It’s almost official.
Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, one of the most debated topics in Hollywood and beyond, should be finalized in mere days.
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The lawsuits. The fearmongering. The panic—a good deal of it from Hulk actor Mark Ruffalo.
Nothing could stop David Ellison and co. from scooping up the historic film studio and its crush of IP and cable channels.
The latter includes CNN.
Part of the partisan uproar centered on the all-news channel’s future. Would it become Fox News 2.0, some on the Left feared? Or, gasp, worse?
Meanwhile, sane souls envisioned a chance to bring CNN back to its roots. News, not gaslighting. And that’s probably all it’ll be, a dream deferred.
Someone already tried to rein in CNN’s partisan excesses. Chris Licht, a left-leaning Hollywood veteran who oversaw “The Late Show” with Stephen Colbert, took over as CNN’s CEO in 2022. He promised a return to a more respectable news reputation, firing such hard partisans as Brian Stelter in the process.
The fact that Stelter’s signature show was dubbed “Reliable Sources” was funnier than anything Colbert ever said.
Could Licht achieve his goals? He was gone 13 months later, having made only modest changes and having given CNN loyalists some brief, sleepless nights. That wasn’t nearly enough to change the culture within the organization.
Even Stelter made a not-so-triumphant return, signaling Licht’s failure.
And then there was CBS. Ellison scooped up the Tiffany Network when his Skydance Corporation bought Paramount last year. His team put journalist Bari Weiss in charge of the network’s news division following her success with The Free Press.
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Similar gnashing of teeth ensued, both within CBS and across the Legacy Media. Weiss is on the center-left of the ideological spectrum, but she strains for more neutrality than most modern scribes.
So far, her grade is south of incomplete for bringing balance to the liberal CBS News. She removed some dead weight from 60 Minutes, including Scott Pelley. The network dug into a few stories that other networks wouldn’t touch, like government fraud run wild.
That’s a massive, ongoing saga that networks recoil from like Dracula seeing a garlic necklace.
Still, the overall network picture isn’t much different than what we see at NBC or ABC. Think of all the countless news stories covered and/or broken by right-leaning news sites. Now, how many were magnified by Weiss’s CBS?
She has a target on her back due to a willingness to shake up the status quo and give conservatives an occasional fair hearing. Many are rooting for her to fail. Who would want to take a Weiss-like role at a Paramount-owned CNN?
These two recent examples suggest we won’t get a new and improved CNN. Changing the atmosphere at a progressive news network takes time. The same folks pushing out fake news will resist the need to reform their practices. They’ll deify the new boss and leak anything negative about them to bring them down.
Any “new” CNN misstep will be magnified in the press.
Plus, as part of the Paramount deal, the network vowed to install independent overseers to ensure editorial freedom at both CBS News and CNN moving forward.
Stelter and Co. will keep twisting the truth as if the whole merger madness had never happened.