Kara Swisher has vowed to quit her job as a CNN contributor if Paramount ends up buying Warner Bros. Discovery.
“I’m walking right out of there the day they get there,” Swisher told her Pivot podcast co-host Scott Galloway on Friday. “I’m walking, and there’s no way I’m working for these terrible people.”
For now, Netflix is set to acquire WBD’s studio and streaming business for around $83 billion, while a spinoff company, called Discovery Global, will own CNN and other basic-cable properties currently owned by WBD, including Discovery, HGTV, Food Network, and TNT.
But Paramount Skydance has launched a hostile $108-billion takeover bid to buy all of WBD — CNN included — and The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Paramount CEO David Ellison assured officials in President Donald Trump’s administration that he’d make substantial changes to CNN if the takeover bid is successful. The newspaper also reported Trump has told people close to him he wants different ownership of CNN and different programming on the channel.
And Swisher is astonished by the prospect of Ellison promising Trump changes to CNN. “‘We’ll stop CNN from being so mean to you, Mr. President, if you give us [the deal],’ — that would have been a four-alarm journalistic fire at any other time,” she said.
Swisher, who also hosts the On With Kara Swisher podcast and serves as New York Magazine editor-at-large, joined CNN as an on-air contributor in November 2023. In prior jobs, she worked as a New York Times opinion writer, hosted the podcast Sway, and co-founded the technology website Recode.
Previously, Swisher indicated her refusal to work for a Paramount-owned CNN in an episode of On last week, saying Ellison is “remaking CBS News in Trump’s image, really.”
Trump weighed in on the CNN question last week. “I think the people that have run CNN for the last long period of time are a disgrace,” he told reporters, per the Los Angeles Times. “I don’t think they should be entrusted with running CNN any longer. So I think any deal should — it should be guaranteed and certain that CNN is part of it or sold separately.”
