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      Sony and Apollo Take Key Step in Bid for Paramount’s Assets

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      The two companies have expressed interest in acquiring the media conglomerate, but are backing away from their $26 billion all-cash offer.Sony Pictures Entertainment and Apollo Global Management have taken a significant step forward in their effort to court Paramount, three people familiar with the matter said on Friday.The two companies have signed nondisclosure agreements with Paramount, allowing them to look at Paramount’s nonpublic financial information, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss active negotiations. Paramount previously shared materials with another suitor, the Hollywood studio Skydance.Early this month, Sony and Apollo sent Paramount a nonbinding expression of interest in acquiring the company for $26 billion. The two had been seeking to buy Paramount for its studio and then sell off other parts of its empire, which includes CBS, cable channels like MTV and the Paramount Plus streaming service.But Sony’s shareholders have fretted over the possible acquisition, given the potential cost of a bid for Paramount and the headwinds facing the subscription streaming business. Sony and Apollo are now contemplating a variety of approaches to acquire the company’s assets, but are backing away from their plan to make an all-cash, $26 billion offer for Paramount, two of the people said.Sony’s new vision for a deal could alter the dynamics of Paramount’s effort to sell itself or merge with another company. Paramount previously rebuffed Sony’s offer to buy just its studio, and Paramount’s controlling shareholder, Shari Redstone, has long sought a deal for the entire company.A person familiar with Ms. Redstone’s thinking has said that a breakup of the company is not a deal breaker, depending on the terms, but that she prefers to keep Paramount intact.Ms. Redstone has blessed a deal to sell her stake in National Amusements, Paramount’s parent company, to Skydance, but Skydance’s bid for the entire company has faced significant pushback from Paramount’s common shareholders.Paramount let an exclusive negotiation window with Skydance lapse in recent weeks, but the two are still talking, and Skydance remains interested in a deal.The deal talks are happening at a tumultuous time for Paramount. The company’s chief executive, Bob Bakish, stepped down last month after more than a quarter-century at the company. He was replaced in the interim by three executives running an “office of the C.E.O.”: George Cheeks, the chief executive of CBS; Chris McCarthy, the chairman of Showtime and MTV Entertainment Studios; and Brian Robbins, the chief executive of Paramount Pictures. More

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      Comcast Plans Streaming Bundle With Netflix, Apple TV+

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      The bundle, called StreamSaver, is the latest joint effort from entertainment companies looking to woo price-weary customers.Comcast, the parent company of NBCUniversal, is planning to offer its streaming service Peacock in a bundle with Netflix and Apple TV+, Brian Roberts, the company’s chief executive, said at an investor conference on Tuesday.Called StreamSaver, the bundle will be sold at a deep discount compared with subscribing to all three services separately, Mr. Roberts said. He didn’t specify a price for the service, which is expected to debut later this month.“We’ve been bundling video successfully and creatively for 60 years,” Mr. Roberts said. “This is the latest iteration of that. And I think this will be a pretty compelling package.”Over the past year, several entertainment companies have joined forces to entice customers who are weary of signing up and paying for numerous individual streaming services.Earlier this year, Warner Bros. Discovery, Fox and Disney announced that they were teaming up to offer a streaming service with games from the National Basketball Association and the National Football League. Last week, Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery said that they would bundle their streaming services, selling users a package that included Disney+, Hulu and Max.Comcast has long offered its users a menu of streaming services on Xfinity, its package of services that includes cable television and broadband internet. For years, the company has offered services like Netflix and Apple TV+ as add-ons to its existing television bundle, acting as a vendor for those companies. This is the first time that Comcast has offered both services as part of a discounted bundle.Comcast, which has millions of broadband and cable television customers across the United States, has different incentives to bundle streaming services together than many of its competitors have. If Comcast can give its customers additional reasons to stick with the company, or convince them to pay for more features through Xfinity, the effort to bundle services will have been worth it.Many other internet providers have sold bundles that include streaming services. When Disney+ launched, Verizon offered a promotional bundle with that service. When the short-lived, short-form streaming service Quibi launched, T-Mobile offered to bundle its wireless offering with that service.Comcast has been willing to spend big to gain a foothold in the competitive video streaming business. Peacock, which launched in 2020, lost $2.7 billion last year, Comcast said in a filing, but paying subscribers increased to 31 million. The company has said that Peacock’s losses were narrowing as the service matured. More

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      Why Al Jazeera is the Go To News Source for Student Protesters

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      Nick Wilson has closely followed news on the war in Gaza since October. But Mr. Wilson, a Cornell student, is picky when it comes to his media diet: As a pro-Palestinian activist, he doesn’t trust major American outlets’ reporting on Israel’s campaign in Gaza.Instead, he turns to publications less familiar to some American audiences, like the Arab news network Al Jazeera.“Al Jazeera is the site that I go to to get an account of events that I think will be reliable,” he said.Many student protesters said in recent interviews that they were seeking on-the-ground coverage of the war in Gaza, and often, a staunchly pro-Palestinian perspective — and they are turning to alternative media for it. There’s a range of options: Jewish Currents, The Intercept, Mondoweiss and even independent Palestinian journalists on social media, as they seek information about what is happening in Gaza.Their preferences embody a broader shift for members of Generation Z, who are increasingly seeking out news from a wider array of sources and questioning legacy outlets in a fragmented media ecosystem.Israel’s recent ban on the local operations of Al Jazeera has only elevated the network’s status among many student protesters. They prize coverage from reporters on the ground, and Al Jazeera has a more extensive operation in Gaza than any other publication. Students also noted the sacrifices it has made to tell the story there. Two Al Jazeera journalists have died since the start of the war.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Say More review: Jen Psaki on Biden, Trump and how to make your point

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      Jen Psaki left the Biden White House after 16 months as press secretary. Saturday Night Live never savaged her, though Kate McKinnon played her. By that and other measures, Psaki compares favorably to Sean Spicer and Sarah Sanders, her predecessors from the years of Trump. A veteran of the Obama West Wing, before that a competitive collegiate swimmer, Psaki had the president’s ear and spoke with knowing authority.Her press briefings were not cauldrons of rancor. Her tussles with Peter Doocey, the Fox News White House correspondent, never neared the boiling point. They played nice.Unlike Karine Jean-Pierre, her successor, Psaki didn’t have to share the White House podium with John Kirby, spokesperson for the national security council and a retired rear admiral. Psaki was a force in her own right.Now a host at MSNBC, Psaki is out with her first book. It mixes political vignettes with tips on navigating life’s competing demands, including how to dodge – and throw – sharp elbows. As a political memoir, it does its share of score-settling. But, true to its subtitle, Lessons from Work, the White House, and the World, Psaki’s book is not a tell-all, terribly newsy or an audition for a slot in a second Biden administration, if there is one.To be expected, Psaki is critical of Donald Trump and his minions, but injects subtlety too. She wields a scalpel, lacerating Spicer and his former boss. She frames criticisms as career advice, not frontal assault.“Shouldn’t [Spicer] have rejected the job offer, if he were truly credible?” she asks of the Republican official who had first go at speaking for Trump, perhaps the most thankless task yet invented in politics.Great question. We all know the answer. As the anti-Trump operative Rick Wilson put it, everything Trump touches dies. Only Ivanka is safe and even then … who knows.“While Sean may not have been acting entirely on his own behalf when he was giving his press briefings,” Psaki writes, “he was the one who suffered as a result.”True. If Melissa McCarthy plays you in an SNL cold open, as she did Spicer, lampooning your loud parroting of your boss’s absurd lies … you’re screwed.Then again, Spicer was kind of lucky. Banished from the Trumpian kingdom early on, he never suffered a January 6-related indictment. Eventually, he expressed regret for beclowning himself over the inauguration in 2017.Back on Psaki’s own side of the aisle, Say More is no hagiography of Joe Biden. Psaki is aware of the president’s capacity for empathy but also mindful of his tendency to bring the story back to his own losses, most recently including that of Beau Biden, his late son who served in Iraq.In summer 2021, amid the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, a suicide bomb at Kabul airport left 13 US soldiers and 170 Afghans dead. Three days later, American bodies arrived at Dover air force base in Delaware, Biden’s home state. The president and the first lady, Jill Biden, attended. Things did not work out as planned.Psaki conveys how Biden was stunned into silence when told that family members of dead Americans were complaining he had spent too much time talking about Beau, alleging he was insufficiently focused on the deaths of their own children.“I paused for the president to respond,” Psaki writes. “The silence that followed was a bit too long. I worried for a moment that our connection had been lost.”Biden finally responded, but did so “in a softer voice than usual”.“I thought I was helping them. Hearing about how other people went through loss always helps me,” Biden said.Again he paused: “Thanks for telling me. Anything else?”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionPsaki also tweaks Chuck Schumer, now Senate majority leader, and John Kerry, Barack Obama’s second secretary of state and until March a member of Biden’s administration as his climate envoy.Once upon a time, the Affordable Care Act was unpopular, viewed by many as another welfare scheme. Against the backdrop of the Great Recession, a stock market crash and the mortgage crisis, Obamacare cost the Democrats both chambers of Congress.“There were those … who suggested that we shouldn’t do anything other than the economy,” Obama later acknowledged to Jonathan Cohn of the Huffington Post.One of those “outsiders” was Schumer. The New Yorker grasped the political consequences of going all in on healthcare amid a meltdown in jobs and housing. Political prescience, however, isn’t always welcomed, let alone rewarded. Recalling how the White House rejected Schumer’s suggestion that Obama’s final State of the Union address contain a pitch for student loan relief, Psaki seems to delight in the outcome.“I was telling [Obama] he needed to decide whether he wanted this to be his State of the Union speech, or Senator Schumer’s,” she recalls. “I delivered my thoughts calmly. My argument tapped into my knowledge of how the media would cover the speech. The president eventually agreed. Sorry, Senator Schumer.”Psaki also recalls a gaffe made by Kerry in 2014. Responding to a question, he intimated that if conflict broke out between Japan and China, the US would use military force – a stance at odds with the stated American position.“That was a huge mistake,’” chided David Wade, a longtime Kerry aide. Kerry didn’t yell back. Instead, he gave Psaki and Wade the green light to contact the White House and distance itself from his comments. In that moment, Psaki learned that being effective in her job meant delivering quick feedback, at times.“Advising someone is not the same as appeasing them,” she writes.The Biden administration has been relatively leak-free. Nothing approaching Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury or Team of Vipers by Cliff Sims, an early memoir by a Trump administration official, has appeared. Whether this matters come election day remains, of course, to be seen.
      Say More is published in the US by Simon & Schuster More

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      Is It Good to Go Exclusive?

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      The exclusive period for Paramount’s potential merger with Skydance expired without a deal, highlighting the long-debated question of whether exclusivity is a waste of time.Paramount’s proposed merger with Skydance has been the most tumultuous media deal in years. Now it has taken yet another turn after the exclusivity period for negotiations expired without an agreement in hand.A month ago, a special committee of Paramount’s board agreed to enter into exclusive talks with Skydance — a Hollywood studio run by the tech scion David Ellison — even as the private equity giant Apollo Global Management reached out with a $26 billion offer. Paramount shareholders grumbled that granting exclusivity was a mistake, and that the company should have engaged with Apollo instead.This week, the special committee told Skydance that it was letting the exclusivity period lapse. The end of exclusivity doesn’t alone kill the deal with Skydance. But it does allow Paramount to open up negotiations with Apollo and Sony Pictures Entertainment, which joined Apollo’s bid.The so far fruitless negotiations raise a question that deal makers have long debated: Why do companies like Paramount agree to exclusivity in the first place?Buyers often prefer exclusivity more than sellers. Exclusivity is a sign from the seller that it is committed to doing a deal and not just using a bid to drum up higher offers.Sellers generally prefer to negotiate without exclusivity because it limits their ability to shop around for a higher price. And since they’ve already signaled to a buyer they’re willing to make a deal, they’ve weakened their bargaining power.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘I’ve missed it since the day I left’: Dan Rather on life after CBS News

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      Dan Rather said his dismissal from CBS News nearly two decades earlier “of course … was the lowest point” of his legendary journalism career as he returned to his former employer’s airwaves for the first time Sunday.“I gave CBS News everything I had,” the 92-year-old newsman said. “They had smarter, better, more talented people, but they didn’t have anybody who worked harder than I did.”Rather’s remarks came during a contemplative interview on CBS Sunday Morning in advance of the release of a Netflix documentary about his life and work.He spent 44 years at CBS – including 24 as anchor of its evening news program – but lost his place there after a doomed 2004 investigation into the military record of George W Bush, who was in the middle of successfully running for a second term as president.Rather avoided official blame for the report that questioned Bush’s service in the national guard during the time of the Vietnam war. But he introduced the piece in his role as anchor and was inextricably linked to it.CBS later said it could not vouch for the authenticity of some of the records on which the investigation depended, though many who worked on the story maintain it was true.Nonetheless, Rather signed off on CBS’s airwaves as anchor for the last time on 9 March 2005. And he ultimately left the network after his contract expired a little more than a year later.According to the Associated Press, in the Netflix documentary debuting Wednesday, Rather believed he would survive the botched investigation into Bush’s military service and was shocked over his downfall at CBS.But in the film he says that he sobered up to reality when his wife, Jean, told him, “You got into a fight with the president of the United States during his re-election campaign. What did you think was going to happen?”Rather’s career in journalism continued after he left CBS, publishing investigations and conducting interviews for digital cable and satellite television network HDNet. He’s written books, commented on presidential politics and fostered a younger audience on social media.But he had not been back to CBS for years because of lingering ill will between him and the network’s former chief Leslie Moonves, who resigned in 2018 after several women accused him of sexual harassment, assault or abuse going back to the 1980s.He was finally back at CBS days prior to the debut of Rather, Netflix’s biographical documentary chronicling his reporting on John F Kennedy’s assassination, Vietnam and Watergate through his anchor years and beyond, as the AP reported.The AP noted that the documentary addresses odder chapters of Rather’s run as a journalist, including his assault in New York City by someone saying, “What the frequency, Kenneth,” before then going onstage with REM when the band performed a song named after that phrase.“Without apology or explanation, I miss CBS,” Rather said in Sunday’s interview, which was filmed at his home in Texas. “I’ve missed it since the day I left there.”Rather said he has not lost the instinct that made him realize he wanted to be a reporter decades ago.“In the heart of every reporter worthy of their name, … there’s a message that news, real news, is what somebody somewhere – particularly somebody in power – doesn’t want you to know,” Rather said. That’s news.”He added: “I get up every morning, and as soon as my feet hit the ground, I say, ‘Where’s the story?’”Asked if it mattered how big or small the audience was, Rather replied, “No.”
      The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      Paramount Chief Executive Bob Bakish Could Be Out Next Week

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      He was once a staunch ally of the company’s biggest owner, Shari Redstone, but the relationship soured in recent months.Paramount is preparing to announce the departure of its chief executive, Bob Bakish, as soon as next week, according to three people with knowledge of the matter, a sudden development even as the company is exploring a merger.The impending move is a result of Mr. Bakish’s worsening relationship with Shari Redstone, the company’s controlling shareholder, the people said, asking not to be identified discussing a delicate matter. Ms. Redstone grew frustrated with what she saw as his inability to get important deals across the finish line, including a sale of the Showtime and BET cable channels, the people said.Two people familiar with the matter said several of Paramount’s senior executives had expressed reservations about the direction of the company to a representative of the board of directors in recent weeks, further eroding Mr. Bakish’s standing with Ms. Redstone.The company is in talks to merge with Skydance, a media company controlled by David Ellison, the tech scion and Hollywood producer. It is also negotiating a lucrative deal to keep channels like Nickelodeon and MTV on the Charter cable system.National Amusements, Paramount’s owner, is contemplating various options to replace Mr. Bakish, 60, who has led Paramount and its predecessor company, Viacom, since 2016 and has worked at the company since 1997. In one possibility, Paramount would be run by an “office of the C.E.O.” led by division chiefs like Brian Robbins, the head of the Paramount movie studio; George Cheeks, the top executive of CBS; and Chris McCarthy, president of Paramount’s entertainment and youth brands. The company could also choose to put an acting chief executive in place.Paramount declined to comment. The Wall Street Journal earlier reported that Paramount’s board was considering replacing Mr. Bakish.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Is there humour left in the White House? – podcast

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      The annual White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner returns this Saturday for a night of comedy ‘roasting’ – where the great and the good are ruthlessly mocked in celebration of the freedom of the press.
      In recent years, however, the night has taken on a different tone, with the atmosphere of warm self-deprecation and bipartisan bonhomie replaced by something more scathing and serious.
      This week Jonathan Freedland is joined by Jeff Nussbaum, a former senior speech writer to Joe Biden, to discuss the art of writing gags for presidents and whether there is still space for humour in US politics.

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know More