This past Thursday night, as rumors swirled regarding the Brown University gunman, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins used social media, highlighting the uncertainty and guiding the public to her channel's 9pm newscast.
While CNN is certainly not a flawless news source, her message rang true for a lot of people. It remains one of the outlets where one can locate fact-based and generally dependable reporting – especially during breaking news situations such as the one unfolding near a New Hampshire storage facility.
A Precarious Position Amid a Business Tug-of-War
But the news network, now four and a half decades old, finds itself in a precarious position as two massive media conglomerates compete for ownership of its corporate owner, Warner Bros Discovery.
No matter the result, the future of CNN has turned into a major game of business acquisition, not as a question of what serves the news-consuming public.
“This represents another instance of the profound systemic issues with roots in decades of policy decisions,” stated Victor Pickard, author of “Democracy Without Journalism?” and a media policy professor at the Pennsylvania University.
The debate about which company will control Warner Bros Discovery – could it be Netflix or Paramount Skydance? – overlooks a broader point.
“The narrative is crafted as a financial tale with powerful individuals as the protagonists, but there is hardly any discussion of the public interest,” Pickard said.
The Additional Element: Donald Trump
This situation is further muddied by Donald Trump’s views about a network he has consistently labeled as perhaps his chief “fake news” adversary.
Think back to 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 claims that CNN needs new ownership. You can read that as ownership that will protect him from criticism and scrutiny. That is one reason why he seems to support Paramount Skydance, which has made a aggressive takeover attempt.
Trump has reason to favor 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.
The company, owner of CBS News, also recently placed the right-leaning Bari Weiss, famous for her “anti-woke” beliefs, as the editor-in-chief of that venerable news network.
An Outcome of Further Turmoil
Significantly, if Netflix prevails, CNN and other cable outlets would first be spun off into a standalone company. That would be a relief to many at the network, but it’s hardly a secure position. That setup could set up CNN for yet another acquisition. It never ends.
In the view of Timothy Wu, a great deal of this is illegal, anyway. The well-known analyst of big tech’s dominance recently argued that competition laws should prohibit both deals.
“Both acquisition attempts would be harmful to the country, and both should be opposed by anti-trust authorities,” Wu recently wrote.
The Bigger Challenge and a Potential Solution
Whatever happens with this particular battle, the underlying crisis persists.
“What we have now is a profoundly anti-democratic system, but we ought not succumb to learned helplessness,” Pickard noted. Regulatory choices – originating in the 1930s and 1940s – helped to create this hyper-commercialized monster, and different policy decisions can fix it.
Can reform occur in an era where the top communications regulator refuses to acknowledge that the agency is independent? Overhaul is a distant prospect now, but that doesn’t mean it will never happen.
Measures that support independent news organizations, reinforce local journalism, subsidize public media, and outlaw the concentration of media power in too few hands are not only possible – they are necessary for a healthy democracy.
In the world of media ownership, size does not equal quality. And news organizations including CNN shouldn’t be pawns in the most recent merger game.
