On Thursday evening, as rumors swirled about the Brown University gunman, the network's Kaitlan Collins took to social media, pointing out the conflicting information and directing people to her channel's 9pm newscast.
Even though the network is hardly a impeccable news source, her words seemed accurate for numerous observers. It remains one of the organizations where you can find grounded and mostly dependable reporting – especially during fast-moving events like the one unfolding close to a New Hampshire storage facility.
A Precarious Position During a Corporate Struggle
However the news network, now four and a half decades old, finds itself in a uncertain situation as two massive media empires compete for ownership of its corporate owner, Warner Bros Discovery.
Whatever the outcome, the future of CNN has turned into a high-stakes game of corporate ownership, not as a question of what serves the information-seeking public.
“Here is one more case of the fundamental flaws with roots in many years of regulatory actions,” said Victor Pickard, author of “Democracy Without Journalism?” and a academic specializing in media policy at the University of Pennsylvania.
The conjecture about the future owner of Warner Bros Discovery – will it be Netflix or Paramount Skydance? – misses a broader point.
“It gets presented as a corporate drama with powerful individuals as the central actors, but there is scant discussion of the societal benefit,” Pickard added.
A Further Element: 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 the president’s rallies, his team's disciplinary revocation of reporter Jim Acosta’s press credentials, or his sparring with Collins in White House briefings.
Trump now claims that the network requires new ownership. This can be interpreted as ownership that will shield him from journalistic oversight. That is part of why he appears to come down on the side of Paramount Skydance, which has made a aggressive takeover attempt.
Trump has reason to prefer that company more. For one thing, it is controlled by David Ellison, son of the pro-Trump Larry Ellison, one of the world’s richest people.
The company, parent of CBS News, also recently installed the right-leaning Bari Weiss, famous for her “anti-woke” beliefs, as the editor-in-chief of that historic news network.
A Possibility of More Instability
Notably, if Netflix prevails, CNN and other cable outlets would first be carved out into a separate entity. This might be a welcome development to many at the network, but it’s not exactly a safe harbor. That setup could pave the way for CNN for another sale. It never ends.
In the view of Timothy Wu, a great deal of this is illegal, anyway. The well-known analyst of big tech’s dominance wrote recently that anti-trust laws should block both deals.
“Each proposed deal would be bad for the country, and both should be challenged by regulators,” Wu recently wrote.
The Core Issue and a Potential Solution
Whatever happens in this situation, the underlying crisis persists.
“The present media landscape is a profoundly structure that undermines democracy, but we must resist a sense of powerlessness,” Pickard emphasized. Policy decisions – dating back to the 1930s and 1940s – helped to create this profit-obsessed monster, and new policy decisions can address it.
Is this likely in an era where the head of the FCC refuses to acknowledge that the agency is independent? Reform is highly improbable now, but that doesn’t mean it will not happen in the future.
Policies that support independent news organizations, bolster local journalism, fund public media, and prohibit the accumulation of media power in very few hands are not only possible – they are vital for a robust democracy.
When it comes to media ownership, size does not equal quality. And news organizations including CNN cannot be pawns in the newest corporate chess match.
