Donald Trump said he wants a new owner for CNN as part of any sale of its parent Warner Bros. Discovery – a signal that he prefers an offer by Paramount Skydance to purchase the media conglomerate versus last week’s winning bid from Netflix.
Streaming giant Netflix has agreed to buy WBD’s Warner Bros. studio and its HBO Max streaming service, leaving CNN’s current management intact. But Paramount Skydance wants to buy all of WBD including CNN – and put the latter under the news chief of its CBS subsidiary, Bari Weiss.
In the latest in a string of extraordinary declarations in the history of US regulation, Trump signaled he is directly inserting himself into a review of the WBD sale, telling reporters outright on Wednesday afternoon that it’s imperative for CNN to be under completely new management.
“I think any deal, it should be guaranteed and certain that CNN is part of it or sold separately, but I don’t think the people that are running that company right now and running CNN, which is a very dishonest group of people, I don’t think that should be allowed to continue,” the president said.
Insiders say Trump’s comments come as Paramount Skydance’s owners, David Ellison and his father Larry, have been scrambling to do damage control with the White House over an explosive “60 Minutes” interview with Marjorie Taylor Greene in which the MAGA apostate slammed the president.
The sources say Paramount’s brass insists that “60 Minutes” staffers kept them mostly in the dark about the controversial interview that aired Sunday night – which provoked Trump to declare that Paramount Skydance and its management “ARE NO BETTER THAN THE OLD OWNERSHIP.”
“Since they bought it, 60 Minutes has actually gotten WORSE!” Trump added of the Ellisons.
In addition to ripping “Marjorie Traitor Greene,” the president called “60 Minutes” correspondent Leslie Stahl a “Trump hating, 60 Minutes ‘correspondent,” Trump added:
“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,” the president added.
Sources say Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison has told people close to Trump he was unaware of the broadcast until the day it ran, as was Jeff Shell, president of Paramount Skydance, and Weiss.
“They’re saying those guys went rogue and when Paramount Skydance found out about it, they were caught flatfooted,” said one person with direct knowledge of the matter.
A Paramount Skydance spokeswoman referred all questions to CBS Rep Chris Ender who both declined comment and would not deny the substance of this account.
All of which underscores the difficulty in running a news operation – or any highly regulated business – in the era of Trump, who has insert himself into major corporate finance deals in ways that are unprecedented. Trump’s comments about CNN, media industry insiders say, shows he’s looking to exert maximum pressure to mold the deal to fit his political goals.
As the Post has previously reported, Trump wants CNN’s alleged anti-MAGA bias “neutralized” and that was one reason he was siding with the Ellisons in the deal contest.
Indeed, part of Paramount’s sales pitch to the WBD shareholders to ditch the Netflix bid is “regulatory certainty” from the Trump White House. It argues that it has less antitrust overlap with WBD than Netflix. Another selling point is that Larry Ellison has been a long-time MAGA supporter.
On Monday, Paramount Skydance launched a “hostile bid” to undo Warner Bros Discovery’s decision last week to select Netflix, arguing its $30 a share all cash offer is superior to Netflix’s cash-stock offer of $30,75. Netflix is bidding on just buying the Warner Studio and streaming service, and counts as part of its bid an eventual spinoff of WBD’s cable properties like Discovery and CNN.
Aside from the tricky Trumpy politics, money will be a key variable in the deal. As The Post first reported, both Paramount Skydance and Netflix are poised to mount a bidding war for the media company that could take the winning price to $35 a share or $91 billion. Before WBD began shopping itself, it had a market value of around $31 billion.
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