The biggest player in the unfolding drama surrounding the megasale of Warner Bros. Discovery isn’t one of the giant companies competing to buy it. It’s President Donald Trump, whose preferences and personal relationships are poised to influence the outcome of this sale of Hollywood and media assets.
“I will be involved,” Trump declared on Sunday in the wake of Netflix’s $83 billion bid for Warner Bros. Discovery — and before Paramount Skydance launched a $103 billion counteroffer Monday morning.
Trump’s statement is ominous. The president of the United States doesn’t usually get directly involved in who buys what in the media. That kind of intervention is typically reserved for authoritarians such as Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán. During almost 16 years in power, Orbán — a Trump ally — and his Fidesz party have twisted Hungary’s news media into reliable instruments of state power by steering deals into friendly hands.
Trump has already shown an Orbán-like tendency to use government power to reward friends, injure perceived enemies and tilt the media to his advantage.
America isn’t Hungary; its information landscape is far bigger and more complex. But Trump has already shown an Orbán-like tendency to use government power to reward friends, injure perceived enemies and tilt the media to his advantage. He appears determined to do so again with Wall Street’s most-watched deal.
After Warner Bros. Discovery — a conglomerate that owns CNN, HBO and the famed movie and TV studio — put itself up for sale in October, it quickly attracted interest from three fellow entertainment and media behemoths: Netflix, Paramount and Comcast Corp. (MS NOW is part of Versant Media, a company being spun off from Comcast as of Jan. 1.)
The outcome of the sale depends not just on the payout but on the conclusion of a lengthy government antitrust review. That means much is riding on whom Trump favors, and most likely on whatever promises he can extract in exchange for his blessing. He said on Sunday that an acquisition by Netflix “could be a problem,” given how much of the streaming market Netflix would control after adding HBO Max.
Paramount would also be greatly enlarged by buying Warner Bros. Discovery, especially by combining CNN with Paramount’s CBS News. But crucially, Paramount is controlled by Larry and David Ellison, the father-son billionaires Trump has described as “friends and big supporters.” David Ellison previously headed Skydance Media, which completed its long-stalled takeover of Paramount in July only after agreeing to settle Trump’s lawsuit against CBS’ “60 Minutes” by paying Trump $16 million.
Much has been written about Trump’s coziness with the Ellisons: He reportedly pushed David Ellison and Paramount to reboot the “Rush Hour” movie franchise two decades after its last installment. The movie will be directed by Brett Ratner, the previously canceled director who also did an upcoming documentary about Melania Trump, for which Amazon paid a reported $40 million to the first lady’s production company.
Paramount’s bid is backed by a private equity firm led by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, and supported by national investment funds from such Trump allies as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar.
However it plays out, this is just the latest major media sale effectively directed by Trump. In September, he announced that a group of wealthy investors was prepared to acquire the American assets of TikTok, the social media platform owned by a company based in Beijing. Trump had delayed the congressionally mandated closure of TikTok four times before approving the sale to this favored group, from which the president reportedly sought a multibillion-dollar “finder’s fee” for the U.S. Treasury. The group includes supporters, advisers and donors of the president including tech billionaire Marc Andreessen, Fox’s Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, GOP megadonor Jeff Yass and … Larry Ellison.
Orban’s most effective tactic in bending the media and culture to his will has been in directing the sale of independent or opposition outlets to political allies. So how does all of this echo Orbán? Upon reaching power for the second time in 2010, Orbán stacked his country’s media regulatory agencies with loyalists and approved new powers to punish and even shutter outlets. (Trump appointed his own activist chairman at the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr.) Orbán purged hundreds of staffers from his nation’s public service broadcaster. (Trump pushed Congress to defund PBS, NPR and hundreds of smaller outlets across the country and has decimated the government-funded Voice of America.) Orbán replaced ousted media officials with compliant managers. (Trump installed MAGA figure Kari Lake at the entity that oversees VOA.) The parallels intersected last month when the U.S. shut down Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Hungarian service, an independent news source inside Hungary. Orbán’s most effective tactic in bending the media and culture to his will has been in directing the sale of independent or opposition outlets to political allies. The list includes Hungary’s leading opposition newspaper, Népszabadság, the independent news channel Hir TV, prominent news sites Origo and Index, and most recently the popular tabloid Blikk. In 2018, media owners loyal to Orbán consolidated hundreds of radio stations, cable news channels, newspapers and websites into a private organization called the Central European Press and Media Foundation. Orbán’s long campaign against Hungary’s news industry has left that nation with a facade of media diversity — a requirement for Hungary’s continued membership in the European Union — but with most of the prominent news sources firmly in the hands of pro-government oligarchs. Reporters Without Borders, the international press-advocacy group, estimates that Orbán’s Fidesz party controls about 80% of Hungary’s media market “thanks to political and economic maneuvers and the buyout of media outlets by oligarchs” loyal to the party. American press advocates see Orbán as a model for Trump in manipulating major media deals, including the sale of Warner Bros. Discovery. “He seems to have learned this particular lesson from Orbán, who paved a path for his rich friends to buy up local outlets and transform their newsrooms into mouthpieces for the regime,” says Tim Karr, senior director of the media advocacy group Free Press. “For many of these owners, caving to a strongman is simply the cost of doing business. … If we’ve learned anything from this Orbán-Trump approach, it’s that the consolidation of media ownership is a prerequisite for the consolidation of political power.” It remains to be seen what Netflix or Paramount might offer to attain Trump’s blessing. An early glimpse of what currying favor could look like might have arrived in October, when the White House disclosed the donors to Trump’s $300 million ballroom project. Although Comcast, also the parent company of NBC News, has since bowed out of the battle for Netflix, its contribution to Trump’s ballroom fund raised eyebrows among some journalists. A down payment for the future, perhaps.
Paul Farhi is a former media reporter for The Washington Post, where he was a staff writer for more than 35 years. He writes about the media industry for The Atlantic, The Daily Beast and Columbia Journalism Review, among other outlets. 
