With Paramount Looming, CNN Braces for Impact
Getting the venerable cable news channel under new ownership was the driving issue for President Trump, leaving staff to wonder what comes next. The cold, hard truth that many inside CNN have been grappling with these past few months was that the venerable cable news channel, Ted Turner’s greatest invention, was about to undergo radical change, whoever won the battle for parent company Warner Bros. Discovery.
If Netflix won, CNN would be spun out into a debt-laden public company, which was widely expected to slash costs and consider a fire sale of its assets (Nexstar’s Perry Sook is said to have coveted the cable channel, though it isn’t clear whether he would have pursued it, given his company’s ongoing pursuit of TEGNA).
But Paramount has already been undergoing a news overhaul, with CEO David Ellison installing Bari Weiss at CBS News with a mandate for change. Weiss and Ellison are both said to be obsessed with the (undeniable!) fact that consumers, regardless of political affiliation, are losing trust in the mainstream media.
“We are not producing a product that enough people want,” Weiss told CBS News staff last month. “We can blame demographics or technology or fractured attention spans or ‘news avoidance,’ but these are all copes.”
While the execution of that plan remains in flux, Weiss has sought journalists that put themselves at the center of the story, taking a cue from creators and influencers on TikTok and YouTube, while also bringing more right-leaning voices into segments.
