This past Thursday night, as rumors swirled about a shooting at Brown University, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins took to social media, highlighting the uncertainty and pointing viewers to her network’s 9pm newscast.
Although the network is hardly a perfect news source, her message seemed accurate to many. It stands as one of the outlets where you can find fact-based and mostly reliable reporting – especially during fast-moving events like the one unfolding close to a New Hampshire storage facility.
An Uncertain State Amid a Business Struggle
However the news network, now four and a half decades old, finds itself in a vulnerable situation as two giant media conglomerates compete for ownership of its corporate owner, Warner Bros Discovery.
No matter the result, the destiny of CNN has turned into a major game of mergers and acquisitions, not as a question of what serves the news-consuming public.
“This represents another instance of the profound systemic issues with roots in decades of regulatory actions,” noted Victor Pickard, writer of “Democracy Without Journalism?” and a media policy professor at the Penn.
The conjecture about the future owner of Warner Bros Discovery – is it going to be Netflix or Paramount Skydance? – overlooks a larger point.
“It gets presented as a business story with key players as the main characters, but there is very little discussion of the public interest,” Pickard explained.
The Additional Factor: Political Influence
The network's predicament is further muddied by Donald Trump’s views about a network he has long portrayed as perhaps his chief “fake news” foe.
Remember the cries of “CNN sucks!” at Trump's rallies, his administration’s punitive suspension of reporter Jim Acosta’s press credentials, or his tense exchanges with Collins in press briefings.
Trump now claims that CNN needs new ownership. You can read that as ownership that will insulate him from criticism and scrutiny. That is part of why he appears to support Paramount Skydance, which has made a unsolicited offer.
There is a basis to prefer that suitor more. For one thing, it is led by David Ellison, son of the Trump-friendly Larry Ellison, one of the world’s richest people.
Paramount, parent of CBS News, also recently appointed the conservative Bari Weiss, famous for her “anti-woke” beliefs, as the top editor of that venerable news network.
A Future of Continued Uncertainty
Significantly, if Netflix prevails, CNN and other cable outlets would first be separated into a standalone company. That would be a welcome development to many at the network, but it’s hardly a guarantee of stability. That structure could pave the way for CNN for yet another acquisition. It never ends.
In the view of Timothy Wu, much of this is a violation of antitrust statutes, anyway. The prominent critic of big tech’s dominance wrote recently that competition laws should block both deals.
“Both acquisition attempts would be detrimental to the country, and both should be contested by regulators,” Wu recently wrote.
The Fundamental Challenge and a Way Ahead
Regardless of the resolution in this situation, the larger issue endures.
“The present media landscape is a very system hostile to democracy, but we ought not succumb to learned helplessness,” Pickard emphasized. Policy decisions – originating in the 1930s and 1940s – helped to foster this profit-obsessed monster, and revised policy decisions can tackle it.
Will that happen in an era where the Federal Communications Commission chair will not confirm that the agency is independent? Change is a distant prospect now, but that should not imply it will be impossible forever.
Policies that bolster independent news organizations, reinforce local journalism, subsidize public media, and prevent the concentration of media power in too few hands are within reach – they are vital for a robust democracy.
In the world of media ownership, size does not equal quality. And news organizations such as CNN cannot be tools in the newest acquisition battle.
