The Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery combination is on hold until an antitrust trial scheduled for March 2027. That’s a long wait for a deal already measured in the tens of billions, and Paramount CEO David Ellison used a guest essay in The New York Times to make his case while the clock runs.

His argument is worth taking seriously, partly because it’s unusual and partly because it may be correct. The lawsuit, he says, challenges how much control the combined company would have over movie releases and cable channels. The real objection, in his reading, is CNN. He committed to maintaining CNN’s editorial independence and said news should be grounded in facts and truth.

Warner Bros. Discovery stockholders voted overwhelmingly at a Special Meeting held today to approve the company’s pending merger with Paramount Skydance Corporation, clearing a critical procedural threshold in one of the largest media consolidations in recent memory.

Samuel A. Di Piazza, Jr., Chair of the WBD Board of Directors, framed the result as a mandate to extract value from the combined entity’s content libraries and distribution assets. President and CEO David Zaslav, who has spent four years restructuring WBD following its own 2022 formation from the WarnerMedia-Discovery merger, called the vote “another key milestone toward completing this historic transaction.”