Days after President Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav expressed enthusiasm about a new administration potentially creating greater “opportunity for consolidation” that would “provide a real positive and accelerated impact on this industry that’s needed.”
Zaslav did add that it’s “too early to tell” whether those hopes would materialize, but he missed a more significant disclaimer: that merger-and-acquisition dreams can quickly become nightmares if your news organization angers the president.
WBD, as the owner of CNN, would be one of the companies to face that risk, along with Paramount Global, owner of CBS News; Comcast, parent of NBC News and MSNBC; Disney, which owns ABC News; and, perhaps surprisingly, even Fox.