Welcome back to The Daily Courant, your afternoon guide to Puck’s best new reporting. Here’s what you need to know… and stick around for more on David Ellison’s final WarnerMount hurdle.

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Meanwhile, on the pods…

And now, a little more on the WBD-Paramount pressure cooker…

HOLLYWOOD

California Attorney General Rob Bonta wants Paramount to sell CNN. He won’t say it publicly, but the widespread belief among those close to him is that a divestiture would potentially placate Democrats frustrated with the Paramount-WBD deal. Sure, blocking the merger outright is a long shot, but the political pressure to act is mounting: Thousands of L.A. jobs are on the line, big-city Democrats are tilting left, and the unseemly details of the Ellison family’s relationship with Trump have stirred up a veritable hornet’s nest.

Now, the conversations around WarnerMount are moving toward a singularly pressing question: What can the states squeeze out of the Ellisons? Paramount sources say David won’t entertain a CNN sale, noting that he believes the network gives WarnerMount a streaming advantage over Netflix and Amazon while still throwing off hundreds of millions of dollars a year. And yet, if the alternative is a protracted legal battle and months of ticking fees, that calculus might change…

Click here for Matt’s full story.

WASHINGTON

As the Republican base sours on the Iran war and Netanyahu’s adventurism in the Middle East, the vice president has changed his rhetoric on Israel—positioning himself as the voice of a new MAGA foreign policy. “He sees the writing on the wall,” said one Trump administration official. “He’s trying to save his political future.”

A.I.

C.E.O. Nadia Carlsten defends the company’s surreal pivot from shoewear to A.I.—its plans to take on CoreWeave and Dell, how it raised all that money, and why bespoke is the future for neoclouds. “The origin story doesn’t really matter,” she insists. “The results will speak for themselves.”

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Imagine your entire company working in perfect sync. Strategy, operations, tech, and AI – all connected. At PwC, we design the solutions that can help you get there.

SPORTS

Since their pandemic-era Last Dance peak, sports documentaries have become harder and harder to get greenlit—even at Netflix. Superstars and monoculture nostalgia plays can still find a home, but the bar has been raised while the payouts have fallen. So what’s a sports doc producer to do?

FASHION

The rate at which consumers like and comment on luxury fashion content is collapsing, forcing brands to scramble to update their well-thumbed marketing playbooks.

HOLLYWOOD

Matt is joined by WSJ reporter Emily Glazer to discuss her fascinating new piece highlighting Larry Ellison’s private friendship with Donald Trump and the impact it had on the Paramount M&A saga. Emily explains why Larry and Donald seem to get along so well, why Larry is bankrolling the WarnerMount deal, and how we got here in the first place.

MEDIA

Julia and Dylan reconvene to pull on every thread from The New York Times’s sprawling exposé on former Athletic reporter Dianna Russini. They dig into the journalism scandal at the heart of the piece, what it really means to be an insider versus a reporter, and how the Times balances standards and ethics as it grows its business, courts new audiences, and elevates its own stars—all while protecting the legacy institution it’s built.

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