President Donald Trump said Wednesday he thinks it's "imperative" that CNN is sold as its parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery, gears up for a proposed merger with Netflix and faces a hostile takeover bid from Paramount.
"I think CNN should be sold, because I think the people that are running CNN right now are either corrupt or incompetent," Trump told reporters during a roundtable with business executives at the White House.
"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," he added. "I think CNN should be sold along with everything else."
Trump was responding to a question about changes he would like to see to the cable news network after The Wall Street Journal reported Monday, citing people familiar with the matter, that Paramount CEO David Ellison visited Trump in Washington and said he would make significant changes to CNN. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday.
"I will be probably involved, maybe involved in the decision. It depends. You have some good companies bidding on it," Trump said at the White House event before he launched into his broader criticism of CNN's leadership.
Warner Bros. Discovery said last week that it had agreed to sell its movie, television and streaming assets to Netflix in a $72 billion deal, which would rise to more than $82 billion when debt is factored in, following bids from Paramount Skydance and Comcast, which owns NBCUniversal, the parent company of NBC News.
The Netflix deal would not include cable channels owned by Warner Bros. Discovery, such as CNN and TNT.
CNN, Paramount, Warner Bros. Discovery and Netflix did not immediately respond to requests for comment Wednesday on Trump’s remarks.
Trump waded into the merger plans Sunday, when he said the deal with Netflix “could be a problem” because of issues of the resulting market share. The next day, Paramount initiated a hostile bid, offering shareholders $30 per share. That bid will be partly backed by funding from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, as well as Affinity Partners, an investment firm founded by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.
Asked during a roundtable Monday about the battle over Warner Bros. Discovery, Trump said: "None of them are particularly great friends of mine, you know; just, I want to, I want to do what’s right."
If federal regulators approve the deal with Netflix, channels like CNN and TNT would become part of a separate public company.
At Wednesday's event, Trump disparaged a CNN reporter who asked him about the Defense Department’s releasing video from a second strike on an alleged drug vessel in September, which sparked inquiries.
"You must be CNN," Trump said. "You know you work for the Democrats," he said, adding, "You're basically an arm of the Democrat Party."
Trump has frequently locked horns with CNN over its coverage of him. During his first term, the White House revoked the press pass of Jim Acosta, then a CNN correspondent, after he pressed Trump about immigration and special counsel Robert Mueller's probe of his 2016 presidential campaign. After a brief court battle, the White House restored Acosta's press access.
In 2022, Trump filed a defamation lawsuit that accused CNN of slandering him over his false claims about the 2020 election. It was dismissed less than a year later, and his attempt to revive the case this year was rejected by an appeals court.
