This past Thursday night, amid swirling speculation regarding the Brown University gunman, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins took to social media, highlighting the uncertainty and pointing viewers to her channel's 9pm newscast.
Although the network is hardly a flawless news source, her words rang true for a lot of people. It remains one of the organizations where one can locate fact-based and largely reliable reporting – especially during crises like the one unfolding close to a New Hampshire storage facility.
A Vulnerable Situation Amid a Corporate Battle
Yet CNN, now four and a half decades old, finds itself in a precarious situation as two massive media empires compete for ownership of its parent company, Warner Bros Discovery.
Regardless of who wins, the fate of CNN has become part of a major game of mergers and acquisitions, instead of as a question of what helps the information-seeking public.
“Here is one more case of the deep structural problems with roots in decades of regulatory actions,” stated Victor Pickard, author of “Democracy Without Journalism?” and a professor of media policy at the University of Pennsylvania.
The conjecture about who will own Warner Bros Discovery – will it be Netflix or Paramount Skydance? – misses a broader point.
“It is often framed as a financial tale with key players as the central actors, but there is hardly any discussion of the societal benefit,” Pickard said.
The Additional Layer: Donald Trump
This situation is further muddied by Donald Trump’s views about a network he has long portrayed as perhaps his chief “fake news” foe.
Think back to the chants of “CNN sucks!” at his rallies, his administration's retaliatory suspension of reporter Jim Acosta’s press credentials, or his tense exchanges with Collins in official meetings.
Trump now claims that the network requires new ownership. You can read that as ownership that will insulate him from negative coverage and examination. That is one reason why he appears to come down on the side of Paramount Skydance, which has made a aggressive takeover attempt.
He has grounds to like that suitor more. For one thing, it is led by David Ellison, son of the pro-Trump Larry Ellison, one of the world’s richest people.
Paramount, parent of CBS News, also recently installed the right-leaning Bari Weiss, famous for her “anti-woke” beliefs, as the editor-in-chief of that storied news network.
An Outcome of Further Turmoil
Notably, if Netflix wins, CNN and other cable outlets would first be carved out into a separate entity. This might be a welcome development to many at the network, but it’s hardly a guarantee of stability. That setup could position CNN for a future sale. It never ends.
In the view of Timothy Wu, a great deal of this is a violation of antitrust statutes, anyway. The prominent critic of big tech’s dominance recently argued that competition laws should disallow both deals.
“Both acquisition attempts would be bad for the country, and both should be opposed by regulators,” Wu argued.
The Fundamental Problem and a Way Ahead
No matter the outcome with this particular battle, the larger issue remains.
“Our current system is a profoundly structure that undermines democracy, but we ought not succumb to learned helplessness,” Pickard noted. Policy decisions – from the 1930s and 1940s – helped to foster this profit-obsessed monster, and different policy decisions can address it.
Is this likely in an era where the top communications regulator refuses to acknowledge that the agency is independent? Overhaul is very unlikely now, but that should not imply it will never happen.
Measures that strengthen independent news organizations, bolster local journalism, finance public media, and prohibit the accumulation of media power in too few hands are not only possible – they are necessary for a healthy democracy.
When it comes to media ownership, bigger isn’t better. And news organizations such as CNN must not be pawns in the most recent corporate chess match.
