Ellison: You can trust me with 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 guest essay for The New York Times this morning, 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,” he writes. “That is the work I intend to pay for, patiently, for a long time.”
You should read the full op-ed, including his arguments against the state attorneys general and Writers Guild lawsuits. Here’s a gift link.
While addressing his commitments to Hollywood, Ellison urges readers to “judge us by the year we just had.”
But while addressing his commitments about news, he makes no mention of Bari Weiss or the upheaval at CBS News. And that’s the main critique I’m hearing: That his actions 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 NYT essay reiterates.
He 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.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta has said — including in an interview published here in Reliable Sources last month — that the antitrust objections to Paramount–WBD are not about CNN.
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.”
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 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 his principles help Paramount in its legal war to win control of WBD? Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín seems to be taking the states’ arguments seriously, and the states’ arguments are not about CNN.
Hollywood power broker Ari Emanuel, a friend and business partner of Ellison, has been publicly supporting Paramount and criticizing the state AG lawsuit. Speaking on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” this morning, he said something new and potentially significant:
The state AG lawsuit is partly “about politics, about CNN. 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 WSJ.
The committee still exists. 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 WBD 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. Two key factors: Who appoints the board members and how much power do they have?
Over the weekend, Nick Bilton “fired off a 734-word ‘welcome back’ memo to the staff of ‘60 Minutes,’” Oliver Darcy reported last night for Status. The note “made clear he is frustrated by the unrelenting speculation regarding the show, along with the torrent of unauthorized information making its way into the press.”
Bilton wrote that “I no longer have the time or the patience” for leaks and rumors, “and I’d rather we spend that energy on the stories.” He added: “I’d like this place to be talked about for what we put on television.”
But Darcy obtained the memo and ran with it, noting that “memos complaining about leaks almost always end up leaking themselves…”
A pair of government watchdogs are demanding probes into whether FCC commissioners “violated ethics requirements by accepting luxury gala tickets from Paramount as the company sought government approval” to buy WBD, ProPublica’s Corey G. Johnson reported yesterday, following up on his earlier story on the subject.
Will today be a normal day at work for Jeanine Pirro? Hard to believe.
CNN’s Alayna Treene scooped yesterday that Trump was considering firing Pirro over her court filing contradicting his baseless claims about Reflecting Pool “vandals.”
It’s a shocking schism given that Trump and Pirro have been friends for 35 years. But Pirro “is between the proverbial rock and a hard place — getting fired if she tells the truth, or getting disbarred if she continues to lie,” Democratic Rep. Jared Huffman remarked.
MAGA media is still looking the other way. Fox News isn’t even mustering up an on-air defense for Pirro, previously one of its most prominent pro-Trump hosts. The network only mentioned this mess one time yesterday. My story for CNN.com has some before-and-after data showing how Fox flooded the airwaves with Trump’s “vandal” cries, but is now ignoring the fallout…
There are primary elections in five states today, headlined by Michigan’s Democratic Senate race. That battle, between progressive Abdul El-Sayed and the more moderate Rep. Haley Stevens, “has emerged as the most significant test of the party’s direction this year,” CNN’s Eric Bradner and Aaron Blake write here in a very helpful explainer of all the primaries.
Expect wall-to-wall live coverage as the votes are tallied. CNN All Access subscribers can submit questions for John King, who’ll be at the “Magic Wall” breaking down the results live here, starting at 9 p.m. ET…
“Elon Musk’s long interview with the editor of the Economist is as good a representation as any of the current clash between two worlds,” Jane Martinson wrote the other day.
Indeed, and it’s helpful to have those clashes on tape so we can analyze them. There’s measurable interest: Zanny Minton Beddoes’ interview with Musk drove a doubled daily rate of new subscriptions to The Economist, a rep for the publication tells me.
The interview was for The Economist’s video show “The Insider,” which launched last October, and it ranks as “our most-watched Insider episode among subscribers” since launch, the rep adds…
>> Will Sommer asks: “What the hell happened to Sean Duffy’s road-trip TV show?” The transportation secretary’s controversially funded program hasn’t aired a single episode. (The Bulwark)
>> “TKO said it lost $30 million on the UFC Freedom 250 mixed martial arts event held in Washington on June 14, but gained in other ways in terms of media exposure and partnership deals,” Christopher Palmeri writes. (Bloomberg)
>> Awkward headline: “ESPN has no comment on Aaron Rodgers’s comments on ESPN, about ESPN.” (NBC)
>> Hadas Gold reports that White House officials are meeting with AI execs today “to discuss a new framework for the government to review frontier AI models before they launch.” (CNN)
>> Snap shares are up more than 12% this morning on the back of a “strong sales forecast.” (CNBC)
>> Spotify posted strong #s too: “Premium customers grew to 300 million in the second quarter of 2026, after the music streamer gained 7 million paying subscribers, exceeding its previous guidance.” (Variety)
>> The settlements continue: TikTok “has agreed to settle three lawsuits” over social media addiction claims. (Reuters)
“Is Spider-Man more powerful than all of the Avengers combined? There’s certainly a case to be made after ‘Spider-Man: Brand New Day’ captured a mind-boggling, record-setting $360 million in its domestic debut, officially ranking as the biggest debut in box office history,” Variety’s Rebecca Rubin reports.
The movie also “launched to a truly heroic $932 million globally, a benchmark that few films achieve by the end of their box office runs, much less after three days on the big screen,” Rubin writes. “Brand New Day” is slated to start its IMAX run at select theaters on Friday…
This edition of Reliable Sources was edited by Andrew Kirell and produced with Liam Reilly. Email us your feedback and tips here.