A monumental moment in sports aired on television this weekend. Not the NBA Finals, where the New York Knicks secured their first championship in 53 years, or the opening U.S. game in the World Cup.
Rather, the Ultimate Fighting Championship staged mixed martial arts cage fights at the White House — an event streamed exclusively on Paramount+.
The first-in-history spectacle wasn’t just a 250th birthday party for the nation and an 80th birthday present to President Donald Trump. It also served as a victory party, of sorts, for Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison, who attended the cage fight just two days after the Trump administration approved his company’s contentious, $111 billion bid to buy Warner Bros. Discovery. The merger would create one of the largest companies in the news and entertainment business, with major implications for Hollywood studios, streaming services — and the news.
The Justice Department’s antitrust division gave a greenlight to the merger Friday, bringing Paramount and Trump ally Ellison one step closer to owning both CBS News and CNN. The news comes at a tumultuous moment for CBS which, under Ellison-appointed top editor Bari Weiss, has undergone a radical shakeup while facing accusations of political meddling.
The overhaul at CBS News, media observers told Straight Arrow, could offer clues about what comes next at CNN. Long a Trump punching bag, the cable network’s audience could soon see programming hew closer to the president’s agenda.
“It’s chaos,” journalist Frank Sesno, a professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University and a former Washington bureau chief for CNN, told Straight Arrow. “If what’s happened at CBS under Bari Weiss happens at CNN, that’s a recipe for a lot more chaos and demoralizing of the troops.”
Whether CNN follows the CBS News playbook remains anyone’s guess, Sesno said, because executives haven’t provided sufficient information — to staff or the public — about “what they’re doing, why they’re doing it or to what end.”
“What’s at stake is CNN’s editorial identity, its reputation and its ability to be a true and independent news organization bringing unfiltered news to the public,” Sesno said.
Given the CBS News shakeup, the Paramount merger “leaves people at CNN wondering, ‘Do they go in and blow it up? Do they go in and recognize that they overplayed their hand at CBS and they need to be careful?’”
Paramount and Warner Bros. representatives didn’t respond to requests for comment from Straight Arrow. CBS News has denied accusations — including by three recently fired “60 Minutes” correspondents — that Weiss has tried to shape news stories to please Trump.
Why did the DOJ approve the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger?
When the Justice Department announced Friday it had approved Paramount’s bid, the government said the decision was the result of a lengthy, eighth-month investigation into the megamerger’s impact on the industry. The merger, regulators concluded, “is not likely to result in harm to competition or American consumers,” with benefits for Hollywood and beyond.
Senior department leaders closed the investigation before career attorneys could object, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday. The lawyers scrutinizing the deal were preparing to recommend a lawsuit on allegations the combination of two major movie studios violated federal antitrust laws, The Journal reported.
Beyond CNN and CBS News, Ellison would oversee the film studios Paramount and Warner Bros. and the streaming services Paramount+ and HBO Max. The merger’s proponents maintain the consolidation will allow Paramount to better compete in the digital media environment, including against Netflix, which ended its bid for Warner Bros. Discovery in February.
In a statement to Politico, a Paramount spokesperson said the decision would allow the company to “better compete against dominant technology platforms,” and that it hopes to finalize the deal as quickly as possible. The spokesperson acknowledged the company is operating in “an industry increasingly defined by intense competition for audiences, talent, technology and investment.”
Paramount didn’t highlight its plans for CNN.
Yet, Paramount’s bid for Warner Bros. has been clouded by accusations of political favoritism and corruption. In late April, Ellison threw a lavish private party in Washington for Trump and top administration officials, with attendees including CBS News executives, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr.
Criticism of the deal intensified over the weekend after the Trump administration gave the deal two thumbs up — and as Paramount’s streaming service aired the White House fight night.
The Justice Department maintained the deal would improve the company’s ability to compete in the digital media landscape, yet the acquisition has been accused of creating a monopoly — and that the Ellison family’s cozy relationship with the president was a factor in the Justice Department’s nod of approval.
Kelly McBride, the senior vice president at the nonprofit journalism school the Poynter Institute and a media ethicist, told Straight Arrow she could see the CNN takeover unfolding in several different ways. CNN is profitable and has a large, loyal audience that probably wouldn’t react positively to major changes, particularly if they appeared to be motivated by political pressure or influence. From a business perspective, she said, “you don’t want to screw that up.”
“It’s not normal operating procedure to reject an audience that you already have in order to go after a different audience,” McBride said.
Part of the challenge at CBS News, she said, could boil down to a lack of experience. Before Ellison tapped Weiss to lead CBS News, she had spent her career as an opinion journalist and lacked television journalism experience.
“If you’re going to run a broadcast newsroom, regardless of what your ideas are about what to do with it, you should have some experience in broadcast news,” McBride said.
The Federal Communications Commission has historically opposed media consolidation. But McBride said the Paramount deal represents a situation in which the owners actively support Trump — a reality that she said could be “bad for consumer trust” and is “problematic for the journalists who are trying to hold the president accountable.”
For their part, CNN journalists vowed last week during a tribute to Turner, who died May 6, they would try to maintain their journalistic independence, despite the uncertain times.
Their remarks were covered on CNN’s website.
The merger has implications for Atlanta and beyond
Paramount isn’t the only legacy media brand making mergers-and-acquisitions headlines. Fox Corp. announced Monday it had entered into a “definitive agreement” to purchase streaming platform Roku in a cash-and-stock deal valued at some $22 billion. The deal would give Fox a greater foothold in the streaming business through physical hardware. Roku sells smart TVs that come pre-loaded with the company’s proprietary operating system.
Though the Justice Department was a major obstacle in the Paramount deal, California, New York and other states plan to file a lawsuit in the coming weeks to block the acquisition. In a post on X Friday evening, California Attorney General Rob Bonta said the merger “is not a done deal and remains under investigation by my office.”
The merger could also be disruptive to the local economy in Atlanta, where CNN was founded and still maintains its headquarters. . Writing Monday in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, media scholars Jennifer Porst and Kate Fortmueller said the Paramount deal threatens the city’s “prominent position in the media and cultural industry.” They called on Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr to join other states in a lawsuit to stop the merger.
Paramount plans suggest executives could shutter operations in Atlanta, lay off thousands of workers and sell properties located in the city, according to Porst, an associate professor at Emory University, and Fortmueller, an associate professor at Georgia State University. Outside of Atlanta, Porst and Fortmueller wrote, the merger could lead to fewer choices and higher prices for customers nationwide despite promises from Paramount executives that the deal would offer “savings to their customers through lower prices and to the industry by further investment in content.”
“If we have learned anything from the examples set by almost every other corporation in the United States, and the behaviors of private equity firms in particular, it is that those promises are empty,” they wrote. “They will raise prices on consumers because they can.”
Jim Antle, executive editor of the Washington Examiner, noted that while the merger’s proponents believe that Weiss is “about to expand her media empire” with the addition of CNN, her critics have watched the controversy unfold at CBS News and believe she is just “one banana peel away from oblivion.”
Either way, he wrote in an op-ed for The American Conservative on Monday, Antle said brands like CBS News and CNN are threatened by the collapse in public trust of legacy news outlets, which has led consumers to seek out “information bubbles that entertain, titillate and affirm at least as much as they educate.”
While Weiss critics see her work at CBS News as “attempting to defang a proud network’s tough coverage of a corrupt and unpopular administration,” Antle wrote, others see her as “attempting to restore a semblance of fairness and balance” at the legacy media brand. Still, he wrote, any efforts at CBS News or CNN to broaden their audiences won’t be easy without alienating their most loyal viewers.
This is hardly the first leadership and ownership shakeup at CNN; Sesno lived through several including an episode in 1985 when Turner sought to take over CBS News. While CNN staffers are equally concerned about potential layoffs as they are changes in coverage priorities, Sesno said it’s important that leaders don’t “try to fix what ain’t broke.”
“This country desperately needs trusted national news brands that play by the established rules of respected journalism,” he said. “If Paramount wants to be greeted without abject alarm at CNN, they should express support for the kind of journalism CNN was founded on.”
What comes next should give readers an indicator of how Paramount plans to proceed. Should Weiss be in a position to lead both CBS News and CNN, McBride said she couldn’t reasonably manage both operations on her own.
“She will have to have a number two who actually runs CNN,” McBride told Straight Arrow. “And that decision will be huge.”
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