Former CNN host Jim Acosta expressed alarm after Paramount won a bidding war for Warner Bros. Discovery during a Friday episode of “The Jim Acosta Show.”
Netflix terminated its efforts to acquire the media conglomerate that owns CNN on Thursday after Paramount Skydance’s higher bid, CNBC reported on Friday. Acosta noted on his show that the new ownership of CNN would likely be friendlier to President Donald Trump and expressed concern about CNN senior political commentator and Republican strategist Scott Jennings getting his own show.
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“[W]e may have a scenario in this country where a MAGA-friendly corporation, a Trumpy corporation, Oracle, will control both CBS News and CNN,” Acosta. “In what world is that normal? How is that happening in America? … I can understand it happening in Russia … Hungary … Turkey … Visit the countries that have state-controlled media … These are not places where you want to live, by and large … These are places you don’t even want to step foot on their soil.”
“Do we want the United States of America to become like Russia? … North Korea?” he added. “Do we want the United States of America to become like China, where you don’t have freedom of thought … political freedom … the ability to read, watch, and absorb the media and information that you want to consume and take in?”
The CEO of Paramount is David Ellison, the son of Oracle founder and Trump fundraiser Larry Ellison. Paramount also owns CBS News, which named The Free Press founder Bari Weiss as CBS News editor-in-chief in October.
“Do we want to have a situation where you have a giant merger of CBS and CNN pumping out propaganda every day, saying how great Donald Trump is, how great his poll numbers are?” Acosta asked. “I mean, if that’s what we’re going to see from this monstrosity of a combined CBS and CNN under the leadership — if you want to call it that — of Bari Weiss, is that what they’re going to pump out over the airwaves? Is that what they’re going to pump out over CNN?”
“That Donald Trump is the second coming of Abraham Lincoln, or as he likes to put it out on the campaign trail, that he’s more popular, that he’s a greater president than Abraham Lincoln and George Washington? What a crock of shit,” he said. “And do we want that crock of shit going out over the airwaves of CBS News on a daily basis, where the anchor of the CBS Evening News recently ended his broadcast and said, ‘We salute you, Marco Rubio’?”
Acosta speculated that Jennings could end up anchoring the CBS Evening News or “Anderson Cooper 360” and excessively praising Trump.
“I mean, what kind of crazy ‘Stranger Things’ upside-down world are we going to become if that’s the kind of news and information that we have pumping out over the airwaves in this country? It sounds to me that that’s exactly what Donald Trump wants,” he said. “All you have to do is go inside his twisted mind.”
“I mean, just the other day, he was tweeting about sending a hospital boat to Greenland. He can’t even stay awake at his own events,” he continued. “And this is the guy who’s going to cow these giant media properties into combining into one another and becoming propaganda arms of his administration. I mean, what kind of crazy 1984 shit is this?”
Employees at CNN also “have real concerns” regarding their network’s future after Paramount won the bidding war, CNN senior media analyst Brian Stelter reported on Friday.
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