SAG-AFTRA member Leah Garland joins fellow entertainment workers at Paramount Studios in Hollywood on Tuesday to protest the settlement allowing the Paramount Skydance-Warner Bros. Discovery merger to proceed.

The top legal officers of the 12 states that were deciding whether to block the biggest takeover in Hollywood history knew the future of TV news was also at stake. Allowing Paramount Skydance, owner of CBS News, to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns CNN, would create not just an entertainment colossus but the dominant power in broadcast and cable news. Fully mergeded, the network would have a third more employees and an 80% bigger prime-time audience than today’s TV news leader, Fox News.

A dozen state attorneys general, led by California’s Rob Bonta, were challenging the Paramount-Warner deal, and in their ranks there was a faction that believed CNN should not be part of it. Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts and Minnesota insisted that as a condition of the merger Paramount should sell CNN to another buyer. But the eventual settlement the group reached with Paramount has no such requirement.

Connecticut Attorney General William Tong said he was “deeply disappointed” with the final deal. Tong was especially alarmed by Paramount’s brusque treatment of CBS News since it bought the network last year. Paramount CEO and Donald Trump pal David Ellison installed right-leaning polemicist Bari Weiss as CBS editorial chief, which triggered a shakeup and the flight of veteran staff.

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“I think everybody paying attention to journalism knows what’s happening at CBS News,” Tong told the Columbia Journalism Review. “How ‘60 Minutes,’ the most credible and important television........

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