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Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes. | AP Photo/Paul Sakluma Time Warner CEO: Trump isn’t serious about redefining First Amendment

Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes, who counts CNN, HBO, Warner Bros. and TBS among the media companies in his portfolio, says that President-Elect Donald Trump’s campaign promises to redefine the First Amendment and “open up the libel laws” are not likely to happen when he takes office.

“No, I don’t think that’s a serious thing. We should all worry if anybody was going to change the First Amendment,” Bewkes said at Business Insider’s Ignition conference, when asked about the campaign promises by interviewer Henry Blodget.

“Remember, the Democratic party had a campaign plan to change the First Amendment, but they were doing it in the guise of campaign finance reform,” Bewkes added. “That would worry me more, because the press tends to miss that, because they tend to lean that way, therefore they supported what they were doing, and I think though they viewed it charitably as something cleaning up money in politics. I think the threat to the First Amendment came more from the Democratic side.”

Bewkes was also asked about Trump’s criticism of CNN on the campaign trail. At rallies, Trump has on occasion led the crowd in chants of “CNN sucks,” and he regularly tweets his complaints about CNN’s coverage.

Trump and his team have "had various disappointments in [their] own evaluation of the press, with all of the news outlets, and at times they have mentioned CNN. We have noticed that some of those mentions have been exaggerated by other media outlets, I don’t know why they would do that,” Bewkes quipped.

Bewkes was also asked about Trump’s promise to cancel the proposed Time Warner-AT&T merger.

“AT&T is buying Time Warner and thus CNN, a deal we will not approve in my administration because it's too much concentration of power in the hands of too few,” Trump said at a rally in October.

Bewkes said that Trump may not have been familiar with the details of the deal, noting that a Senate committee initially called the CEOs of AT&T and Time Warner Cable to appear under oath, apparently unaware that Time Warner Cable had previously been sold to Charter Communications.



“It may have been, it was still before the election, we know some of the strains of populism in the election on both sides,” Bewkes said. “As it becomes clear what we are doing, it will be seen by everyone as being pro-competitive, pro-consumer.”

