Lifestyle
CNN has endured turmoil for years. With Warner Bros. sale, things will get bumpier
CNN anchors Jake Tapper and Dana Bash speaking to members of the audience before the start of the CNN Republican presidential debate in Des Moines, Iowa, Jan. 10, 2024.
Andrew Harnik/AP/AP
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Andrew Harnik/AP/AP
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.
Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for Warner Bros. Di/Getty Images North America
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Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for Warner Bros. Di/Getty Images North America
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.
Andrew Harnik/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
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Andrew Harnik/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
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.
PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images/AFP
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PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images/AFP
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.
Win McNamee/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
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Win McNamee/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
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.
Nearly four years after his death, a retrospective of the multidisciplinary work by the self-taught American artist Daniel Brush — encompassing sculpture, paintings and jewelry in materials as diverse as steel, Bakelite and gold — is scheduled to open June 8 at the Paris location of L’Ecole, School of Jewelry Arts.
“Daniel Brush: The Art of Line and Light” will be the fifth time that L’Ecole has exhibited the artist’s work. But its president, Lise Macdonald, said she believed Mr. Brush’s legacy warranted repeated consideration: “He is a very niche artist, but he is excellent — really one of the greatest artists of the 20th and 21st century.”
The diversity of his creations has been part of his appeal, she said. “We don’t really consider him as purely a jeweler but more a protean artist where jewelry was part of his approach.”
L’Ecole Paris, which operates in an 18th-century mansion in the Ninth Arrondissement and is supported by Van Cleef & Arpels, has prepared programming to complement the show, from conversations with experts on Mr. Brush’s work (to be held on site and streamed online) to jewelry-making workshops for children. Details of the free exhibition and the events are on the school’s website; the show is scheduled to end Oct. 4.
The exhibition is to include more than 75 pieces, which span much of Mr. Brush’s five-decade career. They have been selected by Olivia Brush, his wife and collaborator, and by Vivienne Becker, a jewelry historian and author who said she first met the couple more than 30 years ago. Some exhibits, they said, have never been seen by the public before.
Ms. Becker, who wrote the 2019 monograph “Daniel Brush: Jewels Sculpture,” said the artist had possessed vast knowledge of the history of jewelry and shared her belief that jewels “answer a very important, very basic human impulse to adorn — that it’s essential to customs, beliefs, and ceremonies around the world.” She also has written a book documenting the L’Ecole exhibition — and with the same title — that examines the artist’s preoccupation with the themes of light and line.
“He loved the idea of making a real, intransigent, opaque metal into something that was almost translucent, or transparent,” said Ms. Becker, citing as an example a trio of bangles made in 2009 to 2010 that are called the “Rings of Infinity.” The lines that he engraved on the aluminum pieces functioned, she explained, to “elevate the jewel from a trinket to a great, great work of art.”
A series of engraved steel panels titled “Thinking About Monet” used the interplay of line and light to achieve a different effect, she said. Mr. Brush made individual strokes in tight formation on the panels, producing gently rippling surfaces whose color changes with shifting light conditions.
The effect “is really hard to understand. I couldn’t,” Ms. Becker said. “So many people ask, ‘Are they tinted? Are they colored?’ It’s absolutely nothing. It’s just the breaking of the light.”
Though Mr. Brush was a widely acknowledged master of skills such as granulation, the application of tiny gold balls to a metal surface, both Ms. Brush and Ms. Becker said the exhibition’s goal was not to highlight his virtuosity — nor, Ms. Becker said, was that ever a concern of Mr. Brush’s. “He didn’t want to talk about the technique at all,” she said. “Technique has to just be a means to an end. He just wanted people to be amazed, to have a sense of wonder again.”
The works selected for the L’Ecole exhibition reflect his range, which veered from diamond-set Bakelite brooches inspired by animal crackers to a steel and gold orb meant to be an object of contemplation. “He didn’t want to have boundaries,” Ms. Brush said. “He wanted to do what he wanted to do when he wanted to do it.”
The couple met as students at what is now called Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and her 1967 wedding ring was the first jewel that Mr. Brush made.
All of Mr. Brush’s works were one-of-a-kind creations, completed from start to finish by him in the New York City loft that served as a workshop as well as a family home. Photographs of the space, which contained a library with titles on the eclectic subjects that preoccupied him — Chinese history, Byzantine art, Impressionist painting — and the antique machinery that inspired him and that he used to make his tools, are featured in the exhibition and reproduced in Ms. Becker’s book.
Ms. Brush is a fiber artist in her own right, but Mr. Brush also frequently credited her as an equal participant on pieces bearing his name. “I did not physically make the work,” she explained, “but the work would not have evolved or happened the way it did if it were not for the way we lived our lives,” she said.
The first time Pop’s Social, a catering company in South Orange, N.J., that specializes in dirty soda, served an alcoholic drink at an event, something strange happened.
At the event in December, its nonalcoholic offering, a spiced pear-cider seltzer with vanilla and peach syrups, cream, lemon and cold foam, was a hit. The Prosecco-spiked version? Not so much.
“People were more interested in the mocktail than the cocktail,” Ali Greenberg, an owner of the business, said in an interview.
Dirty soda — a customizable blend of soda, flavored syrup, creamer and sometimes fruit, served over pebble ice — has been crossing into the mainstream for years, especially after the cast of “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” the hit reality show that premiered in 2024, frequented Swig, the Utah chain that started it all.
But its reach has gone far beyond the Mormon corridor, and its rise in popularity has dovetailed with an overall decline in U.S. alcohol consumption. “There’s not a lot of Mormon people in our neighborhood,” said Greenberg. “But there are a lot of people who are sober-curious or not drinking.”
The reality show, which follows a group of Mormon influencers in Utah, helped popularize dirty soda beyond the Mountain States and inspired a wave of TikTok videos on the subject. Swig rapidly expanded — growing from 33 locations in Utah and Arizona in 2021 to now more than 150 locations in 16 states — along with other Utah chains, and spawned copycats nationwide.
Dirty soda has joined other Mormon cultural exports, like tradwife influencers, a “Real Housewives” franchise in Salt Lake City and Taylor Frankie Paul, the Bachelorette who wasn’t, that have captivated America.
With the recent rollouts of dirty soda at McDonald’s, Chick-fil-A and Dunkin’ — behold the Dunkin’ Dirty Soda: Pepsi, coffee milk and cold foam — and the appearance on grocery shelves of Dirty Mountain Dew and a coconut-lime Coffee Mate creamer for homemade dirty sodas, we may have reached peak dirty.
The idea for dirty soda came out of a desire for members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which has millions of followers in Utah and surrounding states, to have more options for social drinking, as the church prohibits the consumption of alcohol, hot coffee and hot caffeinated tea.
When Swig introduced dirty soda in 2010, it filled a need, providing a pick-me-up for car-pooling moms and an after-school treat for their kids. It was quickly adopted by many in the community.
“In other cultures, parents go, they pick up their coffee in the morning, and for me and for a lot of my other friends’ parents, it was, ‘Let’s go pick up our dirty soda,’” Whitney Leavitt, a breakout star of “Mormon Wives,” said in an interview.
Leavitt was surprised when her dirty soda order became a recurring question from reporters in recent years. “They were so excited to hear all of the different syrups and creamers that we add to our drinks to make whatever your go-to dirty soda is,” Leavitt said. (Hers is sparkling water with sugar-free pineapple, sugar-free peach and sugar-free vanilla syrups, raspberry purée, a squeeze of lime, and fresh mint if she’s “feeling really fancy.”)
In April, Leavitt became the chief creative and brand officer at Cool Sips, a beverage chain based in New York that sells dirty sodas.
“Mormon Wives” inspired Kaitlyn Sturm, a 26-year-old mother of three from Jackson, Miss., to post recipes for dirty sodas on her TikTok. The one she makes the most contains Coke or Dr Pepper, homemade cherry syrup, a glug of coconut creamer and a packet of True Lime crystallized lime powder, which she combines in a pasta-sauce jar filled with pebble ice. “It kind of has become like a ritual, where I make one for my husband as well, and we have it most evenings,” Sturm said in an interview.
The trend has also hit fast-food menus. The new “crafted soda” menu at McDonald’s is riddled with dirty soda DNA. The Dirty Dr Pepper, with vanilla flavoring and a cold-foam topper, is the chain’s version of what has shaped up to be the universal dirty soda flavor. Since 2024, Sonic, beloved for its porous, soda-absorbing pebble ice, has offered “dirty” drinks — your choice of soda plus coconut syrup, sweet cream and lime.
These drinks might feel new, but there are antecedents in the Italian sodas of the ’90s (fizzy water and a pump of Torani syrup); the Shirley Temple (ginger ale or lemon-lime soda with grenadine and maraschino cherries); and the egg cream, a tonic of seltzer, chocolate syrup and milk. And what is a dirty Dr Pepper with cold foam if not a descendant of the root beer float? “It’s just a soda fountain from 125 years ago,” Kara Nielsen, a food and beverage trend forecaster, said in an interview.
Though Leavitt moved to New York City with her family in December, her dirty soda ritual has remained consistent, with one key difference. “In Utah, we don’t get to walk to dirty soda shops,” Leavitt said. “We have to drive there.”
Annuals include flowers like marigolds and nasturtiums. They grow fast but won’t come back the next spring (though they will drop seeds and possibly propagate). Perennials like lavender and sage will return year after year, but they may take longer to grow. Wildflower and pollinator packets often contain both annual and perennial seeds but are frowned upon by some serious gardeners, because the selection can be haphazard and ill-suited to the area.
It’s a good idea to exercise a little situational awareness. How much rain can you expect? How much sunlight? Dig the earth and feel it between your fingers — is it sandy? Loamy? These are things to keep in mind as you prepare for your journey into horticultural chaos.
“You want to prepare your soil, your site, at least a little bit,” said Deryn Davidson, a sustainable landscape expert at Colorado State University Extension in Longmont, Colo. “Try to get rid of weeds. Make sure the soil is ready to receive seeds.”
Davidson, who has written about chaos gardening, strongly advised covering the seeds with a layer of soil, lest they become bird food. As for watering, that depends on where you live, she added. On the whole, though, the formula is straightforward: “Soil, sun and water is what these seeds need,” Davidson said.
Not everyone is a fan of the trend, or at least the way it has been portrayed on social media. “Nature is not chaos — nature is pattern,” said Robin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist and the author of “Braiding Sweetgrass,” which recommends imbuing modern life with Indigenous wisdom.
“It seems unrealistic,” Kimmerer said of the chaos gardening videos she has watched. The feeling of effortlessness they convey — a common social media effect, almost always the result of deft editing — seems to elide the work that goes into a garden, whether chaotic or not, she suggested.
“I want my garden to be natural and biodiverse,” she said. “That’s a good impulse. I don’t think this technique is going to get you there, but that’s an important impulse.”
Boitnott, the maker of the viral video, offered a simple reason for why chaos gardening has become popular: “It just makes you happy.”
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