With CNN on the cusp of changing hands once more, this time as part of Paramount’s $111 billion mega-deal for Warner Bros. Discovery, media mogul Barry Diller says that if given the opportunity he would snatch up the iconic news brand instantly.
“Absolutely, I would do it tonight and tomorrow night,” Diller told Wall Street Journal reporter Cara Lombardo at the WSJ’s Future of Everything summit in New York Tuesday. “Before they ruin it any further. Hopefully before it’s extinct, which, I mean, it’s not gonna be.”
Diller had previously reached out to WBD about acquiring the TV news outlet, which was founded by Ted Turner, and saved by John Malone, a mentor of Diller’s. The mogul said Tuesday that CNN is “so ripe” for innovation “that I don’t think it’s seen in almost 10 years.”
Instead, CNN appears destined to be cut in the “savage process” that Paramount will need to undertake to reduce costs when its deal is done.
“So how they do that and navigate also running the surviving businesses … I don’t know,” Diller said.
Diller, who last week announced that he would step aside as CEO of IAC and rebrand that holding company as People Incorporated, also said at the conference that he looked “very deeply” at a deal for Vox Media, which appears headed to James Murdoch’s Lupa Systems.
Diller, of course, has always been outspoken about the state of media and entertainment, and coming from a titan of the industry, his words carry weight. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter last year tied to his memoir, he framed the future of Hollywood as a battle that they have already lost.
“I don’t think Hollywood studios will go out of existence. But I think they’ll be much smaller operations than they have been in the past,” he said. “Their days of dominating media have passed, and Hollywood will never recover from that. Hollywood is now under the dictatorial realm of the technology companies, so they are a smaller piece of the pie.”