CNN confirms WBD owns piece of AEW, pushes WWE rivalry as political

The story that began when “F**k ICE” chants rang out in Las Vegas’ Pearl Theater at the Palms before the start of Brody King’s main event match against AEW World champion Maxwell Jacob Friedman on the Feb. 4 Dynamite isn’t showing any signs of going away.

We won’t spoil any of the results of Grand Slam Australia (which will make its broadcast premiere tonight, Sat., Feb. 14, at 8 p.m. ET; spoilers are here, if you’re interested), but we will tell you the chant opposing U.S. President Donald Trump’s human and constitutional rights-trampling Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations was back when King and MJF main event-ed again in Sydney.

It will likely be edited or bleeped out before it runs on TNT and HBO Max; with 12-hour advance notice, all chants with f-bombs likely will be. That will still fuel speculation the reason could be politically-motivated — a debate that’s continued partly because Wrestling Observer’s Dave Meltzer misreported that AEW’s media rights partner Warner Bros Discovery (WBD) somehow forced King off the Feb. 10 Dynamite because of the chants. WBD officials and AEW president Tony Khan have both gone on record refuting Meltzer, and the Observer scribe walked his quote back, admitting there was no “directive” from Warners while maintaining some at the company have “a lot of leeriness” about the chants.

Into that discussion comes more coverage of the anti-ICE chants, this time from CNN.

CNN is a WBD property. The network surely still has some guidelines for covering brands they share an owner with, and Michael Ballaban, the business writer responsible for “The shocking, rule-breaking new move in pro wrestling: getting specific about politics”, doesn’t seem to be a huge wrestling fan, or certainly not a weekly Dynamite watcher — so I personally won’t be reading too much into AEW and CNN’s shared corporate parent, but it’s important to note.

Especially because one of the big takeaways people have from Ballaban’s article is his confirmation that WBD owns a stake in AEW. That’s been suspected almost from AEW’s launch, and reported by outlets including Wrestlenomics and Sports Business Journal in 2024 around the announcement of AEW and WBD’s new media rights deal. It’s confirmed in the new article while disclosing WBD’s ownership of CNN. It’s at the end of the paragraph where Ballaban calls AEW’s rivalry with WWE “politically-shaded”:

The embrace of contemporary issues is part of a larger, politically shaded rivalry playing out in the industry, between the 7-year-old AEW and the industry’s ruling juggernaut for generations, WWE (Warner Bros. Discovery, CNN’s parent corporation, owns a minority stake in AEW).

From our coverage after the 2024 reporting on WBD’s ownership stake:

That lines up with conclusions that were drawn from AEW’s recent disclosure filing in the lawsuit filed against it by Kevin Kelly & the Tates which stated that no publicly held corporation owns more than 10% of AEW’s shares. WBD is a publicly traded company, so any stake it has would have to be below that threshold.

So it’s official confirmation of something many insiders deduced, from somewhere with more eyes on it than wrestling and sports entertainment reports usually get. And to me, what’s really interesting is that anyone with as big a platform as CNN is pushing the idea that AEW is the blue company and WWE the red one (what follows the “politically shaded” quote above in Ballaban’s article is a section on Donald Trump being in the WWE Hall of Fame and the various McMahon/Trump ties*).

Ballaban never really tries to make it clear that Brody King’s character is not anti-ICE, nor MJF’s pro-Trump. He includes a quote from the academic he interviews, “a professor of theater who studies the history of professional wrestling at the State University of New York at Buffalo” named Eero Laine that does, but Ballaban doesn’t return to what Laine was getting at when he said what’s interesting about the “F**k ICE” chants is “that they support a political stance associated with one of the wrestlers [King, who has raised money to support ICE victims], but they are not necessarily directly related to what’s happening in the ring. And the chant is not part of the repertoire of standard wrestling chants.”

Meltzer says WBD’s “leeriness” about the protest chant is out of a desire to remain neutral, something WWE also claims to strive for despite all of its ties to the Trump empire. In this week’s Observer Newsletter, Meltzer wrote that “both AEW and WWE badly don’t want to be seen favoring one side or the other for fear of alienating a large percentage of their audience.” While still pushing AEW vs. WWE as left vs. right, the CNN piece does include Tony Khan’s quote about allowing wrestlers to be themselves without the company itself getting political.

It will be fascinating to see how politics in wrestling, and coverage of it, continue to evolve. From a business perspective, does AEW use the publicity that’s come from the anti-ICE chants, and risk turning off the large percentage of the U.S. and world that supports Trump and his policies? They may not be a majority of the population or even AEW’s current audience, but they’re probably at least 35-40% of it. Or if public opinion continues to turn against the administration, will WWE be hurt by its associations?

Let us know what you think in the comments, and stay tuned.

_{* Ballaban also again confirms Shad Khan hasn’t donated to Trump since 2017 and has since split with him on most issues. Not that it will stop that talking point from being raised on occasion.}