Late Thursday, amid swirling speculation regarding the Brown University gunman, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins used social media, noting the confusion and directing people to her network’s 9pm newscast.
Even though the network is hardly a flawless news source, her words resonated for a lot of people. It remains one of the outlets where you can find grounded and largely reliable reporting – especially during crises such as the one unfolding in the vicinity of a New Hampshire storage facility.
An Uncertain Position During a Business Tug-of-War
Yet CNN, now 45 years old, finds itself in a uncertain situation as two massive media corporations compete for ownership of its corporate owner, Warner Bros Discovery.
Whatever the outcome, the destiny of CNN has turned into a major game of business acquisition, instead of as a question of what serves the information-seeking public.
“Here is one more case of the profound systemic issues with origins in many years of regulatory actions,” stated Victor Pickard, writer of “Democracy Without Journalism?” and a media policy professor at the Penn.
The debate about which company will control Warner Bros Discovery – could it be Netflix or Paramount Skydance? – overlooks a broader point.
“It is often framed as a financial tale with key players as the central actors, but there is very little discussion of the societal benefit,” Pickard added.
The Additional Element: Political Influence
The CNN scenario is complicated by Donald Trump’s longstanding stance about a network he has long portrayed as perhaps his chief “fake news” adversary.
Remember the cries of “CNN sucks!” at Trump's rallies, his team's disciplinary revocation of reporter Jim Acosta’s press credentials, or his tense exchanges with Collins in White House briefings.
Trump now asserts that the network requires new ownership. This can be interpreted as ownership that will protect him from journalistic oversight. That is one reason why he seems to favor Paramount Skydance, which has made a unsolicited offer.
Trump has reason to favor that suitor more. For one thing, it is controlled by David Ellison, son of the Trump-friendly Larry Ellison, one of the world’s richest people.
Paramount, owner of CBS News, also recently installed the conservative Bari Weiss, noted for her “anti-woke” beliefs, as the lead editor of that storied news network.
An Outcome of More Instability
It is important to note, if Netflix prevails, CNN and other cable outlets would first be spun off into a independent unit. Such a move could be a welcome development to many at the network, but it’s far from a safe harbor. That structure could set up CNN for another sale. It never ends.
If you ask Timothy Wu, a lot of this is against the law, anyway. The influential voice of big tech’s dominance wrote recently that competition laws should prohibit both deals.
“Each proposed deal would be harmful to the country, and both should be contested by anti-trust authorities,” Wu recently wrote.
The Core Issue and a Potential Solution
Regardless of the resolution with this particular battle, the bigger problem endures.
“What we have now is a profoundly system hostile to democracy, but we must resist learned helplessness,” Pickard said. Policy decisions – dating back to the 1930s and 1940s – helped to foster this profit-obsessed monster, and revised policy decisions can tackle it.
Will that happen in an era where the head of the FCC refuses to acknowledge that the agency is independent? Change is a distant prospect now, but that should not imply it will be impossible forever.
Initiatives that bolster independent news organizations, reinforce local journalism, fund public media, and prevent the concentration of media power in very few hands are achievable – they are vital for a functioning democracy.
Regarding media ownership, larger is not superior. And news organizations such as CNN shouldn’t be tools in the most recent merger game.
