On Thursday evening, as rumors swirled about an incident at Brown University, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins used social media, noting the confusion and directing people to her network’s 9pm newscast.
Although CNN is certainly not a perfect news source, her message resonated for a lot of people. It remains one of the outlets where you can find fact-based and largely reliable reporting – notably during fast-moving events such as the one unfolding close to a New Hampshire storage facility.
A Precarious Position During a Corporate Struggle
But the news network, now 45 years old, finds itself in a vulnerable state as two massive media corporations battle over ownership of its corporate owner, Warner Bros Discovery.
No matter the result, the destiny of CNN has become part of 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 decades of regulatory actions,” said Victor Pickard, writer of “Democracy Without Journalism?” and a professor of media policy at the Penn.
The debate about the future owner of Warner Bros Discovery – could it be Netflix or Paramount Skydance? – overlooks a broader point.
“It is often framed as a financial tale with key players as the protagonists, but there is very little discussion of the public interest,” Pickard added.
The Additional Element: Donald Trump
The CNN scenario is complicated by Donald Trump’s longstanding stance about a network he has consistently labeled as perhaps his chief “fake news” adversary.
Think back to the cries of “CNN sucks!” at Trump's rallies, his administration’s punitive revocation of reporter Jim Acosta’s press credentials, or his clashes with Collins in press briefings.
Trump now asserts that the network requires new ownership. You can read that as ownership that will insulate him from criticism and scrutiny. That is one reason why he seems to favor Paramount Skydance, which has made a aggressive takeover attempt.
Trump has reason to like that bidder more. For one thing, it is run by David Ellison, son of the ally of Trump Larry Ellison, one of the world’s richest people.
Paramount, parent of CBS News, also recently placed the conservative Bari Weiss, famous for her “anti-woke” beliefs, as the lead editor of that venerable news network.
A Future of Continued Turmoil
It is important to note, if Netflix wins, CNN and other cable outlets would first be carved out into a separate entity. Such a move could be a relief to many at the network, but it’s not exactly a guarantee of stability. That setup could set up CNN for yet another acquisition. It never ends.
According to Timothy Wu, a great deal 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 harmful to the country, and both should be contested by anti-trust authorities,” Wu argued.
The Core Issue and a Potential Solution
No matter the outcome in this situation, the underlying crisis persists.
“What we have now is a profoundly anti-democratic system, but we must resist the belief that change is impossible,” Pickard emphasized. Government actions – originating in the 1930s and 1940s – helped to build this profit-obsessed monster, and different policy decisions can fix it.
Will that happen in an era where the head of the FCC refuses to acknowledge 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, finance public media, and prevent the accumulation of media power in very few hands are achievable – they are essential for a healthy democracy.
In the world of media ownership, bigger isn’t better. And news organizations like CNN cannot be pawns in the latest corporate chess match.
