2024?) - this merger was going to create jobs! ( State employment would suffer  without a deal, the paper said Newsom has told colleagues, never mind that no credible economist has supplied such evidence.) Another happy coincidence. Or, given that the paper was pointedly not citing sources close to Newsom, perhaps part of an Ellison-led strategy.

Then today, an op-ed of Ellison's own in a redoubt of mainstream liberalism, The New York Times. The mogul trotted out all the usual arguments for legacy media mergers these days - if we don't do this the tech companies win, movie theaters should survive, Hollywood should be employed.  What I can promise is the work, and more of it,  he wrote, using the noun four times, which is four times more than he used the noun Donald Trump. Los Angeles County researchers have concluded that the merger will likely lead to less work.

Meanwhile, Ari has been hitting the hustings, appearing on CNBC Tuesday morning to rattle off a series of Ellison talking points and praising the mogul.  This is a guy who said  hey I'm going to make 30 movies a year, 45-day release,  Emanuel said.  He's gonna spend he says 30 billion in content a year. We need that for the economy of Hollywood.  The comments wouldn't have been out of place on the Paramount investor earnings-call Tuesday, where executives touted all these numbers and used words like  pro-competitive  to describe the deal. If there's one thing we know about capitalism, it's that combining two major companies leads to more competition.

These media hits that aimed to buck the headwinds even involved a literal plane - the day Bonta and the AGs were suing, Ellison jetted to Washington to lobby for a federal tax credit, a news stunt meant as much to lobby support among Hollywood as to win over legislators. One story his coverage play overshadowed that week: ProPublica's bombshell report that Paramount allegedly provided gifts to FCC commissioners reviewing the deal.

More of these pieces are no doubt coming, perhaps even in my own outlet. More foot soldiers arguing for the merger's value to the business, or the world, or the First Amendment. Never mind that the WGA - those fierce opponents of free expression! - have just sued to stop the deal. Doesn't the world's richest family have the right to own CNN? Isn't that enshrined in the Constitution?

All these enlisted authors are a shrewd flyer, and you need to give Ellison's team credit for landing it so effectively.

But you also don't need an advanced radar beacon to see what's happening. Having courted MAGA and Donald Trump to win the deal federal approval (how many Kennedy Center boxes and UFC ringside seats can one centibillionaire's son fill?) Ellison is now pivoting to Dems to take care of the state challenge.

Not regulatory-minded Dems, as that group, from Elizabeth Warren to Cory Booker to Adam Schiff, have all been sharply critical of the deal and ask hard questions about combining the country's third and fourth biggest pure-play entertainment companies. Not those decorated and often landslide-winning Democratic AGs, either.

But if you get enough Dem-ish poobahs like Newsom and the Kamala-donating Ari on your side, maybe people won't notice all the Democrats who aren't. Or enough of their constituents will lose interest, causing AGs to do the same.

Heck, maybe people will even magically forget that no fewer than 1,000 creatives, from Bryan Cranston to J.J. Abrams to Glenn Close to Lin-Manuel Miranda, all signed a letter this spring opposing the deal, noting how a merger  would further consolidate an already concentrated media landscape, reducing competition at a moment when our industries - and the audiences we serve - can least afford it  and lead to  fewer opportunities for creators, fewer jobs across the production ecosystem, higher costs, and less choice for audiences in the United States and around the world.  Who can remember any of those beloved entertainers' warnings when an agent is telling us something is good for creativity?

There's a reason Paramount needs the deal to happen. Warner Bros. Discovery turned a profit of $1.2 billion this past quarter once you strip out all the money they had to pay as part of the acquisition (like severance costs). That's a lot of profit for a company like Paramount, which revealed Tuesday that in the same quarter it netted $41 million.

And there's a reason Paramount needs the deal to happen soon. Starting Oct. 1, Paramount must pay Warners shareholders $7 million every day until the deal closes. By the second week, they'll have wiped out all the profits they earned this quarter. By the spring, they'll have wiped out the profits of the company they're buying. One can't imagine a lot of joy on Melrose, then, when the word came down Tuesday that the trial won't start until March.

Also, the deal is partly bankrolled by Larry Ellison and his significant AI investments. And can that boom go on forever?

The reality is the AGs may not just have the law on their side - they have the leverage. And with every week that passes they have more of it. (With even more come potential Democrat victories in November.) Could they extract a major settlement - possibly even forcing a carve-out of CNN? Don't rule it out, no matter how many UFC fights Ellison attends with the president.

 Winning comes down to having the best stories,  Paramount CFO Dennis Cinelli told investors on the earnings call Tuesday. Ellison and his allies will keep telling them. That doesn't mean it will result in victory.