This past Thursday night, amid swirling speculation about an incident at Brown University, the network's Kaitlan Collins used social media, noting the confusion and directing people to her network’s 9pm newscast.
Although the network is hardly a impeccable news source, her message seemed accurate for a lot of people. It remains one of the organizations where there exists fact-based and mostly dependable reporting – notably during crises like the one taking place near a New Hampshire storage facility.
A Vulnerable State Amid a Business Tug-of-War
Yet CNN, now 45 years old, finds itself in a vulnerable situation as two huge media corporations compete for ownership of its parent company, Warner Bros Discovery.
Whatever the outcome, the destiny of CNN has become part of a high-stakes game of corporate ownership, instead of as a question of what benefits the information-seeking public.
“This represents another instance of the profound systemic issues with origins in many years of regulatory actions,” noted Victor Pickard, writer of “Democracy Without Journalism?” and a media policy professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
The conjecture about which company will control Warner Bros Discovery – is it going to be Netflix or Paramount Skydance? – fails to grasp a more important point.
“It is often framed as a financial tale with influential figures as the protagonists, but there is hardly any discussion of the common good,” Pickard said.
The Additional Element: The Former President
This situation is made more complex by Donald Trump’s longstanding stance about a network he has long portrayed as perhaps his main “fake news” foe.
Think back to the shouts of “CNN sucks!” at Trump's rallies, his team's disciplinary withdrawal of reporter Jim Acosta’s press credentials, or his tense exchanges 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 unsolicited offer.
Trump has reason to prefer that bidder more. For one thing, it is controlled 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 placed the conservative Bari Weiss, known for her “anti-woke” beliefs, as the lead editor of that storied news network.
A Future of More Instability
Significantly, if Netflix is successful, CNN and other cable outlets would first be spun off into a separate entity. That would be a welcome development to many at the network, but it’s not exactly a secure position. That structure could set up CNN for yet another acquisition. There is no finish line.
In the view of Timothy Wu, a great deal of this is a violation of antitrust statutes, anyway. The well-known analyst of big tech’s dominance stated that anti-trust laws should block both deals.
“Each proposed deal would be bad for the country, and both should be opposed by anti-trust authorities,” Wu recently wrote.
The Fundamental Challenge and a Potential Solution
Whatever happens with this particular battle, the larger issue persists.
“What we have now is a highly anti-democratic system, but we ought not succumb to a sense of powerlessness,” Pickard said. Regulatory choices – dating back to the 1930s and 1940s – helped to build this overly commercial monster, and different policy decisions can address it.
Is this likely in an era where the Federal Communications Commission chair won’t even affirm that the agency is independent? Change is a distant prospect now, but that is not to say it will not happen in the future.
Initiatives that support independent news organizations, reinforce local journalism, finance public media, and outlaw the accumulation of media power in too few hands are not only possible – they are necessary for a functioning democracy.
Regarding media ownership, bigger isn’t better. And news organizations like CNN shouldn’t be tools in the most recent acquisition battle.
