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President Donald Trump’s comments to White House reporters last week about the proposed Warner Bros. Discovery sale should terrify every American:
I wouldn’t want to see the same company end up with CNN … I think CNN should be sold because I think the people that are running CNN right now are either corrupt or incompetent … I think any deal should—it should be guaranteed and certain that CNN is part of it or sold separately.
In separate remarks, Trump said he would be “involved” in the deal, and his loyalist attorney general, Pam Bondi, said the Justice Department’s antitrust division would oversee it. In plain sight, the president of the United States is hijacking federal power to decide who owns the media that covers him. So much for freedom of the press.
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Instead of raising alarms about Trump’s dictatorial behavior, the leading suitors of Warner Bros. Discovery—Netflix and Paramount—have been currying the president’s favor. Shortly before the preliminary deal struck by Netflix, the company’s co-CEO, Ted Sarandos, met with Trump in the Oval Office, most likely hoping to prevent any interference. But under the terms of that deal, Warner Bros. Discovery would be split, and Netflix would only take over half of the company, the half without CNN. That’s not what Trump wants.
In response to the Netflix announcement, Paramount Skydance launched a hostile takeover bid. Paramount was recently bought by multi-billionaire Larry Ellison and his son, David, who added it to their Skydance Media. Back in 2016, Larry Ellison backed then-Senator Marco Rubio in the Republican presidential primaries and Senator Tim Scott in the 2024 ones. Still, like so many CEOs, he has been ingratiating himself with Trump ever since, as detailed in the April 2025 The New York Times article “How Trump Could Make Larry Ellison the Next Media Mogul.”
When the Ellisons’ Skydance Media snapped up Paramount, it rapidly moved to make its CBS News subsidiary Trump-friendlier by tapping Bari Weiss to run it. (Trump had pressured the previous Paramount ownership under Shari Redstone to cough up $16 million and settle a flimsy lawsuit accusing CBS News’s 60 Minutes of making deceptive edits to an interview with Kamala Harris.) For good measure, the Ellisons bought a piece of the social media powerhouse TikTok.
Now their eyes are on Warner Bros. Discovery. Unlike with the Netflix proposal, Paramount would not split the acquisition, thereby making CNN its own. The Wall Street Journal reported that “During a visit to Washington in recent days, David Ellison offered assurances to Trump administration officials that if he bought Warner, he’d make sweeping changes to CNN.”
Yet Trump is still unhappy, because the Ellisons haven’t made CBS News a full-fledged propaganda outlet. When 60 Minutes interviewed Trump loyalist-turned-critic Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Trump raged on his social media page, “My real problem with the show, however, wasn’t the low IQ traitor, it was that the new ownership of 60 Minutes, Paramount, would allow a show like this to air. THEY ARE NO BETTER THAN THE OLD OWNERSHIP, who just paid me millions of Dollars for FAKE REPORTING about your favorite President, ME!”
So, we have a president asserting he can decide who owns CNN and pressuring both suitors to woo him, which they seem willing to do.
If we don’t want this craven spectacle to represent the future of American media, then we need to make sure independent media outlets continue to have the resources to operate. That’s why your donation to the Washington Monthly is so critical.
At the Washington Monthly, we don’t seek the president’s favor, regardless of who sits in the Oval Office. We exist to help you understand Washington better and to help Washington govern better. In the Trump era, we don’t obsess about every bit of Trump rage-bait. We focus on what Trump is doing and how to fix what he’s broken.
If Trump had his way, independent media would no longer exist. He has used personal intimidation of professional journalists, favorable treatment of propagandists masquerading as journalists, litigation, threats of lost broadcast licenses, and now interference in merger approvals to bend the Fourth Estate to his will.
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