Billionaire tequila tycoon plots CBS News takeover

A billionaire tequila tycoon who claims the coverage on one of America’s biggest news channels favoured the Democratic Party is poised to make a bid for CBS News.
John Paul DeJoria, a serial entrepreneur who co-founded Paul Mitchell hair products and Patron tequila, is part of a group that is seeking to acquire the channel.
The consortium, led by the Hollywood producer Steven Paul, were outbid in a multibillion-dollar takeover battle for the channel’s parent company, Paramount Global, earlier this year.
They lost out to Skydance, a consortium led by David Ellison, son of Oracle founder Larry Ellison, which is due to complete a $28 billion merger with Paramount next year. Ellison is widely expected to break up the sprawling Paramount empire. As well as CBS, the group’s assets include Channel 5, Nickelodeon and Comedy Central.
Donald Trump filed a lawsuit last week demanding $10 billion in damages from CBS for allegedly editing an interview with Kamala Harris, his rival for the presidency, in a way that misled the public. CBS said the claims were “completely without merit”.
DeJoria said that his group was more determined than ever to acquire the news division of CBS and transform it into a “middle of the road” broadcaster.
“CBS, NBC and ABC, they are all really swayed to the left,” he said. “So whenever you turn them on, you can always depend on something good about the Democratic Party. And maybe they won’t tell you everything good about Donald Trump, for example.”
“We need, in the United States of America, a news station that … is not swayed by one political party or the other,” DeJoria added. “America hasn’t had that in many, many years.”
DeJoria, who has an estimated net worth of $3 billion, was a prominent supporter of the former independent presidential candidate Robert Kennedy Jr. There has been speculation that DeJoria was even offered the position of his vice-presidential running mate. Kennedy suspended his campaign in August and endorsed Trump.
In an interview with this newspaper in September, DeJoria said that Kennedy was “an honest man and wants to do all the right things”. He said he does not necessarily support either of America’s two major political parties, seeing himself as a “true independent”.
Ellison’s takeover of Paramount is subject to regulatory approval. If the Skydance bid collapses “we step right in again”, DeJoria said. “If it doesn’t fall out, then they’re going to break the company up.”