OAN Commentary by: Matt Gaetz
Monday, November 24, 2025
Warner Bros. Discovery, and therefore CNN, is entertaining offers from potential suitors. This could be one of the most consequential media shakeups in modern American history. Takeover proposals were due on Thursday, and two of the companies courting WBD leadership are Netflix and Comcast. For conservatives, that should set off every alarm bell in the building.
This isn’t just about the future of CNN, though that is certainly part of the story. Warner Bros. Discovery is also the home to the number one movie studio in Hollywood, HBO Max, and too many iconic American shows and films to count. That’s why it’s so concerning that two of the most aggressively left-wing corporations in America are lining up to buy it.
Let’s start with Comcast.
Conservatives know exactly who and what Comcast is. This is the same cable giant that has never — not for one day — carried One America News on its enormous national Xfinity platform. Not once. They didn’t drop OAN. They refused to ever give OAN so much as a toehold. Meanwhile, Comcast beams the left-leaning channels it owns (MSNBC and NBC News, to name just a couple) into tens of millions of homes.
And the company has already found itself in antitrust hot water. A decade ago, the company attempted a mega-merger with Time Warner Cable. State attorneys general from both parties revolted, warning that Comcast was already too big and too powerful and that the deal would destroy competition. The DOJ agreed, and the merger collapsed under regulatory scrutiny.
That was in 2015, when Comcast was far smaller. If Comcast was too big to expand then, it should certainly not be able to get bigger now.
It’s not like the company has become any more focused on consumer welfare over the last decade. In fact, it’s been so tone deaf to half of the country’s political views that President Trump blasted Comcast and NBCUniversal on Truth Social, pointing to their long record of anti-conservative bias. Giving Comcast the Warner Bros. Discovery catalog would represent the single largest ideological consolidation of media power in American history.
Netflix isn’t any better. In fact, in some ways it’s worse.
Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings is a darling of The Left, giving Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom’s election efforts $7 million and $2 million, respectively. Netflix subscribers noticed the latter. The company suffered one of its highest one-day cancellation spikes of the year after the donation became public. The company itself gave 98% of its political contributions to left-leaning candidates.
The lesson here was that Americans are fed up with corporations using their money to wage partisan warfare. So what would it mean for consumer welfare if a Netflix takeover of WBD force-feeds Netflix down their throats? Nothing good, that’s for sure.
The Trump administration has already signaled it is watching the WBD takeover process closely. And that makes sense. This administration understands that antitrust has long played a critical role in stopping dominant media firms from using their market power to suppress rival viewpoints — a form of exclusionary conduct the Supreme Court has warned directly undermines the ‘widest possible dissemination of information.”
In August, the Trump administration filed a statement of interest in federal court in a case against The Washington Post, BBC, the Associated Press, and Reuters, making it clear that antitrust law protects the competitive marketplace of ideas by stopping dominant firms from using market power to exclude rival voices.
The Trump DOJ is right. In Associated Press v. United States and Lorain Journal Co. v. United States, the Court made clear that when media monopolies use economic dominance to exclude rival outlets, that conduct is actionable under the Sherman Act — not because of the viewpoints involved, but because suppressing competing voices is a classic form of anticompetitive exclusion.
And that’s why it is entirely justified for the administration to scrutinize this WBD sale so closely.
If conservatives lose this fight, we may wake up one day to find that every major studio, major streaming service, cable platform, and news outlet is controlled by a handful of corporations that despise us. We shouldn’t wait until it’s too late. It’s time for oversight, time for pressure, and time to fight back.
(Views expressed by guest commentators may not reflect the views of OAN or its affiliates.)
Matt Gaetz (@MattGaetz), the host of The Matt Gaetz Show on OANN, is a former Member of Congress from Florida and a former Attorney General nominee for President Donald J. Trump
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