All had been fairly quiet on the set of the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger up until last month, when a dozen state attorneys general sued to stop the deal as a violation of antitrust laws. The Writers Guild of America union followed suit a day later in filing a suit against the deal. We’d been hoping to see state AGs step in, so it was a relief to see it finally happen. It also seems to have suitably shaken Paramount CEO David Ellison out of silence. This week, Ellison penned a guest essay for the New York Times called “In Defense of the Paramount-Warner Deal.” Overall, it’s a big nothingburger of an opinion piece. It’s all very, “Believe what I tell you, NOT the empirical evidence!” Except there’s one argument he makes, what Ellison alleges is the real reason people are so upset over the merger: the fate of CNN. More specifically, that he can’t be trusted to oversee both CNN and the network he already has at Paramount, CBS News. Here’s an excerpt from that section:

I believe a plainer worry sits beneath the briefs and the news releases: the news. The issue is whether I can be trusted as a steward of Warner’s CNN. There has been speculation about my politics, my loyalties, my intentions.

Unfortunately, I can’t give anyone a view into my heart and mind, but I can share this: 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. I believe that news should be based on facts and truth.

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. These were founding principles for both CNN and CBS News, for legends like Ted Turner and Edward R. Murrow, and it is exactly that kind of independence that has always fueled the greatness of “60 Minutes.”

There is much ground to recover. By Gallup’s latest measure, just 28 percent of Americans said they trust the news — the lowest share ever recorded. The temptation is to say the problem lies elsewhere. Our obligation is to look inward and say: We can do better. We are in a moment when Americans trust few institutions, but journalists haven’t always helped their case by refusing to engage with critiques.

Trust can’t be argued back, but it can be earned back — story by story, day by day. 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. That is the work I intend to pay for, patiently, for a long time.

[From NY Times]

Quick question: what timeline is David Ellison living in? Because surely, it’s not the same one as the rest of us. He writes about CBS News as if it hasn’t been a complete and utter sh-t show under his tutelage. As if Bari Weiss as CBS News editor-in-chief hasn’t been the ruination of a once top tier news division. And as if we all didn’t witness what went down only two months ago at the revered news program Ellison had the nerve to invoke, 60 Minutes. Remember that? Weiss and new/inexperienced 60 Minutes executive producer Nick Bilton dramatically firing lead anchor Scott Pelley, all because they couldn’t handle a journalist asking them hard-hitting yet perfectly legitimate questions about WTF was going on? In the aftermath of that firing, Pelley explicitly told us how Weiss was “putting a thumb on the scale” of the Trump administration, citing a story on ICE in Minnesota where Weiss asked for more footage of protestors being violent.

And now Ellison thinks that because he took the time to write an essay where he pinky swears that if he gets his hands on CNN, the newsroom will stay independent without prejudice to “any party or cause,” that we should just take him at his word?? No, sir, we’ll take you at your actions instead. CBS News is a house in disorder, there’s no sound reason to give Ellison another to destroy. To quote one annoying nepo billionaire: “Trust can’t be argued back, but it can be earned back.”

Embed from Getty Images

Photos credit: Kay Qiao/Image Press Agency/Avalon, Getty Images