A state attorney general challenging the controversial mega-merger between Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery is under attack from a newly created mystery nonprofit accused of being an “astroturf” front group.
The group sent text messages in recent days calling on Californians to pressure Democratic state Attorney General Rob Bonta in support of the merger, which he has sued to block in court.
The text messages are the latest escalation of the increasingly bitter battle between Bonta and Paramount CEO David Ellison, who has threatened to move his movie studio to Texasor Tennessee, according to reports from multiple outlets, if a coalition of state attorneys general led by Bonta keeps fighting the merger.
The group behind the text campaign, Neighbors for Strong Communities, cited Ellison’s threat in messages encouraging support for the merger.
“The behavior we’re seeing is what powerful corporations do when they are losing control of the story.”
The group denied the allegations that it is mounting an “astroturf” campaign, but declined to reveal its donors. The lack of transparency led free-speech advocates to issue a scathing press release this week.
“The behavior we’re seeing is what powerful corporations do when they are losing control of the story,” Rashad Robinson, co-chair of the Committee for the First Amendment, said in a statement. “The more the public understands what’s at stake — fewer jobs, fewer stories told, and even more power in the hands of a few billionaires — the harder the deal becomes for Paramount to defend.”
A spokesperson for Neighbors for Strong Communities, Tanner Kelly, declined to disclose the group’s donors.
“We don’t disclose funders, but this campaign is operated independently of Paramount,” he said.
In a statement to The Intercept, Warner Bros. Discovery denied funding the text message campaign. Paramount Skydance did not respond to a request for comment.
Neighbors and Nemeses
Ellison’s merger plans have divided Hollywood unions, leading proponents and opponents to engage in a heated war of words over who speaks for the entertainment industry’s working class.
Into that fray jumped Neighbors for Strong Communities, which was incorporated in Washington in June, a little over three months after Paramount launched its takeover bid for Warner Bros. Discovery.
The national debate over the mega merger has focused on suspicions that Paramount CEO David Ellison might be willing to tilt coverage at Warner properties like CNN in favor of Donald Trump. Ellison, whose billionaire father is a close ally of Trump’s, has courted favor with the White House as the merger moves forward.
The debate over the Paramount merger in California, however, has often centered on jobs.
In text messages to Californians that went out earlier this week, Neighbors for Strong Communities asked recipients to send Bonta messages raising the concern that his opposition to the merger will cost the state thousands of jobs — because of Ellison’s reported threat to move Paramount to Texas.
Those messages and the group’s generic website offer little insight into Neighbors for Strong Communities’s origins. Its incorporation papers in Washington show that several listed directors have worked as political consultants.
In a statement to The Intercept, one of those directors, Tanner Kelly, described the group as a “community advocacy organization that helps everyday people participate in public decisions affecting their lives, livelihoods and futures.”
Bonta is months away from an election he is expected to win handily. Kelly said the group’s pressure campaign against Bonta is “not related” to the pending attorney general election, and Neighbors for Strong Communities has not filed campaign finance disclosures with the California Secretary of State.
Kelly pushed back on the idea that entertainment industry professionals are uniformly opposed to the merger by sending messages from actors who have spoken out in favor of it.
“To the claims this is AstroTurf, tell that to the hundreds of real people participating in our movement who have real concerns, real struggles, and real livelihoods on the line that just want to be heard,” said Kelly, who was registered as a lobbyist in California last year.
“Grassroots Opposition”?
Advocates who oppose the merger suspect there is something more at play, pointing to the circumstances of the group’s creation.
“The sender organization’s website is less than three months old. It discloses no founders, board members, staff, or funders, and the organization does not appear in ProPublica’s nonprofit database,” the Committee for the First Amendment, an anti-merger group co-founded by Jane Fonda, said in a press release earlier this week.
“The sender organization’s website is less than three months old.”
The Committee said that Neighbors for Strong Communities has the “classic hallmarks of a corporate-backed astroturf campaign designed to manufacture the appearance of grassroots opposition.”
The effort to make it seem like the merger has popular support will fail, predicted Jessica J. González, co-CEO of Free Press Action.
“These corporations know where the grassroots movement actually is: with the industry professionals fighting to block this merger,” she said. “This PR campaign is yet another face-off between the many and the money.”