The carcass of Warner Bros. Discovery is currently twitching on the auction block, and the sharks are circling with the dead-eyed precision of algorithms that have already decided your subscription price is too low. It is a scene of grim corporate inevitability, a garage sale of American culture where the items on offer are not dusty lawnmowers but the entire back catalog of HBO, the broadcasting rights to the NBA, and the beleaguered soul of a news network that the President of the United States treats as a personal punching bag. Into this feeding frenzy steps a familiar trio of Senate Democrats, led by Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Richard Blumenthal, who have sent a pointed letter to the Justice Department. Their request is simple, reasonable, and in the current political climate, almost hilariously optimistic. They would like the antitrust division to please, for the love of god, do its actual job.
The letter, addressed to the DOJ’s antitrust chief Abigail Slater, urges a “non-biased” and aggressive review of any potential sale of the media giant. The phrasing itself is a masterful exercise in diplomatic understatement. To ask for a “non-biased” review from an administration that views the Justice Department less as a blind arbiter of law and more as a concierge service for its friends is a bold rhetorical choice. The Senators are effectively asking the fox to kindly double-check the security protocols of the henhouse before inviting his cousins over for dinner. They warn that bids by giants like Netflix, sprawling tech firms, or already swollen studio conglomerates could hand one company outsized control over the holy trinity of modern attention: streaming, sports, and news.
The stakes, as the Senators lay them out, are not abstract. We are staring down the barrel of a future where a single corporate entity decides what you watch, how much you pay for it, and which news stories get buried under an avalanche of reality dating shows. The letter invokes the specter of the “already consolidated media landscape,” a polite way of describing a hellscape where three companies own everything and the consumer’s role is to simply shut up and pay the monthly fee. Warren and her colleagues note that further consolidation will inevitably hike prices for consumers who are already canceling subscriptions to buy eggs. It will further shrink jobs in an industry that has spent the last two years treating writers and actors like redundant software updates. It will strangle creative competition until the only greenlighted projects are sequels to pre-existing intellectual property or documentaries about how great the CEO is.
But the sharpest knife in the letter is hidden in the paragraph about the President. The Senators explicitly flag the “cloud of political favoritism and corruption” surrounding the Trump administration’s dealings with CNN and Warner Bros. Discovery. This is the elephant in the boardroom. Donald Trump does not view CNN as a news outlet; he views it as a rogue province that needs to be brought to heel. The fear is not just financial monopoly, but political weaponization. If the sale of WBD is treated as a playground for the administration’s vendettas, we could see a scenario where approval is contingent on who buys the network and how nice they promise to be to the man in the Oval Office.
The Senators are asking for a “clear firewall” between antitrust enforcement and Trump’s personal grievance list. They are invoking Section 8 of the Clayton Act, a dusty but vital statute that prohibits shared board directors, trying to remind the DOJ that it is illegal for the same twelve rich people to sit on the boards of every competing company. They are framing this sale as a test of the administration’s soul. Will they treat media mergers as serious competition issues that affect the fabric of democracy? Or will they treat them as transactional opportunities to reward donors and punish critics? The question answers itself, but the Senators are insisting on asking it for the record.
Meanwhile, the investor chatter is reaching a fever pitch that makes the floor of the New York Stock Exchange look like a meditation retreat. The names being thrown around as potential suitors—Netflix, a merged Paramount-Skydance entity, perhaps a tech leviathan with spare cash like a couch cushion—turn the fate of HBO into a line item on a spreadsheet. The idea of Netflix absorbing HBO is the kind of cultural singularity that keeps antitrust lawyers awake at night. It would be the end of the streaming wars, not via a peace treaty, but via total conquest. A single platform holding the keys to the prestige drama kingdom would have zero incentive to innovate and every incentive to raise prices until the consumer screams.
The fate of Turner Sports adds another layer of chaotic complexity to the mix. Sports rights are the last tether holding the traditional cable bundle together, the one thing that forces people to keep paying Comcast. If those rights get swallowed by a tech giant or a streaming monopoly, the final nail in the coffin of linear television will be hammered home, likely by a robot. And then there is CNN. The network is a distressed asset in financial terms but a nuclear football in political terms. A sale to a friendly oligarch could turn it into state media with better graphics. A sale to a neutral party could be blocked by a DOJ acting on orders from a President who still holds a grudge about a chyron from 2016.
The letter from Warren, Sanders, and Blumenthal is a desperate attempt to inject reality into a fantasy world. They are trying to use the dry language of antitrust law to stop a looting in progress. They are pointing out that allowing one company to control the news, the games, and the stories is a recipe for a dystopian information environment. They are warning that the “cloud of favoritism” is actually a smog that chokes out competition. The Hill and Yahoo News report on this with the dutiful tone of scribes chronicling the fall of Rome, noting the warnings about price hikes and job losses as if they are theoretical risks rather than guaranteed outcomes.
The tragedy is that the “non-biased” review they are demanding is functionally impossible in a system designed to be biased. The Trump administration has made no secret of its belief that the government exists to serve the President’s interests. To expect his antitrust chief to ignore his loudly broadcast desires is to expect water to flow uphill. The Senators are doing their duty by creating a paper trail of dissent, marking the moment when they tried to stop the consolidation. But the machinery of the merger is loud, and money is the only fuel it recognizes.
The “investor chatter” ignores the human cost entirely. They talk of “synergies,” a euphemism for firing thousands of people. They talk of “efficiency,” a code word for cancelling shows you love for a tax write-off. They talk of “market share,” which really means the power to gouge you without fear of losing your business because there is nowhere else to go. The sale of Warner Bros. Discovery is not just a business transaction. It is a referendum on whether we want a culture, or just a content slurry delivered by a monopoly. The Senators are shouting “Stop!” at a runaway train, and the conductor is too busy counting the gold in the cargo car to listen.
We are witnessing the final enclosure of the American imagination. The few remaining open spaces in the media landscape are being fenced off, sold, and monetized. The “creative competition” the Senators worry about is already on life support. If Netflix or a tech giant swallows WBD, they pull the plug. The dream of the internet as a diverse marketplace of ideas dies, replaced by a digital mall owned by one landlord who sets the rent and evicts anyone who doesn’t pay up. The DOJ has the power to stop it. The Clayton Act gives them the tools. But tools are useless in the hands of a mechanic who has been paid to wreck the car.
The Binges of Wrath
The grim reality is that this letter will likely end up filed in a drawer next to the other warnings we ignored. The DOJ, under its current management, operates on a simple binary: friend or enemy. If the buyer of Warner Bros. Discovery is a friend, or willing to become one, the antitrust concerns will magically evaporate. The “cloud of favoritism” will be rebranded as a “pro-business environment.” The consolidation will be hailed as a victory for the “economy,” that magical word that means rich people getting richer. The prices will go up. The quality will go down. The news will get softer. And somewhere, in a boardroom, a group of executives will toast to the successful capture of the public consciousness, while the rest of us check our bank accounts to see if we can afford to watch the end of the world.