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On Thursday evening, as rumors about the Brown University gunman swirled, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins posted on social media, noting the confusion and directing people to her network’s 9pm newscast.
CNN is certainly not a flawless news source, but her words rang true to me. The network is one of the outlets where you can find reality-based and largely dependable reporting – especially in breaking news situations like the one that was developing near a New Hampshire storage facility.
But CNN, now 45 years old, is in a precarious situation as two huge media conglomerates vie for ownership of its parent company, Warner Bros Discovery.
Whatever the outcome, the fate of CNN has become part of a high-stakes game of corporate ownership, not as a question of what benefits the information-seeking public.
America’s media system isn’t set up for that lofty goal. It’s set up for corporate profitability, for shareholder gain, for ever-increasing size and ever-decreasing competition.
“This is yet another example of the deep structural problems with roots in decades of policy decisions,” said Victor Pickard, author of Democracy Without Journalism? and a University of Pennsylvania media policy professor.
The speculation about who will own Warner Bros Discovery – will it be Netflix or Paramount Skydance? – misses a larger point.
“It gets presented as a business story with powerful individuals as the protagonists, but there is very little discussion of the public interest,” Pickard said. He, along with two other scholars, is the author of a sweeping new Roosevelt Institute report about media consolidation and its dire effects, addressing how we got here and pointing a better way forward.
The CNN scenario is complicated by Donald Trump’s views about a network he has long portrayed as perhaps his primary “fake news” antagonist. Recall the chants of “CNN sucks!” at the president’s rallies, or his administration’s punitive withdrawal of Jim Acosta’s press credentials, or his sparring with Collins in press briefings.
Trump now says that CNN needs new ownership. You can read that as ownership that will protect him from criticism and scrutiny. That is part of why he seems to come down on the side of Paramount Skydance, which has made a hostile bid intended to overcome an earlier accepted deal by Netflix. The Warner Brothers Discovery board rejected the Paramount bid this week, but there are still plenty of regulatory battles ahead, and the Trump administration may well involve itself.
Trump has reason to like that suitor more. For one thing, it is controlled by David Ellison, son of the Trump-friendly Larry Ellison, one of the world’s richest people.
Paramount, parent of CBS News, also recently installed the right-leaning Bari Weiss, known for her “anti-woke” beliefs, as the top editor of that storied news network. Trump has praised Weiss publicly, and as an example of her news judgment, she recently conducted a “town hall” interview with Erika Kirk, the widow of the rightwing activist Charlie Kirk.
Notably, if Netflix prevails, CNN and other cable outlets would first be spun off into a separate entity, and they would not be part of the Warner Bros Discovery acquisition. That would be a relief to many at the network, but it’s hardly a safe harbor. That arrangement could set up CNN and the others for another sale. It never ends.
If you ask Timothy Wu, much of this is illegal, anyway. The prominent critic of big tech’s dominance of major media platforms wrote recently that anti-trust laws should prohibit both deals.
“Either merger would be bad for the country, and both should be challenged by anti-trust authorities,” Wu recently wrote in the New York Times.
Whatever happens in this situation, the bigger problem remains. And Pickard, for one, is not ready to throw up his hands and say nothing can be done to reverse what has happened.
“What we have now is a very anti-democratic system, but we shouldn’t give in to learned helplessness,” he said. Policy decisions – dating back to the 1930s and 1940s in the heyday of radio – helped to create this hyper-commercialized monster, and new policy decisions can address it.
Will that happen in the Trump era in which Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr won’t even affirm that the agency is independent? Reform is very unlikely now, but that doesn’t mean it will never happen – or that it should be regarded as impossible.
Policies that strengthen independent news organizations, bolster local journalism, fund public media, and prohibit the concentration of media power in too few hands are not only possible – they are necessary for a functioning democracy.
In the world of media ownership, bigger isn’t better. And news organizations including CNN shouldn’t be pawns in the latest merger game.
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Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture
