Jane Fonda invokes Ted Turner’s CNN to turn star power against the Paramount–Warner merger

Hollywood’s biggest names have spent the streaming era arguing over wages and AI; this week a different fight surfaced — over who owns the news. Jane Fonda, an activist for as long as she has been a movie star, used a New York stage to recast the proposed Paramount–Warner Bros. Discovery merger not as a business story but as a First Amendment one, warning that a handful of consolidated owners would leave audiences with “a very thinned out kind of culture.”

As Deadline first reported, Fonda told the crowd to “sign a petition to tell your state attorneys general to block the Paramount Warner Brothers merger,” calling the deal “a direct attack on free speech.” Her stake is personal: once married to CNN founder Ted Turner, she warned that the network could lose the independence that defined it. “I have a personal stake in CNN,” she said. “I don’t want to see it go that way.”

The remarks came at “Rise Up, Sing Out: A Concert For The First Amendment,” staged by the Committee For The First Amendment — the same banner first raised in 1947 against the Hollywood blacklist. Robert De Niro opened, Julia Roberts, Bette Midler, Ayo Edebiri and Tessa Thompson lent their names, and Patti Smith closed with “People Have The Power.” The lineup was built to convert celebrity into political weight at a moment when the decisions that matter are made in statehouses, not on red carpets.

What makes Fonda’s intervention more than a soundbite is the lever she chose. Rather than appeal to federal regulators, she pointed the audience at state attorneys general — the venue where the merger is most exposed. It reframes movie-star activism as a targeted pressure campaign aimed at the specific officials who can still slow a deal that would fold CNN, Warner’s film library and Paramount’s networks under one roof.

The deal’s path is uneven. The U.S. Department of Justice has signed off, but approvals in the European Union and the United Kingdom remain outstanding, and California’s attorney general is reported to be weighing litigation. That patchwork is exactly the seam Fonda is trying to widen, turning a regulatory technicality into a public cause.

There was a symmetry to the setting: the actor who married into CNN’s founding now standing in a concert hall built around the First Amendment, betting that a petition and a roomful of famous voices can still bend a merger Washington has already waved through.

Tags: cnn, Jane Fonda, media-consolidation, merger, Paramount Global, Warner Bros. Discovery