TRUMP : “CNN SHOULD BE SOLD”

Thu 11 December 2025:

US President Donald Trump said Wednesday that CNN should be sold as its parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery, faces competing acquisition bids.

“I think CNN should be sold, because I think the people that are running CNN right now are either corrupt or incompetent,” he told journalists.

Trump also said CNN should be sold “along with everything else,” adding: “I don’t think they should be entrusted with running CNN any longer. So I think any deal should — it should be guaranteed and certain that CNN is part of it or sold separately.”

The US president has repeatedly criticized the network, accusing it of biased coverage and calling it “fake news.”

Competition for Warner Bros. Discovery has intensified in recent weeks. Netflix announced last week that it reached an agreement to acquire Warner Bros., including its film and television studios, HBO and the HBO Max streaming platform, in a deal worth $72 billion in equity value and $82.7 billion in total company value.

Paramount later submitted a counteroffer to buy all Warner Bros. Discovery shares for $30 per share in cash, valuing the company at $108.4 billion in enterprise terms. The offer covers all business segments, including Global Networks, and provides around $18 billion more in cash to shareholders than Netflix’s bid.

Trump’s second-term media war—echoing his “fake news” era—has intensified with tools, tirades, and takedowns aimed at “97% negative” coverage.

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Pulling funding, applying pressure

The fourth estate’s turn started in March, when Trump stripped federal funding from Voice of America, a public broadcasting service with a global reach, because it was “anti-Trump” and “radical”.

These cuts also hit two other projections of American soft power, Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia.

In July, he cut funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) in a move that ended all federal support for National Public Radio, the Public Broadcasting service and their member stations.

The US media is now in a deep crisis of the sort that observers of creeping autocracy in places such as Hungary might find familiar. For the Paramount deal is not alone. The settlement follows another, six months ago, when Disney – which owns ABC News – put to bed a legal claim over how George Stephanopoulos, one of its top news anchors, described the president’s sexual assault of the magazine writer E Jean Carroll. Again, the payment was $16m.

He is even pursuing a legal claim against a relatively tiny newspaper for printing a poll he didn’t like: Trump’s lawsuit against the Iowa pollster Ann Selzer accuses her and the Des Moines Register of fraud, after she conducted a poll right before the 2024 election that showed Kamala Harris leading in Iowa, a state which she did not ultimately win.

Perhaps most chilling has been Trump’s attack on the Associated Press, the news agency that is generally relied on to announce the winners and losers of individual elections, up to and including the presidency. When Trump ordered the Gulf of Mexico renamed to “Gulf of America”, and the AP continued to use both names – noting that the rest of the world still uses the original – Trump jumped on it as a pretext to ban AP reporters from the White House.

The AP has sued, but whatever the result, Trump’s attempt to undermine the impartiality credentials of an organisation that is crucial to letting the American people know who their next president is may prove even more dangerous in the long run. And while AP remains banned, official coverage of White House activities has been opened to various new media individuals and groups with no history of impartial journalism at all, and who appear to be selected entirely for their willingness to ask Trump sycophantic questions.

SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES

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