DURING his Thursday night newscast, CNN anchor Jake Tapper found himself in an awkward position: reporting on the sale of his employer, Warner Bros. Discovery Inc., to Paramount Skydance Corp.
“We have some breaking news in our national lead that affects everybody I’m looking at right now in the studio,” Mr. Tapper said.
Paramount, the parent of CBS and MTV, had agreed to buy Warner Bros., the owner of cable networks like CNN, TNT, and HBO, for $110 billion. The deal that will put Mr. Tapper and his associates under the same corporate umbrella as CBS News, whose new leadership has accused the mainstream media of liberal bias.
That possibility has sent a chill through CNN’s newsroom, which is wary of recent developments at CBS following Paramount’s August sale to Skydance Media, led by technology heir David Ellison. Mr. Ellison, 43, is chief executive officer (CEO) of the newly merged Paramount Skydance.
“CNN employees and viewers have serious concerns about whether Paramount CEO David Ellison will uphold the news network’s editorial independence amid severe political turbulence,” CNN media analyst Brian Stelter wrote on Friday.
In a note to staff, CNN chief Mark Thompson, the former CEO of the New York Times Co., said employees should stay focused on their work.
“Despite all the speculation you’ve read during this process, I’d suggest that you don’t jump to conclusions until we know more,” Mr. Thompson wrote.
While there are scant details about how the merger will affect both companies’ news operations, the changes forced on CBS News by Mr. Ellison indicate that CNN may be in for a reckoning of its own. Both news organizations trail their competitors in audience ratings by a large margin and are looking for ways to climb out of the cellar.
To get his $8-billion takeover of Paramount past regulators, Mr. Ellison appointed the former head of a conservative Washington think tank as an ombudsman to review complaints of bias in the news division. Once that deal closed in August, Mr. Ellison acquired the media startup the Free Press and proceeded to name its controversial founder Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News.
Ms. Weiss has frequently criticized mainstream media and has gained popularity among conservatives.
At CBS News, she has been booking guests, suggesting stories, and making changes to on-air talent, trying to revive the network’s last place nightly newscast. The audience for the CBS Evening News totaled 4.34 million viewers a night on average in January. That’s far below the leader, ABC World News Tonight, at 8.33 million, and the NBC Nightly News, at 6.74 million, according to Nielsen data from NBC.
“Obviously, what role Bari Weiss is going to play in a Paramount Skydance-Warner Brothers merger on CNN is a topic of interest given what’s going on,” said Douglas Arthur, an analyst at Huber Research Partners.
In January, Ms. Weiss ruffled feathers at CBS News by delaying a 60 Minutes segment even after the network had promoted it to viewers. Ms. Weiss said she wanted more reporting but the piece, about a prison in El Salvador that held deportees from the US, later aired with few changes.
In a town hall meeting with staff, Ms. Weiss said she hoped to avoid similar incidents in the future.
“Now, am I ever going to hold something again after it has been put out there with promos?” Ms. Weiss asked. “I don’t want to make that exact same decision again. No, I do not.”
The changes have sapped morale at CBS News, according to current and former employees, including Carol Marin, a former 60 Minutes correspondent and now a senior faculty fellow at the Center for Journalism Integrity & Excellence at DePaul University.
“I don’t think CBS has sufficiently answered for the kind of problem that its upper management has created,” she said in an interview.
At Bloomberg’s Screentime Conference in October, Mr. Ellison said he’s interested in “reinvigorating” CBS News, restoring balance to its coverage and targeting the 70% of viewers who are centrists.
“We want to be the most trusted destination in news media,” Mr. Ellison said. Ms. Weiss’ Free Press “really does align with the value system that we’ve been seeking and really does align with the legacy of CBS News.”
CNN has had its own internal turmoil, and a takeover of Warner Bros. by Mr. Ellison’s Paramount would probably mean more.
The Guardian reported that Mr. Ellison’s father and financial backer, Oracle Corp. Chairman Larry Ellison, had discussed with President Donald J. Trump the possibility of firing CNN hosts that the president doesn’t like. Mr. Trump himself called for new ownership of CNN in December.
“I don’t think the people that are running that company right now and running CNN, which is a very dishonest group of people, I don’t think that should be allowed to continue,” he said.
In January, CNN averaged 660,000 nightly viewers in prime time, a distant third place to leader Fox News, at 2.05 million, and MS Now, at 887,000.
“They’re being challenged now to approach things in a different way and in that sense, getting more input from more places and more people can be a good thing,” said Jon Klein, a former executive at both CNN and CBS. CBS News could get a “real shot in the arm,” because of CNN’s extensive operations abroad.
Both organizations previously explored combining operations for economic benefits both in the late 1990s, when Mr. Klein was at CBS, and in 2010 when he was at CNN, he said.
While CNN competes more with other politics-focused networks, like Fox Corp.’s Fox News and Versant Media Group Inc.’s MS NOW, CBS is a traditional broadcaster going up against ABC and NBC. Historically, the two news organizations were alike in many ways, Mr. Klein said. Anderson Cooper, a CNN anchor, has long moonlighted at 60 Minutes. Mr. Cooper left the CBS gig after nearly 20 years earlier this month.
“The cultures of CBS News and CNN are very similar,” Klein said. “That’s why it was always logical.”
But the culture of CBS News may be changing under Mr. Ellison and Ms. Weiss, and a merger with CNN would also likely result in major editorial changes at the 24-hour news network, according to veteran media executive Jon Miller, CEO of Integrated Media Co. who has done stints at News Corp., AOL, and Viacom.
CNN’s current leadership may be ousted and the network may come under Ms. Weiss if Paramount takes over, he said.
CNN made programming updates earlier this year that included shifting longtime Mr. Trump critic and anchor Jim Acosta to a less-favorable time slot. That led to his departure and accusations that CNN, which is typically seen as left-leaning, was trying to gain favor with the president.
Mr. Ellison has also been focused on beefing up the Paramount+ streaming service, with new content deals like the $7.7 billion, seven-year deal with the Ultimate Fighting Championship.
A focus on streaming could benefit CNN, which has struggled to develop an online strategy. After shutting down CNN+, a nascent subscription service, in 2022, Warner Bros. brought in Thompson to lead the network. He launched a new subscription product in October called All Access that lets viewers stream CNN.
One sticking point for a possible merger is labor. CBS News is a union shop, while CNN isn’t, a difference that complicated the 2010 effort to merge the two news organizations, according to Rich Greenfield, an analyst with Lightshed Partners.
The Writers Guild of America, which represents screenwriters and newsroom staffers, said Friday that it was opposed to the merger of Paramount and Warner Bros., calling it “disaster for writers, consumers, and the entire entertainment industry.”
A combination also increases the risk of “creating a monolithic media,” said Neil Brown, president of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies. That could destroy what makes CNN and CBS distinct and alienate their audiences.
“Consumers will be better served if lots of organizations are trying to serve them with new and different products rather than try to blend everything into one,” Mr. Brown said. — Bloomberg
