Late Thursday, while unconfirmed reports spread regarding a shooting at Brown University, the network'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 to many. It stands as one of the broadcasters where one can locate grounded and mostly reliable reporting – particularly during fast-moving events like the one taking place near a New Hampshire storage facility.
A Precarious Situation During a Business Battle
However the news network, now four and a half decades old, finds itself in a precarious position as two huge media empires compete for ownership of its corporate owner, Warner Bros Discovery.
Regardless of who wins, the future of CNN has become part of a major game of corporate ownership, rather than as a question of what benefits the news-consuming public.
“This represents another instance of the deep structural problems with origins in decades of policy decisions,” said Victor Pickard, author of “Democracy Without Journalism?” and a media policy professor at the Pennsylvania University.
The debate about who will own Warner Bros Discovery – is it going to be Netflix or Paramount Skydance? – fails to grasp a more important point.
“It gets presented as a financial tale with powerful individuals as the central actors, but there is scant discussion of the societal benefit,” Pickard said.
The Additional Layer: The Former President
The CNN scenario is made more complex by Donald Trump’s longstanding stance about a network he has long portrayed as perhaps his main “fake news” adversary.
Remember the shouts of “CNN sucks!” at his 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 says that the network requires new ownership. This can be interpreted as ownership that will insulate him from criticism and scrutiny. That is a factor in why he seems to come down on the side of Paramount Skydance, which has made a unsolicited offer.
There is a basis to prefer that bidder more. For one thing, it is run by David Ellison, son of the ally of Trump Larry Ellison, one of the world’s richest people.
The company, owner of CBS News, also recently placed the right-leaning Bari Weiss, known for her “anti-woke” beliefs, as the editor-in-chief of that storied news network.
An Outcome of Further Instability
Notably, if Netflix is successful, CNN and other cable outlets would first be carved out into a separate entity. Such a move could be a relief to many at the network, but it’s not exactly a safe harbor. That structure could set up CNN for another sale. It never ends.
According to Timothy Wu, a lot of this is illegal, anyway. The prominent critic of big tech’s dominance stated that anti-trust laws should prohibit both deals.
“Each proposed deal would be harmful to the country, and both should be opposed by anti-trust authorities,” Wu recently wrote.
The Core Challenge and a Potential Solution
No matter the outcome in this situation, the bigger problem endures.
“The present media landscape is a highly system hostile to democracy, but we shouldn’t give in to a sense of powerlessness,” Pickard said. Government actions – originating in the 1930s and 1940s – helped to foster this overly commercial monster, and revised policy decisions can fix 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 is not to say it will not happen in the future.
Policies that support independent news organizations, reinforce local journalism, finance public media, and prohibit the concentration of media power in a handful of hands are not only possible – they are necessary for a functioning democracy.
When it comes to media ownership, bigger isn’t better. And news organizations like CNN cannot be tools in the latest merger game.
