CNN founder Ted Turner recently died, prompting President Donald Trump to reflect on what the network had become since Turner sold it decades ago. Trump argued on Truth Social that Turner grew disillusioned with CNN’s increasingly ideological direction, and the CNN founder himself said much the same before his death.
Now, as CNN’s parent company prepares to be acquired by the pro-Trump Ellison family’s Paramount-Skydance empire, the political and media establishment is panicking over the possibility that the network could finally move back toward the middle.
One day before Turner’s passing, and just weeks after Trump Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr said that the acquisition of CNN’s parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery, by Ellison’s company, Paramount-Skydance, would be approved quickly, the agency’s sole Democratic commissioner opened a “rigorous review” of the merger.
This renewed scrutiny comes as CNN faces yet another self-inflicted controversy that underscores exactly why so many Americans have lost trust in the network.
When late-night host Jimmy Kimmel joked right before the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner that first lady Melania Trump looked like an “expectant widow,” it was bad enough. When a would-be assassin attempted to shoot at Trump officials, it became so much worse.
Kimmel had few defenders after making his ghoulish quip, but guess who jumped to the front of that short line? You guessed it: CNN.
The network’s lead host, Jake Tapper, couldn’t wait to run interference for Kimmel. “Journalism and jokes are not calls for violence,” Tapper claimed, before declaring that “there is zero evidence — zero evidence that the would-be, alleged assassin heard the joke.”
Tapper seemed to think the tasteless crack was only a problem if it directly inspired the shooter. He went on to muse about the Trump administration using “Saturday’s shooting as justification to stop all critical coverage, whether journalistic or comedic, of Donald Trump,” which they never did.
What makes Tapper’s defense of Kimmel all the more galling is the hypocrisy. As Ian Miller notes, after NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers made a benign joke about Kimmel and Jeffrey Epstein, Tapper went ballistic. “False, defamatory, wildly irresponsible, and not funny,” he proclaimed, adding that there are “lunatics out there who believe this kind of stuff.”
So to recap: It’s OK for Jimmy Kimmel to “joke” about Melania Trump looking like a widow right before a shooter targeted her husband, but not OK to joke about Kimmel.
This double standard drives conservatives crazy, and rightly so. Half the country shouldn’t have to turn on a “mainstream” news outlet and hear this kind of desperate partisanship.
That’s why we should all hope the takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns CNN, by Paramount wins quick regulatory approval.
The pending acquisition offers a sliver of a chance that fair, objective, and detached journalism might eventually find a home at CNN. Why? Because Paramount’s CEO is David Ellison, who has already demonstrated a commitment to ending the left-wing bias at one network, CBS, after the Tiffany Network came under Paramount’s umbrella.
Ellison installed Bari Weiss, a centrist blogger and veteran of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, to run CBS News. Weiss has decreed more evenhanded coverage of the Trump administration and tried to cover political issues more fairly, to the chagrin of many CBS staffers.
Likewise, CNN’s liberal newsroom is reportedly aghast that someone similarly dedicated to fairness and accuracy might end up as their boss. Mainstream Americans can only hope.
As NBC reported, “Seven current CNN employees who spoke to NBC News on Thursday night, hours after Netflix announced it would not try to match Paramount’s bid for WBD, expressed a combination of fear and concern. They described the mood inside the company as ‘shaken’ and ‘depressing.’”
It’s a sad day for journalism when reporters and producers are fearful because new leadership might be on the way in. It’s even sadder when the reason they’re so upset is that their new boss might demand they cover the world fairly.
When Weiss took the reins at CBS News, she told employees, “We have to look honestly at ourselves. We are not producing a product that enough people want.”
Judging by the cable news ratings — CNN badly trails Fox News and even lags behind MSNOW (formerly MSNBC) — CNN is likewise not producing a product that people want. Fewer than 1 million prime-time viewers tune in to CNN, an embarrassing lack of eyeballs for the granddaddy of cable news. Contrast that to Fox News, which averages 3.2 million viewers in prime time.
CNN’s collapse in credibility didn’t happen overnight, and it won’t be fixed overnight either. But if the network truly wants to regain public trust, it has to stop treating naked partisanship as journalism and start remembering what made Turner’s creation successful in the first place.
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No serious journalist should have defended Kimmel’s ghoulish joke. And no serious news network should make excuses for the people who do.
CNN’s staff may fear change, but viewers have been demanding it for years.
Michael Glassner, the president of C&M Transcontinental LLC, served as chief operating officer and deputy campaign manager for Donald J. Trump for President Inc. in the 2016 and 2020 campaigns and was a senior adviser on the 2024 campaign. He is one of the longest-serving executives in modern presidential campaign history and has had senior roles in seven presidential campaigns.