WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump said Wednesday that he wants to ensure CNN gets new ownership as part of the Warner Bros Discovery sale, targeting the news outlet he has long feuded with.
Warner Bros Discovery has become the center of a bidding war between Paramount — led by CEO David Ellison, son of Trump ally Larry Ellison — and streaming giant Netflix.
Under Paramount’s offer, CNN would fall into the Ellisons’ hands. Under the Netflix deal, Warner Bros Discovery would sell off CNN and other cable news properties separately before closing the sale of its studio and streaming operations to Netflix.
“I think any deal should — it should be guaranteed and certain that CNN is part of it or sold separately,” Trump told business leaders Wednesday at the White House.
“I don’t think the people that are running that company right now and running CNN, which is a very dishonest group of people, I don’t think that should be allowed to continue. I think CNN should be sold along with everything else,” he added.
In a break from the norm, Trump has said he would be involved in the government’s decision to approve the deal, instead of leaving the question solely to the Department of Justice, as is typically the case.
US media reports indicate that both bidders — which Trump called “good companies” in his remarks — have lobbied the White House and Trump directly to support their bids.
Trump has long had a hostile relationship with CNN and other major news organizations, branding them “fake news” and attacking them repeatedly on social media.
His insistence that CNN end up in friendly hands appears to favor the Paramount bid — even though the Netflix deal would also involve selling off the news network to an as-yet-unknown buyer.
Since David Ellison took over Paramount earlier this year, the company has named journalist Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News.
Weiss is a prominent critic of what she calls bias in mainstream media, and the appointment won praise from conservatives who have long accused mainstream outlets of liberal bias.
Days before Ellison took the reins of CBS, “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” a late-night staple and major Trump critic, was canceled.
But Trump railed against Paramount and Ellison on Monday, posting on Truth Social that “THEY ARE NO BETTER THAN THE OLD OWNERSHIP” for allowing an interview with Marjorie Taylor Greene, a political ally-turned-critic.
Netflix, by contrast, is closely associated with Democrats, with founder Reed Hastings a major Democratic Party donor.
Trump demands CNN get new owners in Warner bidding war
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Trump demands CNN get new owners in Warner bidding war
- Under Paramount’s offer, CNN would fall into the Ellisons’ hands
Three-year heatwave bleached half the planet’s coral reefs: study
PARIS: A study published on Tuesday showed that more than half of the world’s coral reefs were bleached between 2014-2017 — a record-setting episode now being eclipsed by another series of devastating heatwaves.
The analysis concluded that 51 percent of the world’s reefs endured moderate or worse bleaching while 15 percent experienced significant mortality over the three-year period known as the “Third Global Bleaching Event.”
It was “by far the most severe and widespread coral bleaching event on record,” said Sean Connolly, one the study’s authors and a senior scientist at the Panama-based Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.
“And yet, reefs are currently experiencing an even more severe Fourth Event, which started in early 2023,” Connolly said in a statement.
When the sea overheats, corals eject the microscopic algae that provides their distinct color and food source.
Unless ocean temperatures return to more tolerable levels, bleached corals are unable to recover and eventually die of starvation.
“Our findings demonstrate that the impacts of ocean warming on coral reefs are accelerating, with the near certainty that ongoing warming will cause large-scale, possibly irreversible, degradation of these essential ecosystems,” said the study in the journal Nature Communications.
An international team of scientists analyzed data from more than 15,000 in-water and aerial surveys of reefs around the world over the 2014-2017 period.
They combined the data with satellite-based heat stress measurements and used statistical models to estimate how much bleaching occurred around the world.
No time to recover
The two previous global bleaching events, in 1998 and 2010, had lasted one year.
“2014-17 was the first record of a global coral bleaching event lasting much beyond a single year,” the study said.
“Ocean warming is increasing the frequency, extent, and severity of tropical-coral bleaching and mortality.”
Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, for instance, saw peak heat stress increase each year between 2014 and 2017.
“We are seeing that reefs don’t have time to recover properly before the next bleaching event occurs,” said Scott Heron, professor of physics at James Cook University in Australia.
A major scientific report last year warned that the world’s tropical coral reefs have likely reached a “tipping point” — a shift that could trigger massive and often permanent changes in the natural world.
The global scientific consensus is that most coral reefs would perish at warming of 1.5C above preindustrial levels — the ambitious, long-term limit countries agreed to pursue under the 2015 Paris climate accord.
Global temperatures exceeded 1.5C on average between 2023-2025, the European Union’s climate monitoring service, Copernicus, said last month.
“We are only just beginning to analyze bleaching and mortality observations from the current bleaching event,” Connolly told AFP.
“However the overall level of heat stress was extraordinarily high, especially in 2023-2024, comparable to or higher than what was observed in 2014-2017, at least in some regions,” he said.
He said the Pacific coastline of Panama experienced “dramatically worse heat stress than they had ever experienced before, and we observed considerable coral mortality.”
