an antenna. Channel 4 and Channel 52 are also the newsrooms that lost colleagues in the helicopter crash last month. They are back doing the civic work.
Howard Stern as a character witness in the FCC’s Kimmel file
Stern turned up on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” on Wednesday — the show is doing a run of episodes from Brooklyn this week — and used the chair to push back on reports that ABC might not renew his friend’s contract. “There is no man more loyal to this company than this guy,” Stern said. “He has done everything for the company. And I hope that they keep that in mind.” ABC has called the renewal speculation premature.
The reason a late-night contract rumor is a Los Angeles media story rather than a gossip item: the show is filmed at the El Capitan in Hollywood, and the pressure on it is regulatory. ABC is still fighting the FCC over whether interviews with a Texas Senate candidate aired earlier this year fall inside the news exemption to the political equal-time rule — the exemption that has covered network talk shows since one was granted to an NBC late-night program in the mid-1990s, and that FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has considered narrowing. Carr has gone after Kimmel repeatedly, most consequentially over the monologue that followed Charlie Kirk’s killing, after which Nexstar and Sinclair pulled the show off their ABC affiliates for more than a week while both companies had deals sitting at the FCC awaiting approval. An LA production staff’s job security now turns partly on how one commissioner reads a thirty-year-old exemption.
“I was the cameraman who shot it”
The best-written LA media piece of the week ran in L.A. TACO on Monday, and it is an argument no station is going to make about itself. Scott Shulman spent decades as an airborne news cameraman here. Mourning the three people lost in the NBC4 and Telemundo 52 helicopter crash, he asks whether the benefit of in-air reporting is worth the risk at all — and makes the case for retiring the news chopper.
He starts where the whole genre starts: January 3, 1992, when Darren Michael Stroh carjacked two vehicles in Central California, killed a motorist with a shotgun and led the CHP 300 miles down Interstate 5 through five counties, firing at officers out the back window, until he ran out of gas on a Westminster offramp and raised the shotgun at the officers approaching him. LA news helicopters picked up the pursuit at the county line and carried it live. “I remember it as though it was yesterday, because I was the cameraman who shot it from the KABC helicopter,” Shulman writes. “What I saw through my viewfinder was witnessed by tens of thousands of viewers, a violent death broadcast in real time.” Thirty-four years of LA local-news grammar — the chase, the aerial, the live wide shot — traces back through that viewfinder. The man who built it is suggesting it be put down.
That’s the week
Elsewhere, the usual silences. We swept the radio dial again and came up with nothing for this market — no format flips, no air-staff moves, no LA ratings items — which makes three consecutive quiet weeks on a beat that used to fill this column by itself. Nothing new from the Los Angeles Times or its owner for the ninth straight issue. No new filings we could pin to the window on the LAPD press-freedom docket, and no station people-moves in LA that survived a date check. Know something we don’t? Tips are always welcome — the best items in this column start as somebody’s forwarded email.