Our Value Chain

Sinners

Warner Bros. Discovery is committed to engaging and building trusted relationships with our customers, suppliers, business partners, and employees around the world. We conduct business in a manner that respects the human rights and dignity of all.

Supply Chain

We expect all Business Partners - including our suppliers - to share our values and commitment to ethical business practices.

Our Ethical Sourcing Guidelines, which our suppliers receive before or during onboarding, ensure adherence with standards on child labor, environmental laws and regulations, health and safety, non-discrimination, anti-bribery and anti-corruption, freedom of association and right to collective bargaining, employment records, and appropriate internal controls to ensure adherence to local regulations and WBD policies.

Our ethical business practices

Requests for Proposals (RFPs): We integrate questions on regulatory compliance, labor practices, and sustainability into our RFPs as part of our competitive bidding process to understand potential risks and opportunities with each potential supplier.
Due Diligence: We work with a qualified independent third-party risk management solution to perform a comprehensive risk assessment on key risks within our current global supply chain for new and renewing suppliers. Topics include financial stability, human rights, and environmental performance. Our Procurement team works cross-functionally to develop contingency plans to mitigate identified risks for selected suppliers.
Audits: We conduct ongoing monitoring of our suppliers and reserve the ability to audit our suppliers' facilities - either directly or via third-party auditors - to ensure compliance with our standards as part of our internal controls.
Equal Access for Suppliers: WBD promotes equal access for all businesses, including small businesses, and we evaluate all suppliers based on skills, qualifications, services, and pricing to encourage innovation and strengthen our brands.

Find more information about our procurement and strategic sourcing strategy here.

The Source with Kaitlan Collins

Journalistic Integrity and Media Ethics

We are dedicated to maintaining the highest standards of journalistic integrity across all media platforms. As a global media and entertainment company, we recognize the importance of building trust with audiences by providing accurate, independent, and ethical reporting.

Maintaining journalistic integrity

Standards: We maintain comprehensive policies and procedures that support pluralism and uphold our editorial guidelines of accuracy, independence, and fairness in news media content. Journalists at CNN and TVN24 - Poland's leading, independent news broadcaster, which is part of the TVN Network - are required to abide by high standards of ethics and adhere to stringent standards of journalistic integrity. The standards are regularly updated to reflect evolving best practices and technological advancements. Relevant employees are required to read, attest to, and complete training on these standards, both at onboarding and throughout their careers. We also invest in teams and processes that strengthen media literacy, counter disinformation, and ensure regular fact-checking.
Oversight and Internal Controls: Editorial standards and practices are overseen by dedicated teams at CNN and TVN24. These teams actively monitor, engage directly with journalists, and facilitate editorial processes to uphold standards and to address potential conflicts of interest or ethical concerns. The teams hold regular meetings and ongoing dialogue to help address challenges and reinforce our commitment to journalistic integrity.
AI and Digital Content: As we enhance our digital offerings to reach audiences where they look for news, we are committed to maintaining our standards of journalistic integrity. We explore the use of emerging technologies, including AI, in our newsgathering, reporting, and production. Dedicated teams are required to review content, including images from third parties, to ensure accuracy, authenticity, objectivity, fairness, and other adherence to our journalistic standards. We actively monitor industry and regulatory developments, incorporate best practices, and update our policies and trainings to safeguard the integrity of our reporting across all platforms.

Responsible Programming, Advertising, and Marketing

We are committed to the production of impactful content, and we uphold strict policies to ensure our content is responsible and complies with our internal standards and guidelines, cultural mores, and applicable laws and regulations.

Our Standards and Practices team engages with entertainment producers and partners to review content, apply accurate ratings and content descriptions, and to address potential issues such as those arising from language, depictions of nudity, sex and violence, or other potentially offensive, insensitive, or inappropriate content for the intended audiences.

Advertising must meet commercial clearance guidelines, our viewers' and advertisers' expectations, industry best practices, and applicable laws and regulations. We ensure ads are placed in programming appropriate for the audience, based on brand sensitivities, ratings, audience demographics, and program content. As a supporter of the Children's Advertising Review Unit, a self-regulatory organization dedicated to promoting responsible advertising to children, we monitor and apply industry best practices to restrict or place advertising that might be considered inappropriate for younger audiences. WBD reserves the right to review, accept, reject, or require edits to any advertisement or promotional message, including those flagged by viewers, for any reason whatsoever, including but not limited to, any ads that we deem false, misleading, deceptive, offensive, in poor taste, or inconsistent with our editorial content.

Film Studio Tobacco Depiction Policy

Warner Bros. Discovery firmly believes in artistic freedom of expression and actively supports the creative vision of producers, writers, directors, actors, and others involved in making feature films.

Consistent with this belief, Warner Bros. Discovery’s film studios, Warner Bros. Pictures, New Line Cinema, and DC Studios (together, the “Studios”), work closely with creative talent to produce and distribute for theatrical release feature films that appeal to a wide array of audiences. At the same time, the Studios strive to produce and distribute feature films in a responsible manner and remain sensitive to public concerns, industry practices and public health regulations and research in this area as they evolve over time. Accordingly, the Studios endeavor to reduce or eliminate the depiction of smoking and tobacco products/brands in their feature films, unless there is a compelling creative reason for such depictions.

Warner Bros. Discovery film studios practices

The Studios do not enter into any product placement or promotion arrangements with respect to tobacco products/brands for any theatrical feature film they produce and distribute in the United States.
The Studios endeavor to reduce or eliminate depictions of smoking and tobacco products/brands in any theatrical feature film produced and distributed in the United States that is expected to be rated “G”, “PG” or “PG-13”, unless (a) the depiction involves a character who is a literary or an actual historical figure known to have used tobacco products; (b) the depiction is otherwise warranted for reasons of compelling literary or historical accuracy; or (c) the depiction is part of a conspicuous anti-smoking reference. Even within these three categories, the Studios consider ways to reduce depictions of smoking and tobacco.
The Studios endeavor to reduce or eliminate depictions of smoking and tobacco products/brands in any theatrical feature film produced and distributed in the United States that is expected to be rated “R”, unless there are compelling creative reasons for such depictions
For any feature film produced by the Studios for theatrical release outside the United States or where the Studios’ influence over the content of any feature film is limited (such as a film co-produced by third parties or films produced by third parties and only distributed by the Studios), the Studios discourage the depiction of smoking when they believe it is appropriate to do so.

Hacks

Intellectual Property

WBD is one of the world's leading creators, owners, and distributors of intellectual property, and the protection of our content and brands is of primary importance.

Our intellectual property assets include copyrights in films, television programs, software, comic books, and mobile apps; trademarks in names, logos, and characters; patents or patent applications for inventions related to products and services; websites; and licenses of intellectual property rights of various kinds from third parties. We have made, and will continue to make, investments in developing technology platforms to support our digital products and streaming services, including HBO Max, discovery+, and the CNN app, and consider these platforms to be intellectual property assets as well.

To protect our intellectual property assets, we rely on a combination of copyright, trademark, patent, unfair competition, internet/domain name statutes and laws, and contract provisions. We seek to limit the unauthorized use of our intellectual property through a combination of approaches and tools. To address piracy, we utilize external vendors to detect and remove infringements, leverage industry group memberships, engage with intermediaries, and initiate enforcement actions as needed.

Piracy, which encompasses the theft of our signals and the unauthorized use of our intellectual property in the digital environment, continues to present a threat to revenues from products and services based on our intellectual property. Piracy also includes the unauthorized use of our intellectual property on physical goods. We also address the unauthorized use of our intellectual property by generative artificial intelligence tools.

Product Accessibility

We strive to facilitate and improve content accessibility and the usability of our sites and applications so that our content is accessible to all. Through our Accessibility Center of Excellence and its internal and external stakeholder partners, we offer a range of tools and accessibility features, including audio descriptions, closed captioning, keyboard navigation, interoperability with popular screen readers, and other accessibility features.

To enhance the accessibility of our content, we expanded American Sign Language (ASL) versions of various featured content. In 2025, HBO Max became the first streamer to run ASL versions of series episodes on HBO Max release day and date through releases of HBO Original series The Last of Us, and IT: Welcome to Derry. Find other hit shows and movies with ASL here.

Awards and Achievements

Apple TV App of the Year for HBO Max
American Council of the Blind's 2025 Award for Audio Description for HBO Max and People's Choice Awards for HBO Max's movie, Flow