Analysis: David Ellison says he won’t bend CNN to his views

By Brian Stelter, CNN

(CNN) — Paramount CEO David Ellison says he believes the fight over his Warner Bros. Discovery takeover “is not really about market share” — it’s about CNN.

In a remarkable Tuesday morning guest essay for The New York Times, Ellison seeks to convince readers that he will respect and preserve CNN’s independence.

“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,” Ellison writes. “That is the work I intend to pay for, patiently, for a long time.”

The essay comes as Paramount battles twin lawsuits against the merger brought by a coalition of state attorneys general and the Writers Guild of America.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta has said, including in an interview with CNN last month, that the antitrust objections to Paramount–WBD are not about the news network.

But Ellison clearly suspects otherwise. “The issue is whether I can be trusted as a steward of Warner’s CNN,” he writes. “There has been speculation about my politics, my loyalties, my intentions.”

He then shares, “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.”

But many of the concerns in the past year haven’t been about Ellison’s own views, per se. The concerns have been about Ellison bending CBS to satisfy President Donald Trump and his allies.

In the op-ed, Ellison invokes both Ted Turner and Edward R. Murrow, saying “great news organizations like CNN and CBS News are here to tell it straight down the middle. 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.”

The question now: Does this reaffirmation of principles help Paramount in its legal war to win control of WBD? The judge assigned to the cases, Araceli Martínez-Olguín, seems to be taking the states’ arguments seriously, and the states’ arguments are not about CNN.

Last week, Paramount proposed a November trial date. The state attorneys general said they’ll need more time to prepare and asked for an April 2027 date. Martínez-Olguín is expected to set a trial timeline in the coming days.

Sidestepping the CBS question

While addressing his commitments to Hollywood, Ellison urges readers to “judge us by the year we just had.” He highlights Paramount’s theatrical slate and robust TV production.

But while addressing his commitments about news, Ellison makes no mention of Bari Weiss or the upheaval at CBS News. And that’s the main critique I’m hearing about his Times essay: That his actions involving CBS News haven’t matched his reassuring words.

Ellison took control of Paramount one year ago this week. When I talked with him at his celebratory press conference in Times Square, he said many of the same things that his essay reiterates.

Ellison is right that journalists are sometimes too stubborn to engage with critiques, and he is right to say that “trust can’t be argued back, but it can be earned back — story by story, day by day.”

But his first year owning CBS News has been defined by ratings struggles, shakeups and controversies, mostly stemming from his appointment of Weiss as editor-in-chief.

During her ten months at CBS, Weiss has delighted some, horrified others, and confused others still. I hear opinions about her from every corner. But I don’t hear anyone making the case that CBS News has earned back a whole lot of trust.

A Weiss booster would say, “She deserves more time.” A detractor would say, “She’s already failed.” Ellison’s op-ed sidesteps the debate altogether.

Ari Emanuel proposes an ‘editorial board’

Hollywood power broker Ari Emanuel, a friend and business partner of Ellison, has been publicly supporting Paramount and criticizing the state lawsuit. Speaking on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” Tuesday morning, he said something new and potentially significant.

The state AG lawsuit is partly “about politics, about CNN,” Emanuel said. “And I think there’s a way around that if you just get in a room — not cost everybody money — and say, ‘Okay, let’s put an editorial board over the news organization so that everybody’s calm about news and possibly Larry Ellison controlling CNN and CBS.’ That’s an easy solve. And then we can get to the business of making movies and television, which has been difficult over the last six years.”

The phrase “editorial board” is imperfect because it conjures up a group of newspaper opinion writers, but Emanuel is floating something like the Dow Jones Special Committee.

Back in 2007, when Rupert Murdoch was trying to buy the Wall Street Journal from the reluctant-to-sell Bancroft family, he promised to set up an “independent, autonomous editorial board” to protect the Journal and other Dow Jones properties.

Murdoch followed through, and the committee still exists today. It describes itself as “an independent body charged with safeguarding the editorial independence of The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones, as well as monitoring their adherence to the highest ethical and professional standards.”

At the highest levels of CNN, there have been past discussions about a similar structure. According to two sources who spoke on condition of anonymity, those discussions were kick-started when Warner Bros. Discovery planned to split itself into Warner Bros. and Discovery Global. In other words, the discussions weren’t predicated on Paramount’s looming ownership.

But the possibility remains intriguing. There are examples of this structure working well, for instance at Reuters, where the Thomson Reuters Founders Share Company looks out for the news agency’s “independence, integrity, and freedom from bias in the gathering and dissemination of information and news.”

But there’s an obvious risk that any such board becomes a meaningless fig leaf. Among the key factors: Who appoints the board members and how much power would they have?

A version of this article first appeared in CNN’s Reliable Sources newsletter. Sign up for free here.

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