politic

Paramount Chairman David Ellison believes the tug-of-war over his proposed $111-billion purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery comes down to a single question: whether he can be trusted to control CNN.

“I believe this fight is not really about market share,” Ellison wrote in a Tuesday op-ed in the New York Times, noting that regulators around the world, including the U.S. Justice Department, have approved the deal that has been temporarily blocked by an antitrust lawsuit brought by California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta and his coalition of Democrat state attorneys general.

“I believe a plainer worry sits beneath the briefs and the news releases … The issue is whether I can be trusted as a steward of Warner’s CNN,” Ellison wrote.

The rare opinion piece serves as Ellison’s acknowledgment that his family’s close association with President Trump has sullied his standing in Hollywood and beyond.

Shakeups at CBS News, which is part of Paramount, the departure of CBS late night host Stephen Colbert, and a visible presidential lobbying effort — including hosting a dinner for Trump in Washington in late April and attending Trump’s birthday extravaganza in June with UFC fights on the White House lawn — have come with a cost.

More than 5,000 entertainment industry workers, including such high-profile stars as Jane Fonda, Ben Stiller, Bryan Cranston and Mark Ruffalo, signed an open letter early this year, calling on Bonta to try to block the merger.

Bonta and the other state attorneys general sued, saying the merger of two of the major film studios would give Paramount-Warner Bros. more than 25% of the wide-release theatrical film market. Their lawsuit also alleged the combined company would own too many cable TV channels — more than 50, including CNN, TBS, HGTV and Comedy Central.

Many in Hollywood fear that the consolidation of two historic studios will bring thousands of layoffs and contribute to a bleaker employment picture. Ellison’s Skydance Media’s takeover of Paramount a year ago resulted in the loss of 2,000 jobs.

Some have opposed the Warner Bros. deal, saying one family shouldn’t be allowed to control two significant news operations: CBS News and CNN, which is owned by Warner Bros. Discovery.

“There has been speculation about my politics, my loyalties, my intentions,” Ellison wrote.

“Unfortunately, I can’t give anyone a view into my heart and mind, but I can share this: I have regularly voted for candidates of both parties; I hold some views that would be called conservative and others that would be called liberal, just like most Americans,” Ellison said. “And when it comes to our news operations, I do not aspire to lead these companies to bend their newsrooms to my views. I believe that news should be based on facts and truth.”

“Great news organizations like CNN and CBS News are here to tell it straight down the middle,” he said. “That requires newsrooms that reflect the whole world, not one side of it. And it requires independence. Our journalists will continue to answer to the facts and to all the people they serve — not to any party or cause.”

“These were founding principles for both CNN and CBS News, for legends like Ted Turner and Edward R. Murrow, and it is exactly that kind of independence that has always fueled the greatness of “60 Minutes,” Ellison wrote.

Fired “60 Minutes” correspondents, including Cecilia Vega, have complained that since Bari Weiss became editor-in-chief of CBS News last fall, journalists have been asked to tilt the presentation of controversial news events, including protests to Immigration and Customs Enforcement actions earlier this year in Minnesota, which led to the deaths of two Americans.

Paramount has pushed back saying the plaintiff states have defined markets that fail to factor in the rise of technology companies, including Netflix, Google’s YouTube and Amazon Studios, which also attract significant swaths of viewership.

The Writers Guild of America has separately sued to block the merger, saying the deal would lead to less opportunities and lower pay for writers struggling to stay in the industry.

U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín, who is overseeing the high-profile case, issued a temporary restraining order to block the merger from finalizing while the two sides hash out the evidence. Late last month, Paramount agreed to delay the merger until after a trial — or until June 1, whichever date comes first.

In court documents filed Friday, Bonta and his coalition of 11 other Democratic attorneys general proposed having a two- to three-week trial in April to weigh the evidence.

Ellison’s Paramount pushed back, saying the media company would like to start the courtroom action on Nov. 4.

Now the judge must schedule the court date.

“The states claim this deal will give one company too much influence over theatrical releases and cable operators, while the W.G.A. argues that our combined market power will hurt writers,” Ellison said in the opinion piece. “Both suits imagine a Hollywood that no longer exists — an industry ruled by a handful of legacy studios.”

On election night, Santa Ana City Council member Jessie Lopez found herself in third place, far behind fellow Democratic council colleague David Penaloza and Republican business owner Mayra Ruiz in the race to represent Orange County’s 68th Assembly District.

Tearful supporters at a California Working Families Party shindig at the Mission Control bar and arcade in downtown Santa Ana hugged Lopez, gifted her flowers and wished her well.

If the 37-year-old was sad, she didn’t show it. Lopez had seen this game play out before.

In 2023, the councilmember decisively beat back a recall attempt funded by Santa Ana’s police union and apartment owners who didn’t like her unabashedly progressive views in a city where centrist Democrats have dominated politics for decades and lefty ones were long ostracized.

I wrote a column shortly after, heralding Lopez’s overwhelming victory as a new era for Latino politics in Orange County, where Latinos make up a third of the population but still wield little power.

Lopez spent the next three years along with her fellow progressive Santa Ana council members shoring up the city’s rent control policies and its immigrant defense fund. Nevertheless, few gave Lopez a chance in her assembly race.

Penaloza — who declined to vote when the council deadlocked on whether to cancel Lopez’s recall election — had the backing of the Orange County and California Democratic Party establishment, from current 68th District Assemblymember Avelino Valencia (who’s running to represent the 34th Senate District) to Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas to Katie Porter, a former Orange County congresswoman who ran unsuccessfully for governor this year.

Penaloza’s campaign mailers and video ads were so ubiquitous these past few weeks that they filled up my mailbox and interrupted my binging of Hulu’s “Vanderpump Villa.”

So did anti-Lopez mailers and commercials, funded by nearly $2.7 million in independent expenditures. Yet Lopez once again beat back her well-funded opposition.

As of Wednesday evening, the latest Orange County Registrar of Voters election results had her in second place — less than 1,000 votes away from Penaloza.

“Voters proved that while money can influence politics, it can’t buy community support,” Lopez said this week as she unsuccessfully tried to enjoy tacos and guacamole at Lola Gaspar in downtown Santa Ana, where well-wishers kept calling her or congratulating the candidate in person. “This race is about the future of California — whether we answer to corporations and insiders or to the hard-working people we’re elected to serve.”

With Orange County Supervisor Vicente Sarmiento easily winning reelection and Unite Here Local 11 co-president Ada Briceño currently coming up short in her bid to represent the 67th Assembly District, which includes parts of Los Angeles County, Lopez may be the sole O.C. Latino progressive running in November for a seat beyond the local level.

Expect Lopez versus Penaloza to become a referendum on whether the leftward trend of Latino voters in Orange County continues — or whether its center holds.

“I’ve chosen my side,” Lopez told me. “I’m proud to stand with working people.”

Then she excused herself — someone else wanted to say what’s up.

After a decade of Trumpism, it should come as no surprise that President Trump’s ethos (presenting scandal as strength, outrage as authenticity and public disgrace as evidence you’re a “fighter”) has trickled down into congressional campaigns of both parties.

In Maine, for example, controversial oysterman and veteran Graham Platner, a Democrat, appears poised to face Republican Sen. Susan Collins, after incumbent Gov. Janet Mills’ failure to launch led her to drop out of the Senate primary.

Under old “pre-Trump” rules, Platner’s campaign would have withered instantly after revelations that he once had a Totenkopf SS tattoo, previously identified himself as a communist, said Black people were poor tippers, and wrote that white people “actually are” as racist and stupid as Trump thinks they are.

Instead, after all this surfaced, Platner actually rose in the polls. Considering the circumstances, there are several reasonable explanations for this.

Maybe Maine Dems have concluded that moral purity tests are politically suicidal after years of watching heterodox figures like Joe Rogan and Elon Musk drift away from the party.

Maybe Platner’s rough-edged outsider persona simply feels more authentic than another interchangeable politician in a pantsuit droning on about “working families.”

Perhaps the difference is that, unlike Trump or Texas’ scandal-plagued Republican Atty. Gen. Ken Paxton, Platner has at least attempted contrition.

Or maybe Maine Democrats have absorbed the same lesson Republicans adopted in 2016: Once voters stop treating scandal as disqualifying, policing your own side for off-the-field behavior starts to look like unilateral disarmament.

I mean, who could blame them for thinking you’ve got to fight fire with fire? America, after all, reelected Trump after 34 felony convictions.

At a certain point, continuing to insist that “character matters” starts sounding like advice Ward Cleaver might have offered Wally on “Leave It to Beaver.”

But Maine isn’t the only example of voters viewing scandalous behavior as a “keeping it real” feature, not a bug.

Another just took place in Texas, when the aforementioned Paxton crushed normie incumbent Sen. John Cornyn in a Republican primary runoff, garnering nearly 64% of the vote.

Paxton, it’s worth noting, was previously indicted on felony securities fraud charges, impeached by the Texas House on allegations including bribery, accused by senior aides of abusing his office to help a donor and real-estate developer and accused by his wife (a Texas Republican politician) of infidelity, just to name a few of his greatest hits.

Yet, not only did the scandals not doom Paxton, they probably helped him. They signaled a willingness to fight, casting him as both a victim and an outsider. There may be no purer expression of trickle-down Trumpism than Paxton, which probably explains why Trump endorsed him.

At this point, you might be thinking that all is lost. But there are counterexamples that lend to optimism.

Paxton’s Democratic opponent in Texas, for example, offers a stark contrast, as well as an opportunity to test the level of our societal decline in November.

Texas Democrats could easily have nominated their own chaos agent in Rep. Jasmine Crockett, a progressive firebrand whose flair for viral combat suggests she understands the incentives of modern politics perfectly well.

Instead, they chose James Talarico — a young state legislator, former middle-school teacher and Presbyterian seminarian — who projects the kind of earnest optimism that lands somewhere between Barack Obama and Pete Buttigieg.

If a Democrat like Talarico can win in deep-red Texas — against a scandal-plagued candidate who shouldn’t get within 10 miles of the U.S. Capitol — it will perhaps provide a modicum of hope that red lines still exist, and that some voters still believe character is destiny.

But regardless of who wins that matchup, the fact that both Paxton in Texas and Platner in Maine emerged as their party’s respective Senate candidates (Platner won’t technically be the Democratic nominee until after the Maine primary in June) still suggests something profound has shifted in American politics.

Not long ago, the scandals attached to either man would have ended a campaign overnight.

Today, they function more like résumé enhancements. Because the defining lesson of the Trump era may be this: Nothing is disqualifying anymore.

If a failed nepo baby and middling reality-TV star can become president, survive endless scandals (think “Access Hollywood”), rack up felony convictions, be found liable for sexual abuse, sit by and watch a Capitol riot, and then return to power anyway, traditional ideas about character and electability are simply no longer relevant.

The question now is whether Trumpism has become America’s permanent political operating system — or whether the new rules apply only to Trump himself.

November will offer some hints.

Matt K. Lewis is the author of “Filthy Rich Politicians” and “Too Dumb to Fail.”

WASHINGTON — Barney Frank, the longtime Democratic congressman and leading liberal who brought new visibility to gay rights and crafted the most significant reforms to the financial system in a generation, has died. He was 86.

Frank died late Tuesday, according to Jim Segel, Frank’s former campaign manager and close friend.

After representing broad swaths of Boston’s suburbs in Congress for 32 years, Frank and his husband moved to Ogunquit, Maine. He entered hospice there in April with congestive heart failure and is survived by his husband, Jim Ready, and sisters, the longtime Democratic strategist Ann Lewis and Doris Breay, along with brother David Frank.

A self-described “left-handed gay Jew,” Frank was known for his acerbic wit, combative style and focus on marginalized communities. He represented the party’s left wing while keeping close with Democratic leaders who sometimes frustrated progressives.

He is best known as a pioneer for LGBT rights. After decades of grappling with his sexuality, he publicly came out as gay in 1987, the first member of Congress to do so voluntarily. With his 2012 marriage to Ready, he became the first incumbent lawmaker on Capitol Hill to marry someone of the same sex.

But in an April interview as he entered hospice, Frank said he hoped he would be remembered for advocating a brand of politics that embraced progressive ideals without forcing them on voters prematurely. It is an approach he feared was being rejected as Democrats prepare for what could be a rollicking primary as they hope to retake the White House in 2028 and move past the Trump era.

“I hope I made the point that the best way to accomplish the improvements in our society that we need, particularly in making it less unfair economically and socially, is by conventional political methods,” Frank said. “The main obstacle to our defeating populism and going further in the right direction is that mainstream Democrats have to make it clear that we oppose that part of the agenda of our friends on the left that is politically unacceptable. They’re right about a lot of things but you have to have some discretion.”

“You should not take the most unpopular parts of your agenda and make them litmus tests,” he added. “And that’s what my friends on the left have been doing.”

Frank’s path to public life

Born in 1940 in Bayonne, N.J., Frank wrote in his 2015 memoir that he was drawn to public life after Emmett Till, a Black 14-year-old from Chicago, was lynched by white men in Mississippi. Frank would volunteer in Mississippi during the Freedom Summer of 1964, though he acknowledged the fast-talking style was a challenge in the Deep South.

“My direct organizing of Mississippi voters was limited by the fact that my accent [to this day more New Jersey than New England], my poor diction, and my rapid speech, especially when I got excited, rendered me largely incomprehensible to rural Mississippians of both races,” he wrote.

He entered politics in 1968 as an aide to Boston Mayor Kevin White before winning a seat in the Massachusetts House in 1972. Frank was elected to Congress in 1980, an otherwise dismal year for Democrats as the party lost dozens of seats in the U.S. House and Republican Ronald Reagan won the White House.

Frank’s pragmatic style surfaced early in his congressional career. He joined the liberal Democratic Study Group to help push then-Speaker Tip O’Neill (D-Mass.) to respond more aggressively to the Reagan administration. But Frank said he found himself more often agreeing with O’Neill’s less confrontational approach.

Years later, as Congress prepared to pass a massive tax overhaul package, Frank intended to vote “no,” opposed to the bill’s lowering of top tax rates. He changed his mind, however, when he worked out a deal boosting affordable housing tax credits.

“I was happy to sacrifice my ideological purity to improve legislation that was going to become law with or without me,” he wrote.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat and former House speaker, called Frank an “idealist to the nth degree.”

“The goals, the vision, the promise of it all,” she recalled in an interview. “Nobody could ever surpass what he brought to the table in that regard.”

Making history in Congress

Through his early years in Washington, Frank led something of a double life.

Privately, he socialized in the city’s gay circles and had relationships but did not publicly acknowledge his sexuality. The media at the time rarely reported that someone was gay unless that person was involved in a scandal. When Frank in 1987 invited a reporter to his office to formally ask whether the congressman was gay, Frank responded, “yeah, so what?”

Other elected leaders, perhaps most notably San Francisco’s Harvey Milk, had come out years before. Members of Congress, including Rep. Gerry Studds (D-Mass.), were previously outed through scandal.

Frank’s approach made him the most prominent gay leader in national politics for much of the 1980s and 1990s. He helped secure AIDS funding and pressed the Democratic Clinton administration, unsuccessfully, to lift a ban on gays serving in the military.

But there were low points, too, most notably an overwhelming 1987 House vote to reprimand him for poor judgment involving a male prostitute he hired in 1985. Rep. Newt Gingrich of Georgia, the Republican whip at the time, pressed for the more severe punishment of censure, which was rejected by a large margin.

Frank became something of a punch line among conservative Republicans, with House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas) calling him “Barney Fag” in 1995. Armey said he misspoke and later apologized from the House floor.

Along the way, Frank became known as one of the most quotable lawmakers in Congress.

Regarding abortion, he said Republicans believed “life begins at conception and ends at birth,” criticizing the party’s push to curb social programs. After Ken Starr released a report describing President Clinton’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky in sometimes intimate detail, Frank said it required “too much reading about heterosexual sex.”

Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) entered Congress the same year as Frank and he recalled his former colleague: “You may get a blow, but it was softened by the humor that came with it.”

Presiding over a financial overhaul

By 2007, Frank was the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, where he would leave his lasting policy mark as the U.S. economy careened toward collapse. He worked with the Republican Bush administration to pass a rescue package, providing vital support to financial institutions but spurring a populist revolt that still courses through American politics.

Once the initial crisis eased, Frank helped develop the most significant reform legislation since the New Deal. Working with then-Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), the Dodd-Frank Act would enhance consumer protections, impose new capital requirements for banks and boost the ability of regulators to monitor risk.

“Barney and I shared a fantastic relationship,” Dodd said. “I had many good moments in those 36 years in Congress, but none more significant, joyful, or productive than those almost two years working with Barney on our banking bill.”

During President Trump’s second term, his Republican administration has worked to roll back many of the legislation’s provisions, arguing they were too onerous.

Frank faced his toughest reelection campaign in years in 2010 as the tea party wave swept over American politics. He opted against running again in 2012, though remained engaged in politics long after leaving Congress and was a fierce critic of Trump.

Asked for his prediction on who might succeed Trump, Frank said “unfortunately I won’t get to vote for it.”

Sloan writes for the Associated Press.