How Warner Bros. sale could affect CNN’s future — and the news you watch
A nearly finalized media deal is setting up one family to control more media companies than ever in American media history. The family’s close ties to President Donald Trump are also raising concerns that his influence could impact a news company Trump has targeted in the past.
In May 2025, Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns major networks like CNN and HBO, announced it would put itself up for sale. Paramount Skydance and Netflix became prospective buyers, and a bidding war began in October.
On Thursday, however, it appeared the war was over after Warner Bros. Discovery officials announced they preferred Paramount’s offer to Netflix’s, despite previously favoring the Netflix bid. Netflix later said it wouldn’t raise its offer to match Paramount’s, declared the deal to be “no longer financially attractive,” and walked.
The prospective Paramount purchase has left many at Warner Bros. nervous. The merger would almost guarantee mass layoffs because of redundancies between the two companies.
And others — especially at CNN, the first U.S. 24-hour cable news network — are worried about the relationship between Paramount CEO David Ellison’s family and Trump, especially in light of changes at CBS News after Ellison bought its parent company.
What would Paramount control?
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CNN was the first television network to provide 24-hour news coverage, debuting on June 1, 1980.
If it receives regulatory approval, the deal will give Paramount and the Ellisons control over a massive media empire. Warner Bros. platforms alone are viewed about 270 million times a month between its cable channels and streaming service.
Paramount has agreed to pay about $111 billion for control of media groups like HBO, HBO Max, Warner Bros. Pictures and DC Studios., along with the cable networks CNN, TNT, TBS, Discovery and HGTV.
Netflix previously offered about $82 billion for some of Warner Bros.’ premium assets, including HBO and DC Studios. Under that deal, CNN and the other cable networks would have been spun into a new company, Discovery Global.
The deal requires the approval of Warner Bros.’s shareholders. But with Netflix backing out, it is the only offer on the table.
The merger may also face regulatory scrutiny. CNN reports that some states’ attorneys general may take issue with the creation of another massive media conglomerate.
And because CBS News and CNN would have common ownership, the deal could trigger antitrust scrutiny from the Department of Justice or the Federal Trade Commission. However, some analysts think the Ellisons’ ties to Trump may clear any potential hurdles — if they agree to make CNN’s coverage friendlier to the White House.
“In the climate of politically weaponized antitrust at the DOJ and FTC, I could see White House interference that makes merger approval conditional on changes at CNN,” Diana Moss, vice president and director of competition policy at the Progressive Policy Institute, told Deadline. “This would be a terrible outcome for antitrust, competition, and consumers, as we have seen with other mergers.”
Who are the Ellisons?
While David Ellison is the CEO and the man making most of the public choices at Paramount, his father Larry Ellison is the company’s main financial backer.
Larry Ellison has not always been as closely associated with politics as he is now. Previously, he had donated to both parties, including to former President Bill Clinton, whom he called “an extraordinary human being.”
But during the Obama administration, he began shifting more toward the right, CNN reports. During the 2016 primaries, Larry Ellison gave tens of millions of dollars to now Secretary of State Marco Rubio for his presidential campaign. However, after Rubio dropped out, Larry Ellison didn’t back either Trump or former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
In 2020, he hosted a fundraiser for Trump’s re-election campaign and joined a White House advisory group to help the economy during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I don’t think [Trump’s] the devil—I support him and want him to do well,” Ellison told Forbes at the time.
Larry Ellison did not donate to or endorse Trump in the 2024 elections, according to CNN. However, the day after Trump’s second inauguration, Ellison joined Trump at the White House, along with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, to announce Stargate, an initiative to expand artificial intelligence infrastructure in the U.S.
“In the case of Larry, it’s well beyond technology, he’s sort of CEO of everything,” Trump said at the announcement.
David Ellison founded Skydance in 2010 and first made a bid for Paramount in early 2024. The Ellisons expected to finalize the merger within a year. However, the review process became entangled by allegations of political interference stemming from a lawsuit Trump filed, accusing CBS News of editing an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris during the 2024 campaign to make her look better. The lawsuit — which many media-law experts described as frivolous — was one of many Trump has filed against media companies in the past two years.
Paramount settled Trump’s suit for $16 million as it sought approval of the Skydance merger. Skydance took an extra step, telling the president it would perform a “comprehensive review of CBS” after the merger. Two days later, the FTC approved the deal.
What has happened at CBS News?
David Ellison has made significant changes across CBS, in both its entertainment and news divisions. Days after the deal closed, the network canceled Stephen Colbert’s “The Late Show,” insisting the decision was purely financial, even though Colbert — a frequent critic of Trump’s — had called the lawsuit settlement “a big fat bribe.”
Longtime “60 Minutes” executive producer Bill Owens resigned from the program, citing a threat to editorial independence. Then, in October 2025, David Ellison announced hired opinion journalist Bari Weiss as the editor-in-chief for CBS News. The decision was highly controversial since Weiss had no experience in broadcasting or in managing an organization as large as CBS News. She most recently had created a right-leaning opinion website called The Free Press.
One of Weiss’ first moves was to overhaul the CBS Evening News, replacing anchors John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois with Tony Dokoupil. Before he took the anchor’s chair, Dokoupil said he planned to speak against “elites” and “legacy media.”
The biggest flashpoint of Weiss’ tenure thus far was the pulling of a “60 Minutes” segment three hours before it was scheduled to air. The story, about a notorious prison in El Salvador where the Trump administration has sent unauthorized immigrants, had been previously approved by the network’s editors and lawyers. Weiss said she had issues with some of the story’s wording and insisted that it needed an interview with a White House official to balance the coverage. However, the White House had already refused to talk.
Sharyn Alfonsi, the “60 Minutes” correspondent who reported the story, said that delaying the story “is not an editorial decision, it is a political one.”
What could this mean for CNN?
As Netflix and Paramount negotiated with Warner Bros., The Guardian reported that Larry Ellison had spoken to Trump about who the president would want fired from CNN if Paramount won the bidding contest. The publication reported that Trump had singled out anchors Erin Burnett and Brianna Keilar during the discussion.
As the Paramount-Warner Bros. deal began to solidify this week, the mood at CNN soured. Variety reported staff is “devastated” and that “no one is happy.”
However, CNN management has tried to temper fears. CNN chairman and CEO Mark Thompson asked employees not to “jump to conclusions” and to “continue to focus on delivering the best possible journalism.”
There are also ethical concerns about the fact that about $24 billion of the deal is coming from Saudi Arabian financiers, who are connected to the Saudi government, which orchestrated the killing of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.
Former CNN anchor Jim Acosta criticized the deal in a post on X. He said free speech is at risk.
“As I’ve been warning, America now has state-compromised media,” he wrote. “When 60 Min or CNN is in trouble, we’re all in trouble. Trump has cracked the code in how to hurt the press. Free speech is now at risk. MAGA corporations must not control the news. Support independent media.”
Ella Rae Greene, Editor In Chief
