Paramount and Warner Brothers Discovery reportedly signed an agreement today on a $110 billion deal,

a merger that will make Paramount one of the largest media empires in the world.

It happened after a dramatic turn of events and after Netflix walked away from its proposal to buy out Warner Brothers.

Paramount could now control two key movie studios, multiple streaming platforms,

major intellectual property brands, along with television and cable channels, and two of the

biggest news operations on television, that's CBS and CNN. But this isn't a done deal yet,

as it's now under investigation and awaiting regulatory approval.

For more on all of this, we're joined now by Robin Farsat, host of public radios, full disclosure.

It's always great to see you, Robin.

Thank you, Jeff.

So we will get to the concerns about the media consolidation regarding this deal, but on the specifics

of the deal itself, when Netflix said that this offer was no longer attractive, what was that really about? Was it just about the price or deeper concerns about taking on Warner Brothers' debt and its market exposure?

I think Netflix got every signal from this White House and the FCC and Donald Trump, being explicit and both with kind of background suasion that by far he prefers

Paramount and the Ellison's taking this over.

He's obviously cast dispersions on CNN, which is a small part of the economics of the broader

Warner Brothers Discovery franchise, but it's a lightning rod for him.

And he'd like to see CNN under new ownership, ideally friendly to the persuasions of Donald Trump.

So this wasn't about the offer price. It was about Trump putting his thumb on a scale.

Yeah, because Netflix has so much money. And by the way, this ceased to be on economic a while ago, like a bidding war.

And it's happened in the history of LBOs and massive mergers and acquisitions. Indeed, Warner Brothers discovery itself is like, you know, they say there's something about Mary. There's something about Warner. For 25, 26 years, everybody has been mega merging, acquiring, stripping, flipping it off to other people, was AOL, it was AT&T, it was AT&T, this discovery disaster, and now it's being sold off to another

multi-billionaire. It's been certainly an ill-starred asset to own. So what does Paramount get

by acquiring it? You get this holy grail of a mega streaming app, right? Paramount Plus, or

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