Notable Quotes

The tortured courtship of CBS and Viacom has inspired reams of commentary on Wall Street and elsewhere. Here’s a sampling of what observers are saying:

» “We don’t see how jamming Viacom into the package makes CBS more salable. There is clearly no other bidder for Viacom today. We don’t believe any company wants to go to their shareholders and say, ‘Great news: You now own Viacom!’” Todd Juenger, Bernstein & Co. » “Rather than scuttle this accretive deal, we would suggest that both executives remain in a bake-off scenario where Mr. Ianniello has management control over the current CBS assets and Mr. Bakish runs the current Viacom network assets, with perhaps Paramount CEO Jim Gianopulos reporting to Mr. Moonves directly. Even better, perhaps the company could determine the ideal optimization of assets that could reunite Paramount with CBS TV Studios, unify all the international assets and create a more centralized digital group.” Michael Nathanson, Moffettnathanson Research » “Ms. Redstone should either let CEO Bob Bakish and team run Viacom long term to the best of their ability or put Viacom up for sale if she does not like our idea of Viacom buying CBS at a meaningful premium in an all-stock deal but have CBS’ management team run combined company [and call it CBS].” Craig Huber, Huber Research » “We believe a combined Cbs-viacom would have a larger, more-diverse content offering and international footprint; become more powerful given its larger scale in competing for and producing content; and, in our opinion, wield more power in negotiations with traditional and virtual multichannel video programming distributors, or MVPDS, in contract renegotiations.” Neil Begley, Moody’s Investors Service