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Dec 9, 2025
Trump's media meddling is straight out of Viktor Orbán's playbook
MS NOW
The biggest player in the unfolding drama surrounding the megasale of Warner Bros. Discovery isn't one of the giant companies competing to buy it. It's President Donald Trump, whose preferences and personal relationships are poised to influence the outcome of this sale of Hollywood and media assets.
"I will be involved," Trump declared on Sunday in the wake of Netflix's $83 billion bid for Warner Bros. Discovery -- and before Paramount Skydance launched a $103 billion counteroffer Monday morning.
Trump's statement is ominous. The president of the United States doesn't usually get directly involved in who buys what in the media. That kind of intervention is typically reserved for authoritarians such as Hungary's prime minister, Viktor Orbán. During almost 16 years in power, Orbán -- a Trump ally -- and his Fidesz party have twisted Hungary's news media into reliable instruments of state power by steering deals into friendly hands.
America isn't Hungary; its information landscape is far bigger and more complex. But Trump has already shown an Orbán-like tendency to use government power to reward friends, injure perceived enemies and tilt the media to his advantage. He appears determined to do so again with Wall Street's most-watched deal.
After Warner Bros. Discovery -- a conglomerate that owns CNN, HBO and the famed movie and TV studio -- put itself up for sale in October, it quickly attracted interest from three fellow entertainment and media behemoths: Netflix, Paramount and Comcast Corp. (MS NOW is part of Versant Media, a company being spun off from Comcast as of Jan. 1.)
The outcome of the sale depends not just on the payout but on the conclusion of a lengthy government antitrust review. That means much is riding on whom Trump favors, and most likely on whatever promises he can extract in exchange for his blessing. He said on Sunday that an acquisition by Netflix "could be a problem," given how much of the streaming market Netflix would control after adding
