This past Thursday night, while unconfirmed reports spread about an incident at Brown University, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins took to social media, pointing out the conflicting information and directing people to her network’s 9pm newscast.
Even though the network is hardly a impeccable news source, her message resonated for a lot of people. It stands as one of the organizations where one can locate reality-based and largely reliable reporting – particularly during crises such as the one developing close to a New Hampshire storage facility.
A Vulnerable Position Amid a Corporate Struggle
Yet CNN, now 45 years old, finds itself in a vulnerable state as two giant media empires battle over ownership of its parent company, Warner Bros Discovery.
Whatever the outcome, the fate of CNN has turned into a major game of mergers and acquisitions, rather than as a question of what benefits the news-consuming public.
“This represents another instance of the fundamental flaws with roots in decades of regulatory actions,” stated Victor Pickard, author of “Democracy Without Journalism?” and a academic specializing in media policy at the University of Pennsylvania.
The debate about who will own Warner Bros Discovery – will it be Netflix or Paramount Skydance? – fails to grasp a broader point.
“It gets presented as a financial tale with influential figures as the protagonists, but there is scant discussion of the public interest,” Pickard added.
The Additional Element: Political Influence
The network's predicament is made more complex by Donald Trump’s longstanding stance about a network he has consistently labeled as perhaps his chief “fake news” antagonist.
Remember the shouts of “CNN sucks!” at his rallies, his team's disciplinary withdrawal of reporter Jim Acosta’s press credentials, or his sparring with Collins in press briefings.
Trump now says that CNN needs new ownership. You can read that as ownership that will insulate him from criticism and scrutiny. That is one reason why he seems to come down on the side of Paramount Skydance, which has made a hostile bid.
There is a basis to prefer that bidder 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 placed the conservative Bari Weiss, known for her “anti-woke” beliefs, as the editor-in-chief of that venerable news network.
A Possibility of Continued Turmoil
Notably, if Netflix wins, CNN and other cable outlets would first be carved out into a separate entity. This might be a relief to many at the network, but it’s not exactly a safe harbor. That arrangement could pave the way for CNN for another sale. The cycle continues.
In the view of Timothy Wu, a great deal of this is against the law, anyway. The influential voice of big tech’s dominance wrote recently that anti-trust laws should disallow both deals.
“Both acquisition attempts would be detrimental to the country, and both should be challenged by the government,” Wu recently wrote.
The Bigger Challenge and a Path Forward
No matter the outcome regarding CNN, the larger issue remains.
“What we have now is a profoundly anti-democratic system, but we must resist the belief that change is impossible,” Pickard said. Regulatory choices – dating back to the 1930s and 1940s – helped to build this overly commercial monster, and different policy decisions can fix it.
Will that happen in an era where the Federal Communications Commission chair refuses to acknowledge that the agency is independent? Reform is highly improbable now, but that doesn’t mean it will never happen.
Measures that strengthen independent news organizations, reinforce local journalism, finance public media, and prevent the accumulation of media power in very few hands are not only possible – they are essential for a healthy democracy.
In the world of media ownership, bigger isn’t better. And news organizations including CNN shouldn’t be tools in the most recent merger game.
