Days after it made a deal with the streamer Netflix came a hostile bid by Paramount-Skydance to acquire the venerable media conglomerate that owns CBS, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon and has powerful movie studios — leaving Warner Bros Discovery’s future in doubt.
Paramount offered $108bn, compared to Netflix’s $82.7bn. Netflix’s strategy sparked a widespread antitrust alarm on the left, where progressives including Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, a Democratic presidential candidate who has called for breaking up tech companies and developing tougher antimonopoly regulations, said that it would cut off access for consumers and filmmakers in Hollywood. It went on to say that the White House would be watching the deal very, very closely.
Paramount, meanwhile was stymied in its pursuit of Warner Bros Discovery amid alleged conflict of interest re Trump administration and freedom-of-expression concerns in the US.
Those follow other recent changes at CBS News, where a conservative opinion writer was named the top boss and there have been calls for critical coverage of Trump, including by late-night show hosts.
Among Paramount’s sources of funding is Jared Kushner’s venture capital firm Affinity Partners as well as investments from both Saudi and Qatari sovereign funds. Kushner is married to Trump’s daughter Ivanka, and worked as an adviser during the first Trump administration.
Just in: Warner Bros Discovery is planning to recommend to its shareholders that they reject Paramount’s $108bn hostile bid. WBD is planning to outline four major criticisms of Paramount’s offer in its filing. https://t.co/uRpvttZ3Sd pic.twitter.com/Hqj7jhprBC
— Financial Times (@FT) December 16, 2025
“If you were teaching a class at business school on conflicts of interest, this would be Exhibit A,” Nell Minow, the chair of ValueEdge Advisors in Portland, Maine, told the Reuters news agency.
Those comments came a day after Trump told reporters “neither Paramount nor Netflix are friends of mine” and that he did not speak with Kushner about the deal.
But only last week Trump indicated to reporters that he would have input on whether the Warner Bros-Netflix merger would happen.
“I will be in that decision,” Trump told reporters as he arrived at the Kennedy Center for its annual awards show.
The Kushner tie isn’t the only conflict hanging over the hostile takeover. Paramount is now owned and run by David Ellison, the son of the billionaire Larry Ellison, cofounder of Oracle and close ally to the president.
In the weeks leading up to Paramount’s Skydance merger, its CBS News unit settled a lawsuit that Trump had brought over an interview it conducted with Kamala Harris when she was preparing her 2020 bid for president and which he said had been doctored.
The network called allegations baseless, but nonetheless settled for $16m. In the aftermath of that development Bill Owens, a producer on 60 Minutes alongside Yesner which was at the centre of Trump’s barbs resigned. Owens had been “lost in the independence from corporate”, National Public Radio said, citing two CBS employees.
Days later, Stephen Colbert, the late night host of CBS too, referred to the settlement as a ‘bribe’ (on his show), and soon after the company announced The Late Show – which he has hosted since 2015 – would be cancelled in 2026.
While the show was losing money, its timing for termination was widely considered political.
A few weeks later, Paramount’s deal with Skydance was finalized. Since then, CBS News — which the president has long alleged was unfair in its coverage of him — has taken a string of actions that critics said were more in line with what Trump would prefer.
That included the hiring of ombudsman Ken Weinstein, who was supposed to ensure fairness and adjudicate claims of bias. His nomination, too, has been seen as a partisan one. Weinstein is a former nominee to be ambassador to Japan during Trump’s first term and has no media experience.
In October, Paramount bought The Free Press, a conservative publication, for $150m and installed its founder Bari Weiss as CBS’s head of content (despite no history in TV).
“They hired an opinion columnist, Bari Weiss, to run a news network and paid her enough [so that] they could have kept around lots of the journalists they laid off. Not because operating a successful Substack has somehow prepared her to run a sprawling broadcast news giant, but rather because she and they — and, to a significant extent, Trump — share the same politics,” Seth Stern, director of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation said to Al Jazeera.”
Since she took the position, high-profile anchors and producers have left. The other side is in disarray: The show’s anchor, Maurice DuBois, as well as its standards and practices executive, Claudia Milne, and John Dickerson, co-anchor of the CBS Evening News — who has been with the network since 2009 — all said they were leaving.
CBS News said on Wednesday that Tony Dokoupil would be the co-anchor of its flagship evening news program. Dokoupil had been co-anchoring CBS Mornings and has been with the network since 2016.
In August, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was interviewed by Margaret Brennan, moderator of another leading CBS show, Face the Nation (Face the Nation is a Sunday public affairs program). The interview was condensed, and has been edited for time. The administration objected, and the network revised its policy.
But that order was not the one 60 Minutes received. In October, CBS News veteran Norah O’Donnell asked the president about his decision to pardon Binance’s founder Changpeng Zhao. Zhao had pleaded guilty to money laundering in 2023 but then started doing business with the Trump family’s cryptocurrency company, World Liberty Financial.
The network chose not to broadcast it that portion of the segment.”That seems strikingly close to the charge made by Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer, as far back last year, that a Harris interview (not Sanders) was “doctored”.
The network also cut out the president’s comments on the settlement.
“No, no, 60 Minutes had given me a lotta money. And you don’t have to put this on, because I’m not looking to embarrass you,” Trump said – according to the transcript of the full 73-minute interview published online – “but when I watch your show, maybe they do it with other shows.”
The network did as the president asked. It did not broadcast the portion of the interview.
The president threatens the network but also praises the new management’s reported friendliness.
The President lashed out on social media after 60 Minutes broadcast an interview with outgoing Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has emerged over recent weeks as more of a critic of the president.
