This past Thursday night, as rumors swirled regarding the Brown University gunman, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins posted on social media, highlighting the uncertainty and pointing viewers to her channel's 9pm newscast.
While the network is hardly a impeccable news source, her message rang true for a lot of people. It is one of the organizations where there exists fact-based and generally dependable reporting – especially during crises such as the one unfolding close to a New Hampshire storage facility.
A Precarious Situation During a High-Stakes Struggle
Yet the news network, now 45 years old, finds itself in a uncertain state as two massive media conglomerates battle over ownership of its parent company, Warner Bros Discovery.
Whatever the outcome, the fate of CNN has become part of a high-stakes game of corporate ownership, instead of as a question of what serves the news-consuming public.
“This represents another instance of the deep structural problems with roots in many years of policy decisions,” stated Victor Pickard, author of “Democracy Without Journalism?” and a professor of media policy at the Pennsylvania University.
The speculation about who will own Warner Bros Discovery – could it be Netflix or Paramount Skydance? – misses a more important point.
“It is often framed as a financial tale with powerful individuals as the main characters, but there is very little discussion of the public interest,” Pickard added.
The Additional Factor: The Former President
This situation is complicated by Donald Trump’s longstanding stance about a network he has long portrayed as perhaps his main “fake news” foe.
Remember the chants of “CNN sucks!” at the president’s rallies, his team's disciplinary suspension 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 shield him from journalistic oversight. That is part of why he appears to favor Paramount Skydance, which has made a unsolicited offer.
He has grounds to prefer that company more. For one thing, it is controlled by David Ellison, son of the pro-Trump Larry Ellison, one of the world’s richest people.
Paramount, owner of CBS News, also recently placed the right-leaning Bari Weiss, famous for her “anti-woke” beliefs, as the top editor of that storied news network.
An Outcome of Continued Turmoil
Notably, if Netflix prevails, CNN and other cable outlets would first be carved out into a separate entity. This might be a welcome development to many at the network, but it’s not exactly a guarantee of stability. That structure could pave the way for CNN for yet another acquisition. It never ends.
If you ask 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 competition laws should prohibit both deals.
“Each proposed deal would be bad for the country, and both should be contested by anti-trust authorities,” Wu recently wrote.
The Fundamental Challenge and a Potential Solution
No matter the outcome in this situation, the bigger problem persists.
“The present media landscape is a profoundly structure that undermines democracy, but we ought not succumb to a sense of powerlessness,” Pickard noted. Regulatory choices – dating back to the 1930s and 1940s – helped to foster this hyper-commercialized monster, and revised policy decisions can address it.
Will that happen in an era where the top communications regulator will not confirm that the agency is independent? Change is highly improbable now, but that doesn’t mean it will be impossible forever.
Measures that bolster independent news organizations, reinforce local journalism, subsidize public media, and prevent the concentration of media power in a handful of hands are not only possible – they are vital for a healthy democracy.
When it comes to media ownership, larger is not superior. And news organizations including CNN must not be pawns in the latest acquisition battle.
