Special Investigations

Press Freedom Defense Fund

CNN Could Be Next Up for a Right-Wing Reboot Thanks to the Ellisons

With Paramount’s takeover of CNN owner Warner Bros. Discovery, the network might become the next CBS News.

Shortly before CNN’s launch in 1980, founder Ted Turner — displaying what could politely be described as impressive foresight – instructed that a special video be prepared. The tape, which was leaked online by a former CNN intern in 2015, portrays members of the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine bands performing a melancholy rendition of the hymn “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” As the legend goes, this somber sign-off was meant to be the last thing broadcast by CNN should the end of the world become assured. In light of recent events, CNN employees may be considering digging it out of the archives.

CNN has beheld a pale horse; the rider’s name is David Ellison, and Bari Weiss follows closely behind. After confirmation last week that Warner Bros. Discovery, of which CNN is a subsidiary, would accept Paramount Skydance’s $111 billion takeover bid, the network is set to be swallowed by the father-and-son oligarch duo of Larry and David Ellison, whose naked alignment with the Trump administration predicated their earlier absorption and regime-friendly retooling of CBS News. (Larry, the Oracle CEO, was also pivotal earlier this year in the purchase of TikTok’s U.S. operations from its Chinese owner, installing a new CEO who earlier took credit for the app designating the term “Zionist” as “hate speech.”) Many now look to CBS as a preview of what is to come. Speaking to the Daily Beast, a senior CBS News staffer said, “It can — and will — always get worse,” and added CNN staffers were right to be fearful, as “it is hell over here.”

“CBS Evening News” With Tony Dokoupil Is a Right-Wing Show for Absolutely No One

When it became apparent that the Ellisons’ bid for Warner Bros. would win out after Netflix declined to further raise its offer, Weiss was attending a Free Press debate between Ross Douthat and Steven Pinker on God — an event that would move even the most militant atheist to sympathize with the Almighty — but giggled trollishly on X: “I hear there’s some news?” At CNN, reports indicate the mood is less chipper. “No one wants to work for the Ellisons,” one CNN employee told NBC News. “If Bari is going to be running CNN, expect people to leave.”

This is further proof that there is seemingly no amount of money or power that can force any journalist not married to her to like or respect Weiss, a tool in every sense of the word, whose blatantly ideological interventions and ham-fisted incompetence since being installed at CBS have repeatedly provoked contempt from her underlings. But competence was never part of Weiss’s job description — her role was to act as sugar in the gas tank of a news network against which Donald Trump has long held a grudge. Now, CNN — which has long been even higher on Trump’s enemies list —........

© The Intercept