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Will PSKY be CNN’s New Owner?

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We’ve been talking with some people over the past few weeks about our nagging feeling that the new owners of Paramount, David Ellison’s Skydance Media, which is now trading under the new stock ticker PSKY, could have aspirations to do more than just “right-sizing” CBS News and Stations, which is the division of Paramount that operates the Network News division and the Owned Stations group. (That interesting divisional structure was created under the previous regime of Wendy McMahon.)

And we said, out loud, and more than once, that we could see CBS News being a potential acquirer of the now semi-struggling CNN. It makes perfect sense, really. CBS is still a major news network here in the United States, despite whatever is going on with the leadership of the newsroom. And CNN is still a major international force in news for the rest of the world. Combining the two could create a global news giant to rival the BBC in many ways.

What we didn’t think was that PSKY would make a bid to swallow the whole Warner Bros. Discovery empire. But this afternoon, the Wall Street Journal reports that this is precisely what might happen. (Hat tip to TheDesk.Net for sending us the first alert on the story.)

Though details are slim in the early story, it seems based on substantial reporting that Paramount is preparing an all-cash offer that could lead to the putting of two major movie studios (Warner Brothers and Paramount) under the same roof, along with a broad spread of television brands from CBS and CNN to MTV and Discovery. Not to mention two significant digital streamers of Paramount+ and HBO Max, along with the free streamer PlutoTV.

It is a potentially massive media deal that, if true, would require significant government approval from the Federal Trade Commission. But, curiously, there would be no obvious clearance needed from the Federal Communications Commission, because Warner Bros. Discovery has no broadcast properties and therefore no license transfers that would need to be approved by Brendan Carr and company. (Not that they might not have something to say about the deal just the same.)

So now we are thinking, is there even more on PSKY’s potential list of acquisitions?

After all, David Ellison’s father, Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle, became the richest man in the world yesterday with a worth of about $393 billion.

And we hate to use the clichéd tag here, but this is certainly a breaking story and we’ll have more for you... as it develops.

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