Warner Bros. Discovery, the parent company of CNN, is officially up for sale. That means whoever buys WBD will not only take over the country’s largest entertainment powerhouse, but will also become the new owner of CNN itself. That includes control of CNN’s newsroom, editorial direction, leadership, and political posture.
As an on-air commentator for CNN from 2018-2019, I know from experience that this sale is long overdue.
But it’s not just about CNN. WBD also owns the No. 1 movie studio in the world, the No. 3 ranked streaming service HBO Max, DC Comics, Discovery Channel, and an enormous portfolio of entertainment properties that reach hundreds of millions of people. Its new owner will determine if the content coming out of WBD remains leftist and woke (think HBO’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver and the aggressively woke/ideological DC Comics superhero film slate) or becomes fairer and more balanced.
TRUMP IS HOLDING THE MEDIA ACCOUNTABLE ONE SETTLEMENT AT A TIME
Bids were due on November 20, and we will soon learn which corporations and billionaires have stepped forward.
It’s no surprise as to why the Trump administration wants Paramount to be the ultimate buyer. The company has undergone sweeping changes this year after the Ellison family took effective control of the company, and the influence of Larry Ellison, an outspoken Trump donor, is already proving visible. For example, Paramount recently acquired The Free Press, the anti-woke media outlet founded by Bari Weiss, and named Weiss Editor-in-Chief of CBS News. As Sean Spicer put it, the Ellison-era changes “suggest Paramount is genuinely trying to rethink its editorial culture.”
But while Paramount is the best-case scenario, the problem is that it is only that — just one of many potential landing spots for WBD. There are many other rumored bidders, and most of the rest — among them: Netflix, Comcast, Amazon — will not do conservatives any favors. If any of them win, WBD and CNN would not simply remain biased but also be absorbed into an even more entrenched ideological machine.
Netflix, for example, is led by Reed Hastings, who donated $7 million to Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign and openly embraced the Democratic establishment. Netflix already negatively shapes the culture through its programming choices, from partisan docu-propaganda pieces like “The Social Dilemma” to its hyper-politicized teen and children’s content designed around progressive social messaging, and through recommendation algorithms that reward the same pieces of media.
Comcast is not any better. President Trump has repeatedly blasted Comcast CEO Brian Roberts as a disgrace to broadcasting, pointing specifically to the company’s ownership of and mismanagement of the politically-charged NBC and MSNBC. Enough said.
Amazon may be the most alarming rumored bidder of all. Trump’s FTC chairman, Andrew Ferguson, and DOJ antitrust chief, Gail Slater, have already taken a hard line against the practices of the company, which dominates American life through retail, cloud computing, book distribution, grocery delivery, pharmacy services, home surveillance devices, and logistics systems. It decides what people buy, how they buy it, and increasingly what they read and watch. Adding the number one Hollywood studio and CNN to that empire would create unprecedented centralized influence over both consumer behavior and political perception.
But this raises the unavoidable question: what can the Trump administration actually do to right the WBD ship?
The White House cannot dictate which buyer WBD selects. It cannot order the board to choose Paramount or forbid them from choosing from the likes of Comcast or Amazon.
But what the Trump administration can do is ensure that whoever wins is not violating federal antitrust laws or creating a media power monopoly that harms consumers, suppresses competition, or tightens political control over the information economy.
With a senior Trump official telling the New York Post that who owns WBD is “very important” to this administration and that WBD must think very carefully before making a decision, it appears that the administration will not be afraid to intervene to shape the outcome.
That could mean blocking the sale of WBD to a problematic company outright, or it could mean mandating structural divestitures, forcing transparency around recommendation algorithms, stipulating restrictions on certain types of data integration, or even mandating spinoffs that prevent the domination of both distribution and content creation.
All of this points to one thing: opportunity.
HERE’S WHO IS BIDDING ON WARNER BROS DISCOVERY
Even if the Trump administration cannot choose who wins the WBD bid, it can shape the terms of victory and ensure America’s media ecosystem becomes less consolidated, opaque, and ideologically uniform than it was before.
And in the fight for America’s cultural future, that may be the most important power of all.
Steve Cortes is president of the League of American Workers and senior political adviser to Catholic Vote. He is a former senior adviser to President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance and a former Fox News commentator.
