This past Thursday night, as rumors swirled about a shooting at Brown University, the network's Kaitlan Collins posted on social media, noting the confusion and pointing viewers to her network’s 9pm newscast.
While it is by no means a perfect news source, her message rang true to many. It remains one of the broadcasters where one can locate fact-based and largely reliable reporting – notably during fast-moving events like the one unfolding near a New Hampshire storage facility.
A Vulnerable Situation Amid a Business Struggle
Yet the news network, now middle-aged, finds itself in a vulnerable state as two massive media corporations compete for ownership of its corporate owner, Warner Bros Discovery.
No matter the result, the destiny of CNN has been drawn into a high-stakes game of mergers and acquisitions, rather than as a question of what helps the news-consuming public.
“This represents another instance of the deep structural problems with roots in many years of policy decisions,” said Victor Pickard, author of “Democracy Without Journalism?” and a professor of media policy at the University of Pennsylvania.
The debate about which company will control Warner Bros Discovery – will it be Netflix or Paramount Skydance? – fails to grasp a larger point.
“It gets presented as a financial tale with key players as the central actors, but there is hardly any discussion of the societal benefit,” Pickard added.
The Complicating Layer: Political Influence
The CNN scenario is further muddied by Donald Trump’s views about a network he has frequently denounced as perhaps his main “fake news” adversary.
Recall the cries of “CNN sucks!” at Trump's rallies, his administration's retaliatory revocation of reporter Jim Acosta’s press credentials, or his tense exchanges with Collins in official meetings.
Trump now says that CNN needs new ownership. You can read that as ownership that will protect him from criticism and scrutiny. That is part of why he appears to support Paramount Skydance, which has made a hostile bid.
He has grounds to like that company more. For one thing, it is run by David Ellison, son of the Trump-friendly Larry Ellison, one of the world’s richest people.
The company, parent of CBS News, also recently placed the conservative Bari Weiss, famous for her “anti-woke” beliefs, as the top editor of that venerable news network.
A Possibility of Further Uncertainty
Significantly, if Netflix is successful, 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 far from a safe harbor. That arrangement could pave the way for CNN for another sale. The cycle continues.
In the view of Timothy Wu, a lot of this is a violation of antitrust statutes, anyway. The prominent critic of big tech’s dominance wrote recently that anti-trust laws should disallow both deals.
“Each proposed deal would be harmful to the country, and both should be contested by regulators,” Wu recently wrote.
The Fundamental Challenge and a Way Ahead
Whatever happens in this situation, the bigger problem remains.
“What we have now is a profoundly anti-democratic system, but we ought not succumb to learned helplessness,” Pickard said. Government actions – from the 1930s and 1940s – helped to foster this hyper-commercialized monster, and revised policy decisions can fix it.
Will that happen in an era where the head of the FCC won’t even affirm that the agency is independent? Reform is highly improbable now, but that should not imply it will not happen in the future.
Policies that bolster independent news organizations, reinforce local journalism, finance public media, and prohibit the concentration of media power in very few hands are achievable – they are necessary for a robust democracy.
In the world of media ownership, size does not equal quality. And news organizations such as CNN cannot be pieces in the most recent acquisition battle.
