Donald Trump made clear this week that not only will he be involved in the sale of Warner Bros. Discovery but that he plans to make sure that one of his media arch-nemeses, CNN, is sold in the process and put under new management.
In crashing through longstanding precedent, Trump’s two cents could have serious reverberations over a multi-billion-dollar deal that will reshape the media and entertainment landscape. Traditionally, presidents don’t state their own preferences over a business transaction that will face federal regulatory scrutiny and potentially lawsuits. And yet Trump saying “it’s imperative that CNN be sold” is another Wednesday in Washington.
That’s largely because it’s baked into expectations of Trump that he’ll ignore precedent, make off-the-cuff proclamations, test the guardrails of democracy and bash the news media. All those elements came together this week as Trump called for a new direction at CNN regardless of whether Paramount or Netflix wins out.
Trump has long been obsessed with CNN, a recurring target during his first administration and now front-of-mind in his second, and his actions this week put pressure on Paramount, Netflix and WBD, which planned to spin out CNN through Discovery Global if only selling its streaming and film assets in a deal.
Trump is clearly emboldened in a second term, and enjoys a cabinet bursting with loyalists, a Republican-led Congress and a conservative supermajority Supreme Court. Yet Trump also appears increasingly frustrated by his low approval ratings and unflattering stories about his administration, lashing out at White House reporters and claiming his economy is “A+++++” despite public perceptions to the contrary. Amid this disappointing spell, Trump is taking the opportunity to flex his muscles over media companies, wielding leverage to try to ensure the outcome he desires.
“I think the people that have run CNN for the last, long period of time are a disgrace,” said Trump, who accused them of “spreading poison” and “lies.” The President of the United States trying to assert control over the future of a news outlet may not be surprising, with Trump in the White House, but it is still shocking.
The Zucker Years
While Trump appeared on CNN during the early days of his 2016 presidential run, and his rallies were taken live, the Republican candidate later soured to the network’s coverage. “Your organization is terrible, and I am not going to give you a question. You are fake news,” he told CNN correspondent Jim Acosta in January 2017, setting the tone for a combative four years.
As anchors, reporters and fact-checkers challenged Trump on a regular basis, the president lashed out at the network and its then-chief, Jeff Zucker — the same executive who helped make Trump a reality-TV star years earlier through NBC’s “The Apprentice.”
Zucker went all in on Trump’s presidency, telling the New York Times in 2017 it was “the biggest story we could ever imagine.” Ratings and revenue went up, as pro-Trump panelists like Jeffrey Lord and Kayleigh McEnany became “characters in a drama,” as Zucker put it, defending the president nightly. Meanwhile, Trump and Acosta kept sparring, with the White House revoking the reporter’s press pass and setting off a legal fight.
Despite all the bad blood, Trump did not similarly take a public stand about CNN’s ownership as AT&T was acquiring then-parent company Time Warner. Though Zucker may have “interpreted” the president’s attacks “as an attempt to get him fired as a condition of the merger, as the Times later reported, Trump didn’t explicitly say on camera how CNN should change course as a result of a deal.
While Trump’s Justice Department sued to stop AT&T’s $85 billion acquisition, the company prevailed in 2018 and Zucker remained atop as CNN boss under the newly named Warner Media.
“He only cares about powerful outlets”
Trump may have had reason to believe CNN would ease up its adversarial tone following Zucker’s exit in February 2022 and Time Warner’s merger with Discovery months later to become Warner Bros. Discovery. John Malone, a powerful Discovery board member, and later at WBD, had recently called for CNN to “evolve back to the kind of journalism that it started with.”
WBD chief David Zaslav tapped Chris Licht to lead CNN, and he signaled plans to dial down partisanship, which eventually led to the exits of journalists known for checking Trump’s bogus claims, like John Harwood and Brian Stelter (who later returned). “I really hope that we don’t both-sides democracy,” one staffer told Vanity Fair amid the shakeup.
“The change is we will not do Trump 24/7 or let him dictate our agenda,” Licht told the Times in late 2022. But the new management clearly wanted a better relationship with Trump, producing a widely-panned town hall in May 2023 as he was running again for president. The event more closely resembled a Trump rally, as supporters cheered on the former president attacking “nasty” moderator Kaitlan Collins. The town hall spectacle, coupled with a disastrous Atlantic profile, led to Licht’s ouster the following month.
While his successor, former BBC and New York Times CEO Mark Thompson, has said that the network should not be “throwing punches” in its coverage of Trump’s administration, he’s urged journalists not to shy away “from holding power to account.” Trump continues to criticize CNN’s coverage and its stars, like Collins, who he recently called “stupid and nasty” after she questioned him about Venezuela.
“He only cares about powerful outlets,” one former staffer told TheWrap. “CNN has a lot of power, and that’s why he cares what they say.”
What Trump wants now
Even before Trump’s comments this week, there have been reports indicating he could get a revamped CNN as part of a WBD deal.
First, the Guardian reported that Larry Ellison, the billionaire Oracle co-founder and father of Paramount CEO David Ellison, had spoken to the White House about axing hosts Erin Burnett and Brianna Keilar. The Wall Street Journal reported that David Ellison told Trump officials he’d make sweeping changes to CNN, and on Wednesday, the paper framed the deal as “a second chance to take aim at CNN.” The Journal noted that “Department officials had sought changes to that [2018] deal, including either a spinoff of the television unit that included CNN or a sale of other assets,” which did not occur.
Since Netflix is only trying to acquire WBD’s film and streaming assets, the plan has been to fold CNN into Discovery Global, along with TNT, HGTV and The Food Network. Trump has reportedly “told allies he is open to considering a new deal for Warner in which CNN is completely sold off from the business and not spun off,” and also “has said that CNN should be run by people he believes are friendlier toward him and the Republican Party.”
Trump is close with Larry Ellison, a supporter, and has spoken about CBS News would be “fairer” under David Ellison, who is already putting his stamp on the news division through appointing Free Press co-founder Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief.
And yet, Trump lashed out at Paramount on Sunday in response to a “60 Minutes” interview with former ally turned “traitor” Marjorie Taylor Greene. “THEY ARE NO BETTER THAN THE OLD OWNERSHIP,” he wrote on Truth Social. And privately, according to the Journal, Trump has told associates he is “unhappy with CBS News, saying the network hasn’t done enough to moderate its coverage.
That’s the challenge in appeasing Trump, who will attack broadly supportive networks like Fox News if they run a segment, a poll or an interview he doesn’t like. So whoever winds up owning CNN, even if attempting to placate the president, is inevitably going to have to deal with the whims viewer-in-chief.
