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Comment by shimman | Hacker News Reader

You really think Paramount cares about the IP and not just controlling the platforms to wield political power?

Yes, 100%.

If they wanted the policial platforms and had offered to buy them from Warner as standalone for a tenth of the cost Warner would have snapped their hand off.

They need the IP for scale. That is what this is about.

Walk me through the argument of how they do that or why this is worth $100 billion. Everyone is worried about them owning CNN, but CNN was dying. Their takeover of CBS was a Flubb. I think you could make the argument that part of the reason Trump won was the perception that liberals controlled all media. Change that perception in America, and I think our contrarian nature drives people into the arms of Democrats.

I think the perception that liberals control the media actually comes a bit from Hollywood and celebrity culture, which is more Progressive than average. People kind of conflate all that with news media (and there is genuine overlap sometimes).

But mainly it's driven by right-wing media propaganda. It was never really true, not even really a little. But even so, you can listen to hours and hours of content per day from right-wing personalities driving anti-media grievance. It's been that way for at least two decades.

To change the perception, far-right propaganda has to be countered or stopped. If the Ellison's and Weiss start meddling with CNN, it's probably not to counter far-right propaganda, but to spread even more.

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