Late Thursday, while unconfirmed reports spread about the Brown University gunman, the network's Kaitlan Collins took to social media, noting the confusion and guiding the public to her network’s 9pm newscast.
While the network is hardly a flawless news source, her words resonated for numerous observers. It is one of the organizations where one can locate fact-based and largely dependable reporting – particularly during crises such as the one developing close to a New Hampshire storage facility.
An Uncertain Situation Amid a High-Stakes Battle
But the news network, now four and a half decades old, finds itself in a uncertain position as two huge media empires compete for ownership of its corporate owner, Warner Bros Discovery.
Whatever the outcome, the fate of CNN has turned into a high-stakes game of mergers and acquisitions, not as a question of what benefits the news-consuming public.
“Here is one more case of the deep structural problems with origins in many years of regulatory actions,” said Victor Pickard, writer of “Democracy Without Journalism?” and a professor of media policy at the Penn.
The speculation about which company will control Warner Bros Discovery – will it be Netflix or Paramount Skydance? – misses a more important point.
“It gets presented as a financial tale with influential figures as the main characters, but there is hardly any discussion of the public interest,” Pickard said.
A Further Element: The Former President
The CNN scenario is made more complex by Donald Trump’s opinions about a network he has consistently labeled as perhaps his primary “fake news” antagonist.
Remember the cries of “CNN sucks!” at Trump's rallies, his administration’s punitive suspension of reporter Jim Acosta’s press credentials, or his clashes with Collins in official meetings.
Trump now says that CNN needs new ownership. You can read that as ownership that will shield him from journalistic oversight. That is a factor in why he appears to support Paramount Skydance, which has made a aggressive takeover attempt.
He has grounds to prefer that bidder more. For one thing, it is led by David Ellison, son of the ally of Trump Larry Ellison, one of the world’s richest people.
Paramount, owner of CBS News, also recently installed the right-leaning Bari Weiss, famous for her “anti-woke” beliefs, as the top editor of that venerable news network.
A Possibility of Continued Turmoil
Significantly, if Netflix prevails, CNN and other cable outlets would first be separated into a independent unit. This might be a welcome development to many at the network, but it’s not exactly a guarantee of stability. That arrangement could set up CNN for a future sale. It never ends.
In the view of Timothy Wu, a great deal of this is against the law, anyway. The well-known analyst of big tech’s dominance recently argued that competition laws should disallow both deals.
“Either merger would be bad for the country, and both should be opposed by anti-trust authorities,” Wu recently wrote.
The Fundamental Challenge and a Path Forward
Whatever happens in this situation, the larger issue persists.
“What we have now is a very anti-democratic system, but we ought not succumb to the belief that change is impossible,” Pickard emphasized. Regulatory choices – originating in the 1930s and 1940s – helped to foster this profit-obsessed monster, and new policy decisions can fix it.
Can reform occur in an era where the head of the FCC won’t even affirm that the agency is independent? Reform is a distant prospect now, but that should not imply it will not happen in the future.
Measures that support independent news organizations, reinforce local journalism, subsidize public media, and outlaw the consolidation of media power in too few hands are within reach – they are necessary for a healthy democracy.
When it comes to media ownership, size does not equal quality. And news organizations such as CNN cannot be pawns in the most recent acquisition battle.
