Jack Crosbie
View all posts by Jack Crosbie May 6, 2026
Ted Turner. Rick Diamond/Getty Images Ted Turner, the founder of CNN, died today at 87. True to form, President Donald Trump wasted no time in linking Turner’s death to his greater political plan.
After selling CNN in 1996, Turner, Trump wrote in a post on TruthSocial, “was personally devastated by the Deal because the new ownership took CNN, his ‘baby,’ and destroyed it. It became woke, and everything that he is not all about.”
But then the president moved from personal and historical remembrance to a more clear indication of what he wants for the industry that Turner irrevocably shaped.
“Maybe the new buyers, wonderful people, will be able to bring it back to its former credibility and glory,” Trump wrote.
Trump is referring to the sale of Warner Brothers-Discovery to Paramount-Skydance, which already owns CBS News as well as a massive host of other media properties. The Paramount-Skydance merger went through with explicit pressure from Trump, and now the president has made it clear that he enthusiastically supports further consolidation of the country’s already somewhat-homogenous media landscape.
The money behind all this comes from a familiar place: Oracle founder and key Trump ally Larry Ellison. Ellison’s son David Ellison has been overseeing the media wings of the family’s empire since the merger, and has pulled the various networks into far more Trump-sympathetic territory. CBS News, for instance, has a new leader, the conservative new-media pioneer Bari Weiss, who was installed after Ellison bought her news and commentary site The Free Press. Trump has a long-standing feud with CNN, which means that a sympathetic Ellison takeover is a major victory for Trump personally. The Ellisons have made that explicitly clear by throwing a party in Trump’s honor as they waited for final sign-off on the Warner Brothers-Discovery deal.
