David Ellison's NY Times Op-Ed Proves He Has No Business Owning CNN
Asked why he should be trusted with CNN, Ellison cited G.I. Joe and exposed how little he understands news.
David Ellison went to The New York Times on Tuesday to answer the biggest question looming over his stalled attempt to buy Warner Bros. Discovery: Why should anyone trust him with CNN?
His answer, incredibly, was G.I. Joe: Retaliation.
Ellison’s guest essay begins by declaring that the lawsuits threatening his $110 billion acquisition are not really about competition. “The issue is whether I can be trusted as a steward of Warner’s CNN,” he writes. He then offers some boilerplate about facts, truth and political independence before spending much of the essay discussing his childhood love of movies, Paramount’s production schedule and the commercial performance of films he produced. None of it connected to the sacred discipline of journalism, and worse, it conflated his show-business experience with expertise in news.
It was an abject failure.
Ellison was given a clean opportunity to demonstrate his understanding of the responsibility of owning one of the most important global news institutions. Instead, he paraded his ignorance of what that responsibility entails.
“I understand that promises from an executive in the middle of a merger invite skepticism,” Ellison writes. “So judge us by the year we just had.”
If that reads like an invitation to examine his stewardship of CBS News, know that it is not.
Ellison immediately boasted that Paramount nearly doubled its theatrical slate, greenlit 40 new or returning series and increased its content spending by $1.5 billion. He promised that a combined Paramount-Warner will produce 30 theatrical films, 170 television series and more than $30 billion in annual content investment.
He also curiously provided the reader a brief tour of his IMDb page, thinking that this would in any way allay concerns about his judgment. “G.I. Joe: Retaliation” met financial expectations, he explains. “Top Gun: Maverick” exceeded them. “Terminator: Dark Fate” fell short. Ellison is proud of all three.
I mean…good for him? What any of this has to do with protecting CNN from political or corporate interference is never explained, presumably because Ellison thinks the answer is self-evident. It is not.
I’m sure producing expensive popcorn movies requires talent, discipline and good commercial instincts. It does not qualify someone to safeguard an independent newsroom. And in many ways, the jobs require opposite instincts.
A movie producer is meant to interfere: He or she chooses the material, hires the director, replaces people, reviews cuts, responds to audience testing and shapes the final product around his financial and creative judgment. Fingerprints are meant to be everywhere.
The owner of a serious news organization needs to understand when to keep his hands off. Its the role of a dispassionate governor committed to facts over eyeballs, not a passionate buttinski eager to move units.
Curiously, Ellison never confronts that distinction. What’s worse is that his essay suggests he doesn’t even recognize it. Movies, television programs, and journalism all appear to occupy the same mental category for him: content. They are each just products competing for audience attention. He seems to see the problem as declining trust and lost market share. And his solution is more investment, greater scale, and programming that connects with more consumers.
That might be a perfectly coherent theory of how to run a Hollywood studio, but applied to journalism, it is not just tone deaf but dangerous.
It seems bizarre to point this out, but an audience does not get the final say on whether a fact is true. A newsroom cannot test its reporting until it finds the version that pleases the broadest demographic. Sometimes good journalism angers half the country. Sometimes it angers nearly everyone. Sometimes the owner hates it too.
Ellison writes that CNN and CBS News should report “straight down the middle,” another phrase that sounds reassuring until you consider it for more than five seconds. Facts do not always land in the middle. One party may be lying. One institution may be abusing its power. The truth does not owe equal inconvenience to both sides.
Ellison could have used the essay to propose real protections for CNN. He could have promised an independent editorial board, contractual safeguards for newsroom leadership or hard limits on his own authority. He could have addressed the upheaval at CBS News and explained what he learned from it. He did none of that.
He invoked Edward R. Murrow, promised to pay real reporters and reminisced about bicycles flying across the moon, twin suns setting over the desert and fighter jets racing across the California sky. It reads beautifully, but it is also a flat-out insane response to the question he raised.
Perhaps this is how billionaires (or in this case, a billionaire son of a mega-billionaire) eventually come to see themselves. Ellison has spent his adult life in rooms where his money, taste and approval make things happen. It may genuinely have never occurred to him that success in one industry does not make his judgment universally valuable.
The most important qualification for owning CNN may be the humility to understand the limits of your own qualifications. Ellison’s essay demonstrates the opposite, but as we have seen in the Trump administration, none of this means he will lose. What’s worse is that none of this probably even matters.
Ellison’s relationship with the Trump administration has already been conspicuously productive. Paramount settled Trump’s dubious lawsuit over a 60 Minutes interview for $16 million while its earlier merger with Skydance awaited government approval. Trump’s FCC then approved that transaction in a party-line vote after Skydance made commitments involving ideological balance and an ombudsman. Ellison has since enjoyed public praise from Trump while his father’s relationship with the president has continued to deepen.
The Warner deal has cleared Trump’s Justice Department. The immediate threat comes from the states and the Writers Guild, which Ellison now accuses of disguising political objections as antitrust claims.
His op-ed will not reassure anyone who is seriously worried about CNN. It should make them more worried. Ellison had a guest essay in The New York Times to prove he understood the institution he wants to acquire, and he answered with box-office receipts, production budgets and a story about Terminator: Dark Fate.
That display of ignorance may not cost him anything. Ellison has spent his career failing upward through wealth, access and increasingly valuable acquisitions. He may end up owning CNN for the same reason.
Nobody with the power to give it to him has required a convincing answer about why he should.