This past Thursday night, amid swirling speculation concerning 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 CNN is certainly not a impeccable news source, her message resonated for a lot of people. It is one of the organizations where you can find reality-based and largely trustworthy reporting – particularly during crises like the one developing near a New Hampshire storage facility.
A Precarious Situation During a High-Stakes Battle
Yet CNN, now 45 years old, finds itself in a precarious state as two giant media conglomerates battle over ownership of its parent company, Warner Bros Discovery.
Regardless of who wins, the fate of CNN has turned into a major game of mergers and acquisitions, instead of as a question of what helps the news-consuming public.
“This is yet another example of the deep structural problems with origins in decades of regulatory actions,” stated Victor Pickard, author of “Democracy Without Journalism?” and a media policy professor at the Pennsylvania University.
The conjecture about which company will control Warner Bros Discovery – will it be Netflix or Paramount Skydance? – overlooks a more important point.
“The narrative is crafted as a financial tale with powerful individuals as the main characters, but there is scant discussion of the common good,” Pickard added.
The Additional Element: Donald Trump
This situation is complicated by Donald Trump’s longstanding stance about a network he has long portrayed as perhaps his primary “fake news” antagonist.
Remember the shouts 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 the network requires new ownership. You can read that as ownership that will shield him from journalistic oversight. That is a factor in why he seems to come down on the side of Paramount Skydance, which has made a aggressive takeover attempt.
Trump has reason to favor that company 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, parent of CBS News, also recently placed the right-leaning Bari Weiss, known for her “anti-woke” beliefs, as the editor-in-chief of that historic news network.
A Possibility of More Uncertainty
Significantly, if Netflix is successful, CNN and other cable outlets would first be spun off into a separate entity. Such a move could be a relief to many at the network, but it’s far from a guarantee of stability. That arrangement could pave the way for CNN for a future sale. The cycle continues.
According to Timothy Wu, a lot of this is illegal, anyway. The prominent critic of big tech’s dominance wrote recently that competition laws should block both deals.
“Each proposed deal would be detrimental to the country, and both should be contested by the government,” Wu stated.
The Fundamental Challenge and a Path Forward
No matter the outcome in this situation, the larger issue remains.
“The present media landscape is a very system hostile to democracy, but we ought not succumb to a sense of powerlessness,” Pickard said. Policy decisions – from the 1930s and 1940s – helped to create this hyper-commercialized monster, and new policy decisions can fix it.
Will that happen in an era where the top communications regulator won’t even affirm that the agency is independent? Change is highly improbable now, but that is not to say it will never happen.
Policies that bolster independent news organizations, aid local journalism, subsidize public media, and outlaw the consolidation of media power in very few hands are within reach – they are vital for a healthy democracy.
In the world of media ownership, larger is not superior. And news organizations like CNN shouldn’t be tools in the newest corporate chess match.
