The CNN Sacrifice
In late October, at the Beverly Wilshire Four Seasons hotel, David Zaslav stood onstage before Hollywood’s elite, accepting the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Humanitarian Award at the organization’s annual dinner. During his acceptance speech at the glitzy event, the Warner Bros. Discovery chief declared to the audience, which included newly minted Paramount boss David Ellison, that “when the government controls the news, that is the end of democracy.”
Zaslav’s remark was about how many years ago Poland tried to censor a news network that Discovery owned. But given recent revelations about Ellison’s conversations with Donald Trump, the line sure plays as something closer to a warning shot aimed directly at his wannabe suitor.
Over the last 24 hours, Ellison astonishingly acknowledged that he has spoken to Trump about his many grievances with the Mark Thompson-led CNN, which the president has villainized as the “enemy of the people” since he ascended to the Oval Office in 2016. “By the way, we’ve had great conversations with the president about this,” Ellison said, before perhaps realizing that it would be unwise to disclose more. The Wall Street Journal later reported the obvious subtext: “During a visit to Washington in recent days, David Ellison offered assurances to Trump administration officials that if he bought Warner, he’d make sweeping changes to CNN.”
Once upon a time, a chief executive openly signaling that he’d reorient a newsroom to appease a sitting president would be a five-alarm corporate scandal, the sort of fire that would send the company’s public relations teams sprinting through the hallways to extinguish. Indeed, the notion that Ellison would assure the president that he would overhaul the news network’s editorial posture to be more obedient to him and his administration should be a downright scandal that Paramount would seek to address. As one veteran media executive confided to me…
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