Late Thursday, amid swirling speculation concerning an incident at Brown University, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins posted on social media, highlighting the uncertainty and directing people to her channel's 9pm newscast.
Even though the network is hardly a flawless news source, her message rang true to many. It stands as one of the organizations where you can find grounded and largely reliable reporting – notably during fast-moving events like the one developing near a New Hampshire storage facility.
An Uncertain Position During a High-Stakes Struggle
However CNN, now 45 years old, finds itself in a precarious position as two giant media empires battle over ownership of its parent company, Warner Bros Discovery.
No matter the result, the future of CNN has become part of a high-stakes game of business acquisition, instead of as a question of what serves the news-consuming public.
“Here is one more case of the profound systemic issues with origins in decades of policy decisions,” noted Victor Pickard, author of “Democracy Without Journalism?” and a professor of media policy at the Penn.
The debate about the future owner of Warner Bros Discovery – is it going to be Netflix or Paramount Skydance? – fails to grasp a broader point.
“The narrative is crafted as a business story with key players as the main characters, but there is hardly any discussion of the common good,” Pickard explained.
A Further Factor: The Former President
The network's predicament is made more complex by Donald Trump’s opinions about a network he has long portrayed as perhaps his chief “fake news” antagonist.
Think back to the cries of “CNN sucks!” at the president’s rallies, his team's disciplinary revocation of reporter Jim Acosta’s press credentials, or his sparring with Collins in White House briefings.
Trump now asserts that the network requires new ownership. You can read that as ownership that will shield him from negative coverage and examination. That is part of why he seems to favor Paramount Skydance, which has made a hostile bid.
Trump has reason to favor that suitor more. For one thing, it is led by David Ellison, son of the Trump-friendly Larry Ellison, one of the world’s richest people.
Paramount, parent of CBS News, also recently installed the right-leaning Bari Weiss, famous for her “anti-woke” beliefs, as the lead editor of that venerable news network.
A Future of More Turmoil
Significantly, if Netflix is successful, CNN and other cable outlets would first be carved out into a separate entity. That would be a relief to many at the network, but it’s far from a guarantee of stability. That structure could set up CNN for yet another acquisition. There is no finish line.
According to Timothy Wu, a great deal of this is illegal, anyway. The prominent critic of big tech’s dominance wrote recently that anti-trust laws should block both deals.
“Both acquisition attempts would be bad for the country, and both should be opposed by regulators,” Wu argued.
The Bigger Issue and a Potential Solution
Whatever happens in this situation, the bigger problem persists.
“What we have now is a highly anti-democratic system, but we ought not succumb to the belief that change is impossible,” Pickard noted. Government actions – originating in the 1930s and 1940s – helped to create this overly commercial monster, and revised policy decisions can fix it.
Can reform occur in an era where the head of the FCC refuses to acknowledge that the agency is independent? Reform is very unlikely now, but that doesn’t mean it will not happen in the future.
Measures that bolster independent news organizations, bolster local journalism, fund public media, and prohibit the concentration of media power in very few hands are not only possible – they are vital for a robust democracy.
Regarding media ownership, bigger isn’t better. And news organizations like CNN shouldn’t be tools in the most recent acquisition battle.
