Skydance opts for stability at CNN
Mark Thompson, who has led CNN for the past three years, will remain at the helm once the Ellison family takes control of CNN’s parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery.
This morning, on the eve of Paramount’s merger with Warner, David Ellison and co-CEO Ynon Kreiz announced the combined company’s leadership team, including Thompson as chairman and editor-in-chief.
Thompson wrote in a memo to CNN staffers, “I have real confidence that they both understand and will fully support the principle and practice of the kind of independent news that CNN has always stood for.”
He wrote that he will be leading the news organization “as an independent editor-in-chief with the same responsibilities and prerogatives that I have now.”
The news resolved months of uncertainty about CNN. And to be frank, there’s a palpable sense of relief among the journalists I work with.
As I reported back in February, many CNN staffers (and viewers) had serious concerns about whether the Ellisons would uphold the news network’s editorial independence. There have been questions about Larry Ellison and his private conversations with President Trump; controversies about David Ellison and his hiring of Bari Weiss; apprehensions about the financing from Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds.
And Trump himself said “it’s imperative that CNN be sold,” signaling that he viewed the change in ownership as a way for him to exert control over news coverage.
Now Skydance is taking control at a time when CNN is in court suing the Trump administration over its attempt to ban the news organization from the White House. The next hearing is on Thursday.
So the decision to keep Thompson in place – rather than effecting a shakeup on day one – is a significant one.
Weiss will also remain in place as editor-in-chief of CBS News, still reporting directly to Ellison, though like Thompson and everyone else on the CEO leadership team, she’ll now also report to Kreiz. Here’s my full story…
Thompson’s memo to staffers noted that “the specifics of how CNN will plug into and operate in the new company have yet to be finalized — hardly surprising given that serious discussions could only begin after Paramount’s anti-trust settlement a few days ago.”
Those discussions will surely involve how to bring CNN and CBS News closer together and — even more urgently — how to keep growing digital businesses to offset cable and broadcast declines.
Thompson wrote that the Skydance leadership team “really does believe in news alongside entertainment as a top strategic opportunity for our new company. They’ve seen our digital strategy and are as excited about it as we are.”
For now, there are many unknowns, including how the court-mandated “editorial independence board” will fit into all this.
Skydance execs will hold an employee town hall tomorrow followed by a media event later in the day. Variety’s Todd Spangler has a full recap of the leadership structure on the entertainment side here…
Last week, despite “robust demand” for its investment-grade and junk debt, “Paramount’s $55 billion debt offering — the largest ever — opened with a thud, as traders, saddled with more Skydance debt than they knew what to do with, frenetically sold it off,” Rohan Goswami wrote in Semafor Media last night.
Paramount’s CFO Dennis Cinelli told Bloomberg’s Caleb Mutua and Emily Graffeo that the declines were just “one-day choppiness in the market.”
But Bloomberg and other business outlets highlighted how Paramount had to pay through the nose for its corporate bonds. The delay caused by the state AG lawsuit meant that Paramount now has to pay hundreds of millions of dollars more in interest payments, the WSJ’s Jack Pitcher wrote yesterday.
>> This headline is the most-read story on Bloomberg’s website this morning: “Larry Ellison Risk Exposed by Paramount and Oracle Debt Binges.”
This just in: “Ex-Panorama editor Rachel Jupp has been named director of BBC News and Current Affairs starting this month,” Press Gazette’s Charlotte Tobitt reports.
It’s a huge job, with responsibility “for a team of 4,500 people, broadcasting to around half a billion people across the world in more than 40 languages,” the BBC’s press release notes. Jonathan Munro has been serving as interim director since Deborah Turness resigned last November.
>> Meanwhile, “morale at the BBC has been severely dented by a gradual ‘bloodletting’ that has seen plans to shed as many as 2,000 staff slowly announced over several weeks,” The Guardian media editor Michael Savage reported earlier in the day…
☝🏻There’s the least surprising headline of the day. The former Trump press secretary will become a Fox News contributor starting November 1, NYT’s Michael Grynbaum scooped this morning.
“Sad to see that Fox & Friends (Sunday) is not covering our packed house and incredibly enthusiastic (beyond!) Rally that took place in Ohio last night, or the ones in Alabama, Texas, or Oklahoma over the past two days,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Sunday morning.
He went on, “It’s the old undercurrent at FoxNews! Other networks are reporting about these Rallies, and really positively, like ‘crazy!’ Our people want to see our Rallies, and reports on our Rallies, on FoxNews, or they will very quickly stop watching (like I am doing right now!).”
Maybe. Or maybe — and this is my educated guess — Fox is calculating that Trump’s rallies aren’t a ratings magnet right now. The midterm convention sure wasn’t. There have been times in the past when Fox hosts thought themselves better GOP messengers than the president. Is this another one of those times?
Ahead of this Thursday’s hearing before Judge Tim Kelly, the Justice Department argued that Trump “should be allowed to reinstate his White House ban of CNN, MS NOW and Politico in a court filing late Friday,” CNN’s Tierney Sneed wrote here.
The filing was mostly a rehash of earlier arguments. It “leaned into the idea that spreading ‘misinformation’ is itself a national security risk,” Sneed wrote. It also suggested that the president can block reporters over lack of “professionalism” as defined by him.
How might one define “professionalism,” you ask? Well, the DOJ filing stated that “bona fide journalists would identify sources instead of relying on anonymous sources,” even though the White House routinely holds background briefings where reporters are required to treat admin officials like anonymous sources…
Here’s what Ted Boutrous, the counsel for the three banned news outlets, said in a statement yesterday: “We established in our preliminary injunction motion that the President’s ban of CNN, MS NOW and POLITICO from the White House is a blatant violation of the First Amendment and due process. Since then the President has only made it clearer that he announced this ban to punish reporting he doesn’t like and try to force journalists to cover him in ways he prefers.”
“The White House’s filing on Friday shows the president’s ‘ban on the free press’ is indefensible. The law is absolutely clear,” Boutrous said. “The harm to our clients, the First Amendment, and the public as a whole is profound. It is critical that the White House is enjoined to keep this unconstitutional ban on the free press out of commission.”
Last week we noted Columbia Journalism School’s decision to pause admissions to its Master of Arts offering. Now Reuters has some details about why:
“The Trump administration’s changing visa policies caused a sharp drop in international applications to Columbia University and contributed to the university pausing admissions to one of its journalism programs,” Aditya Soni and Edmund Lee wrote, citing four people familiar with the matter.
“The Israeli military has published an investigation saying that 170 people killed in the war in Gaza who had presented themselves as journalists were actually militants, rebutting accusations that it targeted journalists in violation of international law,” the NYT’s Ephrat Livni reports.
Some of the people — “about 78” — also appear on the Committee to Protect Journalists’ list of “190 deaths of Palestinian reporters and media workers that it has documented during the war.” CPJ says it will assess the Israeli military’s new list and look at the available evidence.
“But for the most part,” Livni notes, “the two lists do not overlap — more than half of the people Israel says used journalism as mere cover are not claimed by CPJ as killed media workers, and more than half of the media workers CPJ says were killed were not disputed by Israel.”
Last week I had the honor — and it really was an honor — of running a Scholastic book fair at my son’s school. Books are like magical portals for kids. But they’re also a source of conflict for adults, which brings me to Banned Books Week 2026.
This morning PEN America is out with its annual count, finding that 11,982 books “were banned in public schools during the 2025-2026 school year,” which is “the highest number of recorded bans in a single year since PEN America began tracking book bans in 2021.” Most of those bans are in Florida and Texas.
Kasey Meehan, director of PEN America’s Freedom to Read program, says, “When reading for pleasure is in decline across all ages, bans on popular and engaging titles are exceptionally tragic…”
Vanity Fair’s global editorial director, Mark Guiducci, has relaunched the publication’s New Establishment list after a seven-year hiatus.
Fittingly, the top spot is filled by OpenAI’s Sam Altman, whom Guiducci interviewed twice. But the list isn’t all Silicon Valley. Also on the list are Meredith Kopit Levien, David Ellison, Josh D’Amaro, Lachlan Murdoch, James and Kathryn Murdoch, Tucker Carlson, Kaitlan Collins, Bari Weiss, Hasan Piker and Erika Kirk.
>> Lachlan Cartwright is out today with two profiles for the Murdoch entries on the list: He interviewed James and Kathryn about New York magazine and their media ambitions, and he talked with people close to Lachlan about how the Fox scion operates…
>> David Folkenflik goes deep on Oleksandra Kuvshynova’s death in Ukraine: “She died covering war for Fox News. Her parents blame the network — and a star reporter.” (NPR)
>> Trisha Thadani reports out her own family’s tragic story: “Dying patients are inundated by misinformation. My dad was one of them.” (NYT Mag)
>> Kristen Hare says “a new study of 112 independent publishers shows just how much local news entrepreneurs have to juggle.” (Poynter)
>> Armand Broady asks: With Tony Romo out, “can J.J. Watt win the CBS job?” (Sports Media Watch)
>> Valerie Trapp says this “SNL” sketch “understands how the internet shapes our reality.” (The Atlantic)
>> This morning, tech reporting star Mike Isaac announced he is leaving the NYT to cover Silicon Valley for The Atlantic. (X)
>> Another win for the Substack Defender program: “A CEO tried to bully a journalist into silence. He failed.” (Substack)
>> “Production of Daily Wire’s pro-ICE film ‘Pawn Shop’ has been temporarily halted” in Livingston, Montana. (Variety)
>> YouTube “says it wants to ‘focus on originality’ in a push to surface better Shorts recommendations for users.” (9 to 5 Google)
>> Taylor Swift’s “The Life of a Showgirl” returned “to No. 1 on the Billboard 200 albums chart for a 13th nonconsecutive week” following the “Encore” reissue. (Billboard)
Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “Digger,” starring Tom Cruise, “collapsed” at the box office “with an embarrassing $8 million from 3,321 North American theaters,” Variety’s Rebecca Rubin reports. “With a production budget of $160 to $180 million, ‘Digger’ will wind up as not just one of the biggest bombs of the year but potentially of all time.”
Honestly, this just makes me more interested in seeing the film…
This edition of Reliable Sources was edited by Andrew Kirell and produced with Liam Reilly. Email us your feedback and tips here.