Late Thursday, as rumors swirled about a shooting at Brown University, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins used social media, noting the confusion and guiding the public to her channel's 9pm newscast.
While the network is hardly a flawless news source, her message resonated to many. It stands as one of the outlets where you can find reality-based and mostly reliable reporting – especially during fast-moving events like the one unfolding in the vicinity of a New Hampshire storage facility.
An Uncertain State During a Corporate Struggle
Yet the news network, now four and a half decades old, finds itself in a uncertain position as two huge media corporations battle over ownership of its corporate owner, Warner Bros Discovery.
Regardless of who wins, the destiny of CNN has been drawn into a major game of mergers and acquisitions, instead of as a question of what helps the news-consuming public.
“This represents another instance of the deep structural problems with origins in decades of policy decisions,” noted Victor Pickard, writer of “Democracy Without Journalism?” and a professor of media policy at the Penn.
The debate about who will own Warner Bros Discovery – is it going to be Netflix or Paramount Skydance? – misses a more important point.
“It gets presented as a business story with powerful individuals as the main characters, but there is hardly any discussion of the public interest,” Pickard added.
A Further Element: Donald Trump
The network's predicament is made more complex by Donald Trump’s longstanding stance about a network he has consistently labeled as perhaps his primary “fake news” foe.
Recall the cries 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 official meetings.
Trump now claims that CNN needs new ownership. This can be interpreted as ownership that will insulate him from negative coverage and examination. That is a factor in why he appears to come down on the side of Paramount Skydance, which has made a hostile bid.
He has grounds to like that suitor more. For one thing, it is led by David Ellison, son of the pro-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 lead editor of that historic news network.
A Future of More Uncertainty
Significantly, if Netflix prevails, CNN and other cable outlets would first be separated into a standalone company. This might be a welcome development to many at the network, but it’s far from a safe harbor. That arrangement could set up CNN for another sale. The cycle continues.
If you ask Timothy Wu, a great deal of this is a violation of antitrust statutes, anyway. The influential voice of big tech’s dominance wrote recently that competition laws should disallow both deals.
“Each proposed deal would be detrimental to the country, and both should be opposed by the government,” Wu recently wrote.
The Core Problem and a Way Ahead
No matter the outcome regarding CNN, the bigger problem remains.
“The present media landscape is a very structure that undermines democracy, but we must resist the belief that change is impossible,” Pickard noted. Government actions – from the 1930s and 1940s – helped to foster this profit-obsessed monster, and revised policy decisions can tackle it.
Is this likely in an era where the head of the FCC refuses to acknowledge that the agency is independent? Reform is a distant prospect now, but that should not imply it will not happen in the future.
Measures that support independent news organizations, reinforce local journalism, subsidize public media, and prevent the accumulation of media power in very few hands are achievable – they are essential for a healthy democracy.
When it comes to media ownership, size does not equal quality. And news organizations such as CNN cannot be tools in the most recent acquisition battle.
