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Attorney General William Tong spent Monday looking like a man who just watched his favorite cable sports package get canceled right before the championship game.
After a coalition of 12 Democrat attorneys general settled their antitrust lawsuit and cleared Paramount-Skydance’s roughly $110 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, Tong put out a statement dripping with grievance.
Connecticut, he said, “led the fight to the bitter end” to protect the “editorial independence” of CNN and CBS News. The state “wanted and demanded full divestiture.” They “fought aggressively.” He is “deeply disappointed that we could not do more.”
Translation: the merger is going through, CNN and CBS News stay under the same roof, and Tong did not get the prize he actually wanted—ripping the newsrooms out of the deal.
What the coalition got instead is an “Editorial Independence Board.” Five “established” journalists, appointed by the combined company’s board within 180 days, will write principles, referee disputes about “reporting bias,” and monitor “ethical journalism.” No more than two members may share a political party. The board reports through a compliance officer. Five states will help police the consent decree.
Tong calls that structure “enforceable” and says it will “meaningfully help.”
It still sounds like he lost.
On Facebook, Tong laid it on thick, and warned that “all of us” still need “what our democracy needs so much"—“fair, objective fact and science based independent ethical reporting and news.”
Yes, Tong wants you to think that CNN and CBS, as currently staffed and programmed, are the last firewall standing between the public and unapproved information.
Connecticut residents might be wondering why Tong was trying to force a media conglomerate to sell two national news brands in the first place. The lawsuit was originally sold as an antitrust issue: movies, cable carriage, market power, consumer prices. However, Tong’s statement and video make the actual priority obvious—the lawsuit was really about who gets to define “fact,” “science,” and “ethics” on television.
Tong blamed Washington for the loss: “The complete abdication of the federal government’s enforcement role in this fight left states with one arm tied behind our backs.”
In other words, the Trump administration declined to use federal antitrust power the way Tong wanted it used, so a blue-state AG lawfare coalition tried to do it on their own.
The pressure campaign around this merger has been a group project. Norm Eisen and the #BlockTheMerger folks spent months treating David Ellison’s deal as a democracy emergency. Mark Ruffalo was still telling Rob Bonta not to “cave” days before the settlement. New York AG Letitia James and California AG Rob Bonta were in the same coalition. The public pitch was jobs, theaters, and competition. The private panic was much simpler: if Paramount closes the deal, CNN may stop functioning as a reliable delivery system for Democrat talking points.
That is the constructed reality Tong is trying to freeze into place. Democrats built a closed loop — activist lawyers, blue-state AGs, Hollywood signatories, and friendly newsrooms — then called the product “independent journalism.” They call dissent “threats to democracy” and a change of ownership “unchecked market power.”
If Tong's concern was really about market concentration, his statement would have led with film quotas, studio lots, and cable negotiations — the parts of the consent decree that actually sound like they could be antitrust related.
Instead his statement led with CNN, CBS, the White House press pool, and lamenting that the networks were not carved out and handed to an owner more likely to blindly push Democrat propaganda.
The merger is expected to close by early October.
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