This past Thursday night, as rumors swirled concerning an incident at Brown University, the network's Kaitlan Collins took to social media, pointing out the conflicting information and pointing viewers to her channel's 9pm newscast.
While it is by no means a impeccable news source, her message seemed accurate for a lot of people. It is one of the broadcasters where there exists grounded and mostly trustworthy reporting – particularly during crises such as the one taking place close to a New Hampshire storage facility.
An Uncertain Situation During a High-Stakes Tug-of-War
However CNN, now 45 years old, finds itself in a precarious situation as two massive media corporations vie for ownership of its corporate owner, Warner Bros Discovery.
Whatever the outcome, the future of CNN has been drawn into a high-stakes game of corporate ownership, rather than as a question of what serves the information-seeking public.
“This represents another instance of the profound systemic issues with roots in decades of regulatory actions,” noted Victor Pickard, author of “Democracy Without Journalism?” and a media policy professor at the Penn.
The debate about who will own Warner Bros Discovery – will it be Netflix or Paramount Skydance? – fails to grasp a more important point.
“It gets presented as a financial tale with key players as the central actors, but there is hardly any discussion of the common good,” Pickard explained.
A Further Factor: Political Influence
The CNN scenario is made more complex by Donald Trump’s opinions about a network he has frequently denounced as perhaps his chief “fake news” adversary.
Think back to the chants 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 asserts that the network requires new ownership. You can read that as ownership that will shield him from journalistic oversight. That is one reason why he seems to come down on the side of Paramount Skydance, which has made a hostile bid.
There is a basis to like that bidder 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, parent of CBS News, also recently appointed the right-leaning Bari Weiss, famous for her “anti-woke” beliefs, as the editor-in-chief of that historic news network.
A Possibility of Further Instability
Significantly, if Netflix prevails, CNN and other cable outlets would first be spun off into a separate entity. That would be a welcome development to many at the network, but it’s far from a guarantee of stability. That setup could set up CNN for another sale. There is no finish line.
In the view of Timothy Wu, a great deal of this is a violation of antitrust statutes, anyway. The prominent critic of big tech’s dominance wrote recently that anti-trust laws should prohibit both deals.
“Each proposed deal would be detrimental to the country, and both should be contested by the government,” Wu argued.
The Bigger Challenge and a Path Forward
No matter the outcome in this situation, the bigger problem endures.
“What we have now is a profoundly anti-democratic system, but we shouldn’t give in to a sense of powerlessness,” Pickard emphasized. Government actions – from the 1930s and 1940s – helped to build this hyper-commercialized monster, and different policy decisions can fix it.
Is this likely in an era where the Federal Communications Commission chair refuses to acknowledge that the agency is independent? Change is very unlikely now, but that should not imply it will be impossible forever.
Measures that strengthen independent news organizations, aid local journalism, finance public media, and outlaw the concentration of media power in very few hands are achievable – they are vital for a healthy democracy.
In the world of media ownership, bigger isn’t better. And news organizations like CNN must not be tools in the latest corporate chess match.
