This past Thursday night, as rumors swirled about an incident at Brown University, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins took to social media, highlighting the uncertainty and directing people to her channel's 9pm newscast.
While CNN is certainly not a impeccable news source, her words resonated for a lot of people. It is one of the outlets where one can locate fact-based and mostly dependable reporting – especially during breaking news situations such as the one unfolding close to a New Hampshire storage facility.
A Precarious Situation During a Corporate Struggle
However CNN, now 45 years old, finds itself in a precarious state as two huge media corporations compete for ownership of its parent company, Warner Bros Discovery.
Regardless of who wins, the destiny of CNN has turned into a high-risk game of mergers and acquisitions, not as a question of what helps the news-consuming public.
“This represents another instance of the fundamental flaws with origins in many years of regulatory actions,” noted Victor Pickard, writer of “Democracy Without Journalism?” and a professor of media policy at the Penn.
The speculation about who will own 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 scant discussion of the public interest,” Pickard explained.
The Complicating Layer: Political Influence
The network's predicament is complicated by Donald Trump’s opinions about a network he has frequently denounced as perhaps his main “fake news” foe.
Recall the shouts of “CNN sucks!” at Trump'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 criticism and scrutiny. That is a factor in why he seems to favor Paramount Skydance, which has made a hostile bid.
There is a basis to like that company more. For one thing, it is led by David Ellison, son of the Trump-friendly Larry Ellison, one of the world’s richest people.
The company, owner of CBS News, also recently installed the conservative Bari Weiss, noted for her “anti-woke” beliefs, as the editor-in-chief of that historic news network.
An Outcome of Further Turmoil
Significantly, if Netflix is successful, CNN and other cable outlets would first be separated into a standalone company. Such a move could be a welcome development to many at the network, but it’s not exactly a secure position. That arrangement could pave the way for CNN for yet another acquisition. There is no finish line.
In the view of Timothy Wu, a lot of this is illegal, anyway. The well-known analyst of big tech’s dominance stated that competition laws should disallow both deals.
“Both acquisition attempts would be bad for the country, and both should be challenged by regulators,” Wu argued.
The Core Problem and a Path Forward
No matter the outcome in this situation, the larger issue endures.
“The present media landscape is a profoundly anti-democratic system, but we must resist a sense of powerlessness,” Pickard said. Regulatory choices – from the 1930s and 1940s – helped to build this profit-obsessed monster, and different policy decisions can fix it.
Is this likely in an era where the top communications regulator refuses to acknowledge that the agency is independent? Overhaul is highly improbable now, but that doesn’t mean it will never happen.
Measures that bolster independent news organizations, reinforce local journalism, fund public media, and outlaw the concentration of media power in too few hands are within reach – they are vital for a healthy democracy.
When it comes to media ownership, bigger isn’t better. And news organizations such as CNN must not be tools in the most recent acquisition battle.
