Billionaire media mogul Barry Diller has reiterated his desire to take over CNN. When asked whether he was still interested in snapping up the struggling news station at an event in Manhattan Tuesday, the former Fox Broadcasting Company executive wasted no time with his answer.
'Absolutely,' he told The Wall Street Journal. 'I would do it tonight and tomorrow night before they ruin it any further.'
'Hopefully before it’s extinct, which I mean it’s not going to be, but I think, I mean, it is so ripe for care,' the exec added.
The exchange comes months after a January Journal report revealed Diller, 84, wanted to buy the network from Warner Bros. Discovery after the latter put itself up for sale last year. Paramount has since entered an agreement with Warner to acquire the company, CNN included, at the cost of $111 billion. Shareholders have already signed off on the bid, which still needs federal approval.
Diller - once the CEO of Paramount himself - said he still feels like the best fit. 'It is so ripe for a kind of innovation that I don’t think it’s seen in almost 10 years,' Diller told editor Cara Lombardo of CNN, at the Journal's Future of Everything Festival.
'The thing is and you know, a lot of the people who work at CNN I have a lot of respect for, I just don’t think they’ve been served well because no one has made an investment really,' he added. 'They’ve made investments to some degree in trying to turn it into a digital property, maybe they’ll succeed with that, but they haven’t done anything with their on-air product.'
When it comes to linear, 'They haven’t really, I believe, at least seems to me, invested in it,' he said. 'I would very much invest in it,' Diller quickly clarified.
He founded Fox alongside Rupert Murdoch back in 1986. Before that, he was an executive at ABC. CNN, meanwhile, has lost nearly two-thirds of its primetime viewers over the past decade. The network's daytime lineup has experienced a similar decline.
CNN was the first 24-hour all-news TV network in 1980, and it inspired the creation of rivals such as Fox News and MSNBC. In terms of cable, Diller said CNN C-suiters are not 'invested' in the station, which has shed viewers over the past ten years.
Diller is the chairman and senior executive of IAC and Expedia Group. He has an estimated net worth of $5.3 billion, according to Forbes. The once-leading cable station carried out a round of layoffs within its TV division to herald in its long-promised move to digital at the start of 2025.
'You can use your thumb to flick from a CNN news story to a CNN anchor to a reporter,' CNN CEO Mark Thompson said at the time, of a then-planned shift to vertical videos. The long-in-the-works restructuring plan followed a failed leadership stint from then-CEO Chris Licht that lasted barely 12 months.
A former showrunner for Stephen Colbert, Licht replaced longtime lead Jeff Zucker. The latter masterminded the network's shift to more opinionated content in the 2010s, right around the time of Donald Trump's first presidency. Trump's rise ramped up interest in previously languishing cable channels. The spike continued until 2017, led by anti-Trump anchors like Jim Acosta, Don Lemon and Brianna Keilar.
Several CEOs and lineup changes later, the network is set to be seized by Paramount. CEO David Ellison - the son of billionaire Trump ally Larry Ellison - was one of the only parties interested in CNN. Bidders like Netflix passed and only wanted Paramount's studio and streaming assets. Netflix dropped out of the bidding war following several increased offers from Paramount.
Diller, moreover, is the chairman and senior executive of Home Shopping Network holding company IAC and Expedia Group. He has a net worth of roughly $5.3 billion, Forbes estimates. Other figures to speak at the Tuesday event about evolving technologies included actor Anthony Anderson, filmmaker Ken Burns, and Cedric the Entertainer.
