In a guest essay for the New York Times on Tuesday, Paramount CEO David Ellison says CNN is at the root of opposition to the company’s merger with Warner Bros Discovery.
Concerns about market share are not the main driver of antitrust lawsuits filed by 12 state attorneys general and the Writers Guild of America, Ellison contends. “I believe a plainer worry sits beneath the briefs and the news releases: the news,” he writes. “The issue is whether I can be trusted as a steward of Warner’s CNN. There has been speculation about my politics, my loyalties, my intentions.”
The proposed $110 billion merger is on hold pending the outcome of the lawsuit. A judge is expected to set a trial date for later this year or early in 2027.
The Times essay comes as Paramount is preparing to report second-quarter earnings after the close of trading. WBD will report Thursday morning.
As to his anticipated stewardship of CNN, Ellison writes, “I can’t give anyone a view into my heart and mind, but I can share this: I have regularly voted for candidates of both parties; I hold some views that would be called conservative and others that would be called liberal, just like most Americans; and when it comes to our news operations, I do not aspire to lead these companies to bend their newsrooms to my views. I believe that news should be based on facts and truth.”
Last year, Ellison’s Skydance completed its long-gestating merger with Paramount Global, giving Ellison control of CBS News. That part of the media empire has created non-stop controversy, particularly after pre-Skydance Paramount paid $16 million to settle a lawsuit by the Trump administration over the editing and promotion of a 60 Minutes interview, with the suit widely viewed as frivolous. The makeover of top-rated 60 Minutes, with most of its correspondents departing in recent months amid charges of meddling by editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, who reports directly to Ellison, has only added to the furor.
CBS News and CNN are “here to tell it straight down the middle,” Ellison asserted in the essay. “That requires newsrooms that reflect the whole world, not one side of it. And it requires independence. Our journalists will continue to answer to the facts and to all the people they serve – not to any party or cause.”
Diminishing public trust in news (here Ellison cites a Gallup poll that found that just 28% of Americans trust the news) is a core issue facing all news leaders, Ellison says. As the overseer of CNN, he said restoring trust would be at the core of his mission. “Trust can’t be argued back, but it can be earned back – story by story, day by day,” he writes. “In an age when so much of what fills our screens is machine-generated or engineered to enrage, journalism from real reporters matters more than ever. That is the work I intend to pay for, patiently, for a long time.”
Left unmentioned were some of the moves that Skydance has made that have triggered suspicions on the left, including from Democrats on Capitol Hill. Under a commitment to the FCC, Skydance agreed to hire an ombudsman to take complaints about CBS News. But the person hired, Kenneth Weinstein, had a background that included leading the conservative think tank the Hudson Institute.
Ellison himself has stepped into the political fray, attending Donald Trump’s State of the Union address and, in April, hosting a dinner for the president and the White House, along with CBS News correspondents.
