A few weeks ago I lamented Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, which brings CBS News and CNN under the same corporate roof, writing, “The immediate upshot is that two of the three major cable news outlets — CNN and Fox News — are now in the hands of executives who are friendly to Trump, with MS NOW the only holdout.”
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This week I’m choosing to be optimistic, although I’m well aware that my relatively sunny take on this week’s events might prove to be unrewarded. Mainly I’m encouraged that David Ellison, the head of Skydance (as the renamed company is known), has decided to keep Mark Thompson as chief executive of CNN.
Thompson is a serious news executive who helped transform The New York Times into a profit machine and who is in the midst of a digital reinvention at CNN. More to the point, it signals that Ellison may be at least partly serious about journalistic independence. The Times’ Benjamin Mullin reports that Thompson had this to say in a memo to employees about his conversations with Ellison and other Skydance executives:
Having now spoken to them at length on the topic, I have real confidence that they both understand and will fully support the principle and practice of the kind of independent news that CNN has always stood for.
We are learning that David Ellison is not as Trumpy as his father, tech mogul Larry Ellison, and that in fact he’s made campaign contributions both to Donald Trump and Joe Biden. What’s more, though CNN’s business isn’t as strong as it used to be, it’s expected to earn more than $600 million in profits in 2026. That may be a relatively small part of Skydance’s revenues, which are focused on entertainment properties, but it does give Ellison an incentive not to do what he did to CBS News: Turn it over to the Trump-curious opinion journalist Bari Weiss and let her steer it into a ditch.
I have no illusions about Ellison’s motivations. But looking at it from the most cynical view possible, he got the regulatory permission he needed to merge the two companies, so there’s nothing more that he really needs from Trump; and Trump these days is weak and flailing, making him a far less formidable presence than he was a year ago.
Writing for Status, Oliver Darcy reports on a news conference that Ellison held Tuesday. Some of what came out of that also gives reason for optimism. Status reporter Jon Passatino asked Ellison some uncomfortable questions (sub. req.) about his closeness to Trump, which prompted Ellison to respond:
I think it is important to talk to everybody on both sides of the aisle…. When you’re operating within a business-friendly administration, you should always have those relationships. I think the really important thing is politics. We want to speak to everybody. We do not want to politicize the company.
Darcy also writes that in a meeting with CNN employees, Anderson Cooper pressed Ellison on whether he supported the network’s efforts to fight back against Trump’s illegal attempts to ban CNN (and MS NOW and Politico) from the White House and from the presidential press pool. Ellison’s answer: “Of course.”
Should we trust this? No. What’s significant isn’t what Ellison believes (who knows what he believes?) but that he sees standing up for an independent CNN as the smartest move he can make right now. They say that hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue. I think we should choose to believe Ellison — and to keep a very close eye on him to see whether he actually means what he says.
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I have even less confidence in Ellison as a news media owner than in Jeff Bezos, who at least had an interesting (engineer-driven) theory for how to improve news and a seemingly semi-idealistic mission vision that he brought to the Post before losing interest and abandoning and subverting it. Has this guy said or done anything interesting or worthwhile in his life besides selling his soul to get richer by enabling fascism?