COMPANY TOWN ANNEX

Paramount’s Davis Says Viacom Was the Right Deal: Martin S. Davis, chairman of Paramount Communications Inc., said in an interview with Time Magazine that the company’s original merger deal with cable firm Viacom Inc. was “the right deal. I’ll say that to my dying day,” Davis said in the interview in the Jan. 24 edition of Time. “I wouldn’t have done a thing differently. Seriously. What we did was the right thing in our view, and I would do it again today. I could not conceive of it coming out the way it did.” The entertainment giant has been the target of bids by Viacom and QVC Network Inc., which is run by Barry Diller, the former head of Paramount’s Hollywood studio. After a Delaware court battle that set the stage for an auction of Paramount, the company agreed to a merger with QVC.