After Netflix made a big play to buy most of CNN’s parent company, journalists and executives at the news network thought they had dodged a bullet. One week later, it’s pretty clear they hadn’t.

Two questions remain: Why did they think that in the first place? And what’s ahead?

Netflix, which is already the nation’s leading streamer, had struck a deal to acquire the movie studios, archives, intellectual property and streaming services of CNN’s parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery.

But Netflix did not want to become Newsflix. CNN and its sister cable channels were to be spun off in a separate company. Inside CNN, that seemed like good news.

“It will enable us to continue to roll out our strategy to secure a great future for CNN by successfully navigating our digital transition,” Mark Thompson, the chairman and CEO of CNN Worldwide, wrote in a memo to staff shortly after Warner said it would accept the Netflix offer.

Mark Thompson, chairman and CEO of CNN Worldwide, speaks onstage during Warner Bros. Discovery Upfront 2024 on May 15, 2024 in New York City.

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Staffers recalled the mass layoffs caused when new corporate owners at Warner canceled the network’s streaming service CNN+ in April 2022, just a month after it launched. They say they had been heartened to think their new efforts might actually get off the ground.

But in the new plan, as part of a corporate family of fading cable channels loaded with debt from the merger that created Warner Bros. Discovery, CNN’s fate would remain entirely up for grabs.

And President Trump, who has long called networks such as CNN fake news and long sought to taunt or toss out CNN’s reporters, now wants a deciding role in the network’s future.

“I think the people that have run CNN for the last long period of time are a disgrace,” Trump said Wednesday at the White House in response to a question from a Daily Mail reporter. “I think it’s imperative that CNN be sold.”

This account is based on interviews with seven current and former CNN staffers, including journalists and executives. They spoke on condition they not be named due to the uncertainty surrounding the network’s future and, for those still at CNN, their jobs.

CNN put in play by corporate maneuvers

CNN’s status was put in play this past summer, when Warner CEO David Zaslav announced the company would split in two. Unsolicited, David Ellison, backed by his billionaire father Larry, bid for the entire company. Zaslav turned them down. They kept at it. He finally put the company up for auction.

Larry Ellison is the co-founder of Oracle, one of the richest people on the planet, and an ally of Trump. David is the head of Skydance, a Hollywood production company. Since last summer, he’s also the head of Paramount Global, which includes CBS, Paramount Studios and other properties.

Billionaire and Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison shares a laugh with President Trump as Ellison stands on a stool at a news conference at the White House on Jan. 21, 2025. Ellison’s son David is making a hostile bid for Warner Bros. Discovery.

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Presidents do not – or are not supposed to – play a role in anti-trust decisions. They are typically handled by Justice Department officials or semi-autonomous regulatory agencies.

Yet to get the sale of Paramount to the finish line, its prior ownership paid $16 million to settle a lawsuit Trump filed against CBS’s 60 Minutes – a lawsuit that outside legal observers considered flimsy. The company also announced the end of the late night show of longtime Trump critic and satirist Stephen Colbert.

The Federal Communications Commission approved the Ellisons’ takeover of Paramount, required because the company owns 28 local television stations and needed government signoff to allow the transfer of their broadcast licenses.

With David Ellison now at the helm of CBS, there have been more changes that appear to be aimed at responding to Trump’s criticism of the network and to appeal to conservatives, according to four people at CBS. (They spoke on condition of anonymity to characterize sensitive corporate matters.)

Ellison named Kenneth Weinstein, a former head of a conservative think tank, as ombudsman at CBS News and he also selected Bari Weiss, the founder of the right-of-center Free Press, as the network’s editor in chief. Ellison also fulfilled pledges to scrap DEI initiatives at the network.

Despite feeling of relief, CNN still vulnerable

Hence the sigh of relief inside CNN when news broke of Netflix and Warner’s deal: many of CNN’s journalists didn’t want the political implications of having Paramount as owner. Nor did they want to merge with CBS, which would entail massive job losses.

Yet the Netflix deal, assuming it is consummated, would leave CNN and its sister channels exposed, vulnerable to purchase by someone else. Maybe a local TV giant like Nexstar or Sinclair Broadcast Group, which have a center-right and a hard right orientation, respectively, would want to acquire it. Maybe an investment fund would.

It is just as likely Paramount itself would give it another go – and pick up the former Warner channels on the cheap. Ellison had suggested they were worth $1 a share. (He is currently offering $30 a share for the whole company.) And now, among some staffers at CNN, there’s a sense of growing dread.

Trump’s comments Wednesday about the network’s leadership were “extremely unprecedented, perhaps not surprising, coming from President Trump, given his long dislike for any journalism that holds him accountable,” CNN anchor Jake Tapper said on his show Wednesday in a clip he reposted on social media. “He made it so clear that the fate of CNN is what’s driving his view and his potential involvement [in] this potential transaction when it comes to who buys Warner Bros. Discovery.”

Tapper’s on-air guest was former CNN reporter Oliver Darcy, founder of the media newsletter Status. He told Tapper that Trump was “a thin-skinned aspiring autocrat who wants to seize control of the media. And he wants an obedient press.”

David Ellison has mounted a hostile takeover bid for Warner Bros. Discovery. Here, the Paramount Skydance CEO speaks during the Bloomberg Screentime conference in Los Angeles on Oct. 9, 2025.

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Paramount seeks to build trust as it seeks to bulk up

As this week has proven, the Ellisons are far from finished in their pursuit of the entire company. They upped their offer a bit. They pledged to unify big studios and beef up streaming, sports rights and cable properties to take on the likes of Netflix. They promised to save Hollywood from being swallowed by the giant streamer. The Ellisons are seeking to rally the creator class on their behalf.

Having been frozen out by Warner chief Zaslav, Paramount pitched itself to Warner’s investors as the logical and more profitable choice — backed by far more cash up front than Netflix’s offer. Paramount’s new chief legal officer is Makan Delrahim, perhaps best known as the head of the U.S. Justice Department’s antitrust division during Trump’s first term in office. Ironically, in office Delrahim unsuccessfully sought to block AT&T from acquiring CNN and its then-corporate parent.

AT&T may have wished Delrahim had succeeded in court; it spun off its media holdings to merge them with Discovery several years later, creating Warner Bros. Discovery.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, is among the lawmakers who have raised questions about media consolidation on bids from both Netflix and Paramount.

“We’ve got two already giant companies, both of which have these big streaming services,” Warren said Thursday on NPR’s Morning Edition. “We’re going to spend a bazillion dollars to do this. But we’re going to make even more bazillions of dollars.

“And how do they plan to do that?” she asked rhetorically. “Well, there’s only two places to go. They plan to do it by squeezing the workers. That is, there’ll be fewer places to pitch your movie. There’ll be fewer places to be a makeup artist or to drive trucks for. And they plan to squeeze the consumers. And they do that, of course, by raising prices.”

Major investors, major ties to Trump

David Ellison argues the administration will more readily approve Paramount than Netflix. And he’s not been shy about touting his family’s ties to Trump. “I’m incredibly grateful for the relationship that I have with the President, and I also believe he believes in competition,” Ellison told CNBC earlier this week. Earlier this year, Trump arranged for Larry Ellison to receive a significant stake in the U.S. version of TikTok.

Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia holds a joint press conference with President Trump in the Oval Office of the White House on Nov. 18, 2025.

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As for the financing of the Paramount deal: According to the small print of Paramount’s filings with federal financial regulators, it involves the Public Investment Fund of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, controlled by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, an ally of the president who was implicated in the assassination of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. At least two Republican senators said after classified briefings they believed Prince Mohammad was involved in the hit. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence concluded the prince approved an operation to capture or kill Khashoggi.

Other investment partners in the Paramount bid include the L’imad Holding Co. PJSC of Abu Dhabi, the Qatar Investment Authority and the U.S. investment fund Affinity Partners. The last of those funds is controlled by Jared Kushner — the president’s son-in-law and former White House adviser. In its securities filing, Paramount said all agreed to foreswear any claim to a seat on the board of directors.

In interviews, CNN staffers recoiled at the idea that the Saudi royal or the Trump in-law would have any ownership stake in the network – even given the promises they would keep their distance.

“They could be in it purely for profit,” says Kelly Shue, a finance professor at the Yale School of Management said of the investors. “But it is also disturbing that they could control media framing and news.”

That’s the appeal for Trump.

When a reporter for ABC News questioned Prince Mohammad about Khashoggi and the Saudi involvement in the September 2001 terror strikes on the U.S in an Oval Office appearance last month, Trump attacked her for being “insubordinate” — as though she worked for him somehow.

Similarly, on Wednesday, when Trump was asked about the release of a video showing the U.S. strikes on Venezuelan vessels that his Defense Department claims are operated by terrorists, he turned his ire on the questioner.

“I thought that issue was dead. I’m surprised. You must be with CNN,” Trump said to the reporter, who indeed was with CNN. “You know you work for the Democrats, don’t you? You’re basically an arm of the Democrat party.”

With that, Trump shut down questions from all reporters present.

Paramount’s current offer to buy Warner is good through Jan. 8th, although it could be extended.

On Monday, Netflix co-chief Ted Sarandos told investors that he foresaw a new bid from Paramount and that he expects Netflix’s deal to hold.

There’s no sign that this auction is over yet. And there’s no more clarity on who will own — or control — CNN.

Editor’s note: CNN, Paramount Plus, Warner Bros. Discovery and Warner Bros. Pictures are among NPR’s financial supporters.

Instagram/@leahmob

Leah McSweeney, the former actress from ‘Real Housewives of New York’ and the creator of Married to the Mob, has proposed a rather bold statement regarding her impact on the franchise that seems to be the subject of much discussion among viewers. Recently, McSweeney shared a series of beautiful pictures, one of which had a caption that could very well be among the most heated discussions. She wrote, ‘Just a baddie that ruined your favorite franchise 🖤’. The message is a direct, unapologetic reference to her tumultuous yet eventful involvement in the reality show and its subsequent cancellation.

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The post ignited a flurry of comments from her friends, former colleagues, and, of course, followers. Many vehemently disagreed with her criticism of herself and backed her up. One user replied, ‘Ruined neverrrrrr. You ELEVATED THAT SHIT 🔥😍’. Another user who held a similar opinion said, ‘You didn’t ruin anything. You brought life to that show. There’s a reason it’s not on anymore and it has nothing to do with you’. The support these fans show is indicative of the fact that the following who keeps her in the picture sees her as a good, if somewhat controversial, influencing factor.

In other comments, a more confrontational approach was taken, and the divisive nature of her TV personality was focused on. After one user said, ‘I’ve a feeling you ruin everything you come in contact with babe’, McSweeney took revenge on her by getting back at her. The pair not only failed to convince each other but, in the process, McSweeney even remarked, ‘u a lil miserable 🐀’ and later one said, ‘my worth depends on how I treat people and esp women, I don’t leave weird comments on their pages, like u do’. The public spat was a display of her combative yet unfiltered style that has become her trademark.

Not only are McSweeney’s supporters showing their loyalty towards her, but the incident also exemplifies when comments were made during the discussion. A long-time supporter has even said that besides the comments he is always there during the brand name ‘Married to the Mob’ referring to how difficult it is to find a leading and uplifting role model for women like McSweeney who is still present in that role through business and the position of a female empowerment figure while TV might be the past for that. Another person, who pretended to be an old friend, said, ‘I ain’t mad that my high school friend turned out to be such a 🔥🔥🔥’, adding a personal note to the public praise.

Her heading also triggered calls for a different part in the television show rerun. A follower who wished the best said, ‘You still need your show’, a suggestion that probably most of her fans would concur with. Another post said, ‘The girlies need MTTM more than ever!! Save us 🙏🏽🙏🏽🙏🏽’, making a direct link to her fashion line and the connections it created. This reveals that they want her to be the one telling her story rather than sharing the cast on a reality show.

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Leah McSweeney’s post is not just photos; it is also a declaration of entitlement. By referring to herself as the ‘baddie’ who ‘ruined’ a certain franchise, she reclaims the narrative that accompanied her controversial departure from television. Whether the audience sees her as a villain or a hero, she can still draw attention and stir up debate, and that is precisely why her power is so difficult to deny. In the world of reality television where everything hinges on perception, McSweeney continues to narrate her story through the defiance and pride that she possesses.

Some of the earliest plants attracted pollinators by producing heat that made these plants glow with infrared light, according to a new set of experiments.

The work, published in the journal Science, suggests that long before brightly colored flowers evolved, these ancient plants would metabolically rev themselves up when they had pollen at the ready. Nocturnal insects such as beetles could then see that heat from afar and home in on the target.

These heat-producing plants, called cycads, exist today in tropical forests around the world, although they’re one of the most endangered plant groups.

“Some people call them dinosaur plants because they were much more dominant when the dinosaurs were around,” says Wendy Valencia-Montoya, a cycad expert at Harvard University.

Fossils from over 200 million years ago, compared to cycads that exist today, show that “the plants look exactly the same,” she says. “So they haven’t changed much in hundreds of millions of years.”

They’re related to pines, and male and female plants each produce fleshy, pine-cone-like structures that contain the pollen and the seeds. “That’s something very unique among this group of ancient plants,” says Valencia-Montoya, who says these are the oldest known plants that have pollen.

A couple of centuries ago, botanists noticed that these plants produced heat in their reproductive structures. Compared to the ambient air temperature, they can be hotter by 15 to 25 degrees Fahrenheit, or even more.

“We think of producing heat as something that mammals do, or birds do, but in fact, plants can do it too,” she says, although it’s not common in the plant world and takes a lot of energy.

In these plants, the heat was thought to be a byproduct of metabolic processes. Or, maybe the heat volatilized the scent of the plant, much like plugging an air freshener into an electrical outlet to generate heat that sends scent around a room. Research done in the last couple of decades has shown that male and female cones heat up at slightly different times, which could send pollinators moving from one cone to the other.

To try to understand more about what was going on, Valencia-Montoya and her colleagues painted some pollinating beetles with fluorescent markers to watch when the beetles went to the plant. And they found that the beetles were clearly going to the plant cones when they heated up.

This thermal image shows two male cycad cones releasing pollen. This plant’s cones heat up during pollen-release.

Wendy Valencia-Montoya

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Wendy Valencia-Montoya

To decouple the heat from other potential signals that these plants produce, like scent and humidity, her team used 3-D printing to make some simulated pollen cones. These fake plant structures were hollow inside, and got filled up with heated sand.

The fake cones glowed in the infrared much like real plants. “It was quite striking, when we saw it in the field,” says Valencia-Montoya, who says the fake plants were deployed outside at the Montgomery Botanical Center in Coral Gables, Florida.

Using these fake plants, the researchers figured out a couple of tricks to see if insects were attracted to the infrared glow, rather than the tactile sensation of heat itself. For example, in one experiment, they wrapped the cone with plastic wrap that is transparent to infrared light. Insects could see the infrared light but not get close enough to the cone to actually feel the heat.

What they found is that the infrared glow, by itself, was enough to attract hundreds of pollinating beetles.

And when they looked at those beetles, they found that they have specialized antennae that have evolved to detect slight differences in temperature — similar to the heat-sensing receptors used by snakes to detect prey.

What’s more, it turns out that the beetles’ antennae seem to be tuned to the exact temperature range deployed by their host plant, since different beetle species frequent different cycad species.

“Infrared radiation is perhaps the oldest discovered pollination signal,” says Nicholas Bellono of Harvard University, one of the authors of the new study.

Back when plants first evolved pollen, the insects that were around were nocturnal and had poor vision, says Valencia-Montoya. “So it makes a lot of sense that a signal like heat was guiding them.”

But as new groups emerged that were active in the day and had better vision, like butterflies and bees, “it makes more sense for plants to change their signaling strategy to also tap into the sensory systems of these more recent pollinators,” she says, adding that in evolution, there’s a constant dance back and forth between plants and their pollinators. Once color became a possible signal, flowering plants had an immense range of color combinations at their disposal, allowing them to rapidly diversify.

These researchers used “a powerhouse of techniques” to prove that the temperature of cycad’s heat-producing cones is intimately related to attracting pollinators, and that this association is ancient, says Roger Seymour, with the University of Adelaide in Australia, who wasn’t part of the research team: “This is an important contribution.”

Seymour thinks that heat could have more than one role, however, and the chance for a warm-up may be a bonus for beetles that require high body temperatures for activity. “Heat can be a direct energy reward to insect pollinators which may remain inside a thermogenic flower for much longer than insects visiting non-thermogenic species,” he says.

Irene Terry at Tthe University of Utah, an ecologist who specializes in cycads and their insect interactions but wasn’t part of this research team, says it’s only been relatively recently that people realized these ancient plants even had pollinators, rather than just spreading their pollen with the wind.

Particular odorants seem to be important pollinator attractants, she says, noting that these plants can smell like everything from bubblegum to bell peppers. Still, this study shows “in the most beautiful way” that infrared is also key.

“I was not surprised at all that infrared was involved,” says Terry, given that other insects like mosquitoes use infrared to find their way to a target. “There’s a range of things that insects can see that we don’t.”

Imagine, says Bellono, being a prehistoric beetle trying to navigate the darkened environment in the early evening, and seeing various plants start to glow red.

“The infrared is an entirely different world that we don’t experience,” he says. “I think that’s a cool thing to think about, going back in time, that this signal was around when the dinosaurs were there, long before us. And the beetles still use it to this day and are still experiencing that world.”