Employees of Paramount Global have been through the wringer over the last year and a half. And the uncertainty hanging over their heads is far from over.
After M&A talks with Skydance Media that started in late 2023 whipped back and forth, the parties in July 2024 announced they had reached a deal to merge. Then Paramount endured another year of waiting before the FCC finally cleared the deal on Thursday. It was, to say the least, a politically fraught process. Critics accused the media conglomerate of having “bribed” President Trump with a $16 million payment to settle what experts deemed a meritless lawsuit targeting “60 Minutes.” CBS’s cancellation of “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” announced a week before the FCC OK’d the Skydance transaction, appeared to many to be another concession to Trump (who said “I absolutely love that Colbert got fired,” prompting an f-bomb riposte from the late-night host); CBS has maintained it was “purely a financial decision.”
To meet the FCC’s approval, Skydance said it would ensure diversity, equity and inclusion programs are dead at Paramount and that DEI would not return to the newly merged company. Furthermore, it agreed to install an ombudsman at CBS to vet and act on “bias” complaints in its news and entertainment programming — a pledge that Anna Gomez, the FCC’s single Democrat commissioner, said represented the Trump administration “imposing never-before-seen controls over newsroom decisions and editorial judgment, in direct violation of the First Amendment and the law.
Through all of this, Paramount, parent of CBS, Paramount Pictures, Paramount+ and Pluto TV, MTV, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon and BET, has undertaken several rounds of layoffs — and there are certain to be more job cuts coming when Skydance officially takes control of the company, expected within the next few weeks.
As of Friday morning, neither Paramount nor Skydance had publicly commented on next steps in their merger, including when it’s expected to close or details about restructuring. [UPDATE: The companies said later Friday that the deal will close Aug. 7, with Paramount Skydance Corp. trading under the symbol “PSKY.”]
In a July 2024 presentation to investors after the Skydance deal with Paramount and Shari Redstone’s National Amusements Inc. was announced, Jeff Shell (the former NBCU CEO who is set to become president of “Paramount Skydance Corp.”) said the Skydance team working with consulting firm Bain & Co. had identified at least $2 billion in potential annualized cost savings at the combined company.
Shell indicated much of those cost cuts will come from its linear TV business: “We know that linear is challenged and declining. We like these businesses, particularly CBS. We think it is a very, very, very strong business with more reach than any other business… However, I think a lot of us in the business know, we got to run these businesses in a different way as they decline.”
(Excerpt) Read more in: Variety