Lifestyle
Ina Garten shares her secret for a great dinner party: 6 people and round table
“I love cooking for people I love,” Ina Garten says. “And the cooking is just the medium; the thing that I care about is the connection.”
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Ina Garten, the host of the Food Network’s Barefoot Contessa, still remembers a disastrous party she threw when she was 21. She’d invited 20 guests, with the intention of making an individual omelet for each person — except she barely knew how to cook an omelet.
“I was in the kitchen the entire time,” Garten says. “It was such a bad party, I almost never had another party again.”
Garten says she learned a few things from the experience — not the least of which was to keep things simple. Her ideal dinner party is six people sitting at a small, round table. And, yes, the shape of the table matters.
“Very often people have long, rectangular tables that are way too wide and people are seated too far apart,” Garten says. “I like when everybody’s knees are almost touching and it feels very intimate, with a dark room and a candle in the middle.”
Garten’s relaxed approach to entertaining is the hallmark of Barefoot Contessa, which debuted in 2002. Filmed in the kitchen of her home in East Hampton, N.Y., the show follows Garten as she shops for ingredients, tests recipes and sits down to eat with her husband Jeffrey and their friends.
“When you cook for people you love, they feel taken care of, and you make great friends and you create a community for yourself,” she says. “And I think that’s really what we all need, and what we all kind of hunger for.”
An Emmy and James Beard Award winner, Garten has also penned 13 cookbooks. In the new memoir, Be Ready When the Luck Happens, she details how she went from working in the White House to becoming a beloved culinary voice, with fans from all walks of life.
“One of the things I love about what I do is that everybody cooks,” she says. “I was walking up Madison Avenue one day and a woman in a big fur coat … said, ‘Darling, I just just love your cookbooks.’ And a block later, a truck driver pulled over and said, ‘Hey, babe, I love your show.’ And I thought, That’s food. Everybody’s interested in food.”
Interview highlights
On how working for the federal government in the 1970s connects to her love of cooking
I worked in a group called Office of Management and Budget, and what we did was write the president’s budget that was sent to Congress. And I worked in nuclear energy policy. … I’ve always been very interested in science, and the way I feel about what I do now is it’s science, but you end up with something delicious instead of enriched uranium.
On buying a specialty food store in Westhampton, N.Y., when she was 30
I walked in and they were baking chocolate chip cookies. And I just remember thinking, Wow, this is where I want to be. … So we met with the owner and I made her a low offer. She was asking for $25,000, which was more money than we had in the world. And I just, on a whim, offered her $20,000, thinking, Well, we’ll go home, we’ll negotiate, I’ll have time to think about this. And we drove back to Washington [D.C.]. And Monday morning, I was in my office and the phone rang, and … [the owner] said, “Thank you very much. I accept your offer.” And I remember thinking, s***, I just bought a food store. I remember going to my boss and going, “You’re not going to believe what I just did.”
On the store’s name, Barefoot Contessa
The name really related to Diana [Stratta, the previous owner], not me. But then as the summer progressed, I realized it actually had a resonance. … It was about being elegant and earthy at the same time. And I think that really was what the store was about.
On a time when she separated from her husband Jeffrey
This was the ‘70s and we both assumed that he would be the husband and I would be the wife and that he would take care of the finances and I would have dinner on the table. I mean, we had prescribed roles, but it was a time when women were becoming aware that just because we were women didn’t mean that there were things that we had to do. I really credit Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan for making us think about it. And it may be that you want to have dinner on the table, but it doesn’t mean that because you’re the woman, you’re the only one who should have dinner on the table. So I was becoming aware of this, and Jeffrey, who had no reason at all to change his mind, wasn’t. And so I found some frustration with being in a prescribed role as the wife. …
One weekend in Westhampton, that first summer, we took a long walk on the beach and I said, “I feel like I need to be on my own for a while.” And Jeffrey said the right thing. He said, “If you feel you need to be on your own, then you need to be on your own.” And he went back to Washington and didn’t come back. And it was a tough time, but it led us back to a different kind of relationship.
On writing about her unhappy childhood
Remember, this was the ‘50s. It’s not the era of helicopter parents who are encouraging their children to do extraordinary things. This is an era where you did what the parents told you to do. And my parents were particularly harsh about it. … [My mother] dealt with it by pushing us away and making sure that she didn’t actually have to spend time with us. So I spent most of my time in my bedroom, and my brother spent time in his. And then my father was a really, really harsh authoritarian figure. If you didn’t do exactly what he wanted you to do, it was met with pretty serious anger and sometimes … hitting. And it was a very difficult way to grow up. … The only thing I remember is just total disappointment, because I wouldn’t do what they wanted me to do. They never gave me an opportunity to do what I wanted to do.
I talk about this in the book, not so much because it was such a terrible childhood. It certainly wasn’t a happy one, but there were so many worse childhoods. But I wanted people to know that the story of your childhood doesn’t necessarily need to be the story of your life.
Therese Madden and Anna Bauman produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.
Performers onstage at The Game Awards 2025 at the Peacock Theater on December 11, 2025 in Los Angeles, California.
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The first minutes of The Game Awards set the mold for the next three hours. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 won best independent game during the preshow, beating out acclaimed sequels like Hades 2 and Hollow Knight: Silksong. Moments after, the main stage opened with operatic singers and a full orchestra (plus the obligatory electric guitar!) belting out music from the game.
Clair Obscur was already the favorite to win the grand prize — but kicking off the show with the game front-and-center felt like an anointing. It triumphed in nearly every category it competed in, picking up nine awards in total. By the time it won “Game of the Year,” Clair Obscur had surpassed The Last of Us: Part 2 to become the most decorated game in the Awards history.
As predictable as the night became, the game it honored was anything but. Clair Obscur came from an independent French studio composed of developers who had worked for the French gaming behemoth Ubisoft. Instead of chasing trendy genres like battle royales or open-world action games, Clair Obscur drew inspiration from turn-based role-playing games like the classic Final Fantasy titles. It paired an intimate and existential story with a setting that was both whimsical and epic. And it cast motion-capture icon Andy Serkis alongside game actor veterans like Ben Starr and Jennifer English, who delivered the night’s most rousing speech when she accepted the award for best performance.
“I just want to say to every neurodivergent person watching in this room, because I know there’s probably quite a lot of you,” English said. “To all of you that feel like life is stuck on hard mode, this is for you, and thank you so much to the games community and industry for giving us, so many of us, a home.”
Jennifer English, also known for her leading role in 2023 Game of the Year winner Baldur’s Gate 3, accepts her best performance award onstage at the Peacock Theater on December 11, 2025.
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Clair Obscur’s victories fit with two themes of the night: the rise of independent studios and the internationalization of the awards themselves. Half of the “Game of the Year” nominees were indie games, even as the term has stretched to include titles with sizable budgets and publisher partnerships.
This semantic squishiness is a result of The Game Awards’ outsourced voting process, which polls over 150 international media outlets (including NPR) to determine a list of nominees. These outlets decide for themselves how to define categories like an “independent game” or “action adventure game.” After the shortlist is tallied, they’ll pick their favorites in each category, which are weighted against an open online voting system that makes up a 10th of the total score. As the jury has expanded outside of the U.S., which now only represents roughly 15% of outlets, award winners have become both more global and more mainstream.
Still, Clair Obscur’s ubiquity speaks volumes. Even as it swept other deserving indies aside, the game demonstrates the outsized impact a small team can have on the broader market. No longer seen as just a niche, prestige title, Clair Obscur rose to prominence thanks to strong word-of-mouth and its inclusion on the Xbox Game Pass Service, which allowed regular gamers and critics alike to try the game out without committing to a full purchase.
Guillaume Broche, Tom Guillermin, Nicholas Maxon-Framcombe, and François Meurisse accept the Game of the Year award for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.
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Big companies still took home prizes, however. After being completely shut out last year, Nintendo earned a few awards for Switch 2 exclusives, with Donkey Kong Bananza winning best family and Mario Kart World winning best sports/racing. Grand Theft Auto 6 won most anticipated game for the second year in a row. Wuthering Waves, a Chinese game with a huge mobile audience, won the Players’ Voice award, the only category completely determined by public online votes.
Here are the full nominees and winners for the 2025 Game Awards (winners in bold):
Game of the year
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (Sandfall Interactive/Kepler Interactive)
Death Stranding 2: On The Beach (Kojima Productions/Sony Interactive Entertainment)
Donkey Kong Bananza (Nintendo EPD/Nintendo)
Hades II (Supergiant Games)
Hollow Knight: Silksong (Team Cherry)
Kingdom Come: Deliverance II (Warhorse Studios/Deep Silver)
Best game direction
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (Sandfall Interactive/Kepler Interactive)
Death Stranding 2: On The Beach (Kojima Productions/Sony Interactive Entertainment)
Ghost of Yōtei (Sucker Punch Productions/Sony Interactive Entertainment)
Hades II (Supergiant Games)
Split Fiction (Hazelight Studios/EA)
Best narrative
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (Sandfall Interactive/Kepler Interactive)
Death Stranding 2: On The Beach (Kojima Productions/Sony Interactive Entertainment)
Ghost of Yōtei (Sucker Punch Productions/Sony Interactive Entertainment)
Kingdom Come: Deliverance II (Warhorse Studios/Deep Silver)
Silent Hill f (NeoBards Entertainment/KONAMI)
Best art direction
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (Sandfall Interactive/Kepler Interactive)
Death Stranding 2: On The Beach (Kojima Productions/Sony Interactive Entertainment)
Ghost of Yōtei (Sucker Punch Productions/Sony Interactive Entertainment)
Hades II (Supergiant Games)
Hollow Knight: Silksong (Team Cherry)
Best score and music, leveled up by Spotify
Christopher Larkin, Hollow Knight: Silksong
Lorien Testard, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
Darren Korb, Hades II
Toma Otowa, Ghost of Yōtei
Woodkid and Ludvig Forssell, Death Stranding 2: On The Beach
Best audio design
Battlefield 6 (Battlefield Studios/EA)
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (Sandfall Interactive/Kepler Interactive)
Death Stranding 2: On the Beach (Kojima Productions/Sony Interactive Entertainment)
Ghost of Yōtei (Sucker Punch Productions/Sony Interactive Entertainment)
Silent Hill f (NeoBards Entertainment/KONAMI)
Best performance
Ben Starr, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
Charlie Cox, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
Erika Ishii, Ghost of Yōtei
Jennifer English, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
Konatsu Kato, Silent Hill f
Troy Baker, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
Innovation in accessibility
Assassin’s Creed Shadows (Ubisoft)
Atomfall (Rebellion)
Doom: The Dark Ages (id Software/Bethesda Softworks)
EA Sports FC 26 (EA Canada/EA Romania/EA)
South of Midnight (Compulsion Games/Xbox Game Studios)
Games for impact
Consume Me (Jenny Jiao Hsia/AP Thomson/Hexacutable)
Despelote (Julián Cordero/Sebastián Valbuena/Panic)
Lost Records: Bloom & Rage (Don’t Nod Montreal/Don’t Nod)
South of Midnight (Compulsion Games/Xbox Game Studios)
Wanderstop (Ivy Road/Annapurna Interactive)
Best ongoing
Final Fantasy XIV (Square Enix)
Fortnite (Epic Games)
Helldivers 2 (Arrowhead Game Studios/Sony Interactive Entertainment)
Marvel Rivals (NetEase Games)
No Man’s Sky (Hello Games)
Best community support
Baldur’s Gate 3 (Larian Studios)
Final Fantasy XIV (Square Enix)
Fortnite (Epic Games)
Helldivers 2 (Arrowhead Game Studios/Sony Interactive Entertainment)
No Man’s Sky (Hello Games)
Best independent game
Absolum (Guard Crush Games/Supamonks/Dotemu)
Ball x Pit (Kenny Sun/Devolver Digital)
Blue Prince (Dogubomb/Raw Fury)
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (Sandfall Interactive/Kepler Interactive)
Hades II (Supergiant Games)
Hollow Knight: Silksong (Team Cherry)
Best debut indie game
Blue Prince (Dogubomb/Raw Fury)
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (Sandfall Interactive/Kepler Interactive)
Despelote (Julián Cordero/Sebastián Valbuena/Panic)
Dispatch (AdHoc Studio)
Megabonk (Vedinad)
Best mobile game
Destiny: Rising (NetEase Games)
Persona 5: The Phantom X (Black Wings Game Studio/Sega)
Sonic Rumble (Rovio Entertainment/Sega)
Umamusume: Pretty Derby (Cygames Inc.)
Wuthering Waves (Kuro Games)
Best VR/AR
Alien: Rogue Incursion (Survios)
Arken Age (VitruviusVR)
Ghost Town (Fireproof Games)
Marvel’s Deadpool VR (Twisted Pixel Games/Oculus Studios)
The Midnight Walk (MoonHood/Fast Travel Games)
Best action
Battlefield 6 (Battlefield Studios/EA)
Doom: The Dark Ages (id Software/Bethesda Softworks)
Hades II (Supergiant Games)
Ninja Gaiden 4 (Platinum Games/Team Ninja/Xbox Game Studios)
Shinobi: Art of Vengeance (Lizardcube/Sega)
Best action/adventure
Death Stranding 2: On the Beach (Kojima Productions/Sony Interactive Entertainment)
Ghost of Yōtei (Sucker Punch Productions/Sony Interactive Entertainment)
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle (MachineGames/Bethesda Softworks)
Hollow Knight: Silksong (Team Cherry)
Split Fiction (Hazelight Studios/EA)
Best RPG
Avowed (Obsidian Entertainment/Xbox Game Studios)
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (Sandfall Interactive/Kepler Interactive)
Kingdom Come: Deliverance II (Warhorse Studios/Deep SIlver)
The Outer Worlds 2 (Obsidian Entertainment/Xbox Game Studios)
Monster Hunter Wilds (Capcom)
Best fighting
2XKO (Riot Games)
Capcom Fighting Collection 2 (Capcom)
Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves (SNK Corporation)
Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection (Digital Eclipse/Atari)
Virtua Fighter 5 R.E.V.O. World Stage (Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio/Sega)
Best family
Donkey Kong Bananza (Nintendo EPD/Nintendo)
LEGO Party! (SMG Studio/Fictions)
LEGO Voyagers (Light Brick Studios/Annapurna Interactive)
Mario Kart World (Nintendo EPD/Nintendo)
Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds (Sonic Team/Sega)
Split Fiction (Hazelight Studios/EA)
Best Sim/Strategy
The Alters (11 Bit Studios)
FINAL FANTASY TACTICS – The Ivalice Chronicles (Square Enix)
Jurassic World Evolution 3 (Frontier Developments)
Sid Meier’s Civilization VII (Firaxis Games/2K)
Tempest Rising (Slipgate Ironworks/3D Realms)
Two Point Museum (Two Point Studios/Sega)
Best sports/racing
EA Sports FC 26 (EA Canada/EA Romania/EA)
F1 25 (Codemasters/EA)
Mario Kart World (Nintendo EPD/Nintendo)
Rematch (Sloclap/Kepler Interactive)
Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds (Sonic Team/Sega)
Best multiplayer
Arc Raiders (Embark Studios)
Battlefield 6 (Electronic Arts)
Elden Ring Nightreign (FromSoftware/Bandai Namco Entertainment)
Peak (Aggro Crab/Landfall)
Split Fiction (Hazelight/EA)
Best adaptation
A Minecraft Movie (Legendary Pictures/Mojang/Warner Bros)
Devil May Cry (Studio Mir/Capcom/Netflix)
The Last of Us: Season 2 (HBO/PlayStation Productions)
Splinter Cell: Deathwatch (FOST Studio/Ubisoft/Netflix)
Until Dawn (Screen Gems/PlayStation Productions)
Most anticipated game
007 First Light (IO Interactive)
Grand Theft Auto VI (Rockstar Games)
Marvel’s Wolverine (Insomniac Games/Sony Interactive Entertainment)
Resident Evil Requiem (Capcom)
The Witcher IV (CD Projekt Red)
Content creator of the year
Caedrel
Kai Cenat
MoistCr1TiKaL
Sakura Miko
The Burnt Peanut
Best Esports game
Counter-Strike 2 (Valve)
DOTA 2 (Valve)
League of Legends (Riot)
Mobile Legends: Bang Bang (Moonton)
Valorant (Riot)
Best Esports athlete
brawk – Brock Somerhalder (Valorant)
Chovy – Jeong Ji-hoon (League of Legends)
f0rsakeN – Jason Susanto (Valorant)
Kakeru – Kakeru Watanabe (Street Fighter)
MenaRD – Saul Leonardo (Street Fighter)
Zyw0o – Mathieu Herbaut (Counter-Strike 2)
Best Esports team
Gen.G – League of Legends
NRG – Valorant
Team Falcons – DOTA 2
Team Liquid PH – Mobile Legends: Bang Bang
Team Vitality – Counter-Strike 2
Players’ voice
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (Sandfall Interactive/Kepler Interactive)
Dispatch (AdHoc Studio)
Genshin Impact (HoYoverse)
Hollow Knight: Silksong (Team Cherry)
Wuthering Waves (Kuro Games)
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.
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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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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.
PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images/AFP
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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.
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