🔗 Share this article

On Thursday evening, amid swirling speculation concerning an incident at Brown University, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins posted on social media, highlighting the uncertainty and directing people to her channel's 9pm newscast.

Although CNN is certainly not a impeccable news source, her words seemed accurate to many. It is one of the organizations where one can locate grounded and mostly dependable reporting – especially during crises such as the one developing close to a New Hampshire storage facility.

A Precarious Position During a Business Battle

Yet CNN, now 45 years old, finds itself in a precarious position as two massive media empires battle over ownership of its corporate owner, Warner Bros Discovery.

Whatever the outcome, the future of CNN has been drawn into a major game of corporate ownership, instead of as a question of what serves the news-consuming public.

“This represents another instance of the deep structural problems with origins in many years of governmental choices,” noted Victor Pickard, writer of “Democracy Without Journalism?” and a academic specializing in media policy at the Penn.

The conjecture about which company will control Warner Bros Discovery – is it going to be Netflix or Paramount Skydance? – fails to grasp a more important point.

“It gets presented as a corporate drama with powerful individuals as the main characters, but there is very little discussion of the public interest,” Pickard explained.

The Additional Layer: Donald Trump

The network's predicament is further muddied by Donald Trump’s longstanding stance about a network he has long portrayed as perhaps his primary “fake news” adversary.

Recall the cries of “CNN sucks!” at the president’s rallies, his administration's retaliatory revocation of reporter Jim Acosta’s press credentials, or his clashes with Collins in press briefings.

Trump now claims that CNN needs new ownership. You can read that as ownership that will insulate him from criticism and scrutiny. That is a factor in why he seems to favor Paramount Skydance, which has made a hostile bid.

He has grounds to favor that bidder more. For one thing, it is controlled by David Ellison, son of the ally of Trump Larry Ellison, one of the world’s richest people.

Paramount, parent of CBS News, also recently appointed the right-leaning Bari Weiss, famous for her “anti-woke” beliefs, as the top editor of that historic news network.

A Future of Further Turmoil

It is important to note, if Netflix is successful, 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 arrangement could position CNN for yet another acquisition. There is no finish line.

According to Timothy Wu, much of this is illegal, anyway. The influential voice of big tech’s dominance stated that competition laws should prohibit both deals.

“Each proposed deal would be detrimental to the country, and both should be contested by the government,” Wu stated.

The Core Issue and a Potential Solution

No matter the outcome regarding CNN, the bigger problem remains.

“What we have now is a profoundly anti-democratic system, but we shouldn’t give in to the belief that change is impossible,” Pickard said. Government actions – dating back to the 1930s and 1940s – helped to foster this profit-obsessed monster, and new policy decisions can fix it.

Will that happen in an era where the Federal Communications Commission chair won’t even affirm that the agency is independent? Reform is highly improbable now, but that doesn’t mean it will never happen.

Policies that support independent news organizations, bolster local journalism, subsidize public media, and prohibit the concentration of media power in too few hands are achievable – they are vital for a functioning democracy.

In the world of media ownership, size does not equal quality. And news organizations including CNN must not be pawns in the most recent acquisition battle.