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.
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.”
Photos credit: Kay Qiao/Image Press Agency/Avalon, Getty Images
Isn’t she the one who faux dated Brad Pitt?
Whatever.
Re Larry: It must really suck to be that rich and still nobody likes you.
??
Are you talking about bari weiss? And confusing her with Alia Shawkat?
“Straight down the middle” sounds an awful lot like “Fair and Balanced”. And we know how destructive that Murdoch-helmed right-wing propaganda machine – Fox News – was and is for the world and democracy, women and minorities.
How about focusing on facts, reality, the news as it is based on actual events, research, experience … not spin, not agendas, not suppressing reporting of actual things that happened, reporting what politicians, government officials are actually saying and doing including reporting of Trump’s unhinged lunatic megalomaniacal posts and speeches, ICE and other government entities’ illegal actions, letting experienced investigative teams, journalists (not influencers, media personalities, donors) shed light, report on, educated the public on what is going on in the world instead of treating it like a PR Opp for the 1 percent, oligarchs and white nationalists seeking to remake the country in their white sheeted, Confederate/Nazi flagged/III tattooed, torch and gun-bearing self image.
The forking NYT editorial team letting David Ellison publicize propaganda for his merger/fascist news takeover.
“I hold some views that would be called conservative and others that would be called liberal” sure Dave! You don’t have a liberal bone in your body.
Also it’s just ridiculous these billionaires arguing for “centrist” positions when the playing field is tilted to authoritarianism. There’s no center there – there’s a dictator, a lot of depraved henchmen in government, and some oligarchs building everything around their financial interests, power and their cruelty. The only center is in the middle of that black hole of nutjobs.
Telling it straight down the middle is not remotely the same as telling the truth. Which is what the news should be aspiring to.
The best part were the comments ripping him a new one in that op-ed. And he’s full of crap and everyone knows it.
I’ve never seen a president get such a pass from the press as the current one. Not even close. Every day, he does multiple things that just one of which would have ended the political career of a democrat.
This fucking guy….didn’t even finish college.
One of the issues is that when a news organization just “tells it like it is” and tells it “straight down the middle” the right wing screeches that the organization is biased. as Colbert said back in his satire days – reality has a well known liberal bias.
Take the tragedies in Minnesota. When you present the facts, just the basic facts, its clear the ICE agents were in the wrong. So most national news stations arent doing that. they’re making sure to tell us what the victims were doing wrong, what other protestors are doing wrong, etc.
I come back to that old quote about journalism – if one side tells you its sunny and one side tells you its raining, your job is not to cite both sides Your job is to look out the window and see what the weather actually is. But in this climate, to do that would be seen as “biased” for the liberals because the weather is such a disaster right now of the right’s making (both the actual weather and the metaphor, lol.)
This is the line literally EVERY single right wing producer, journalist, and judicial nominee uses. It’s the root of FOX News’s “Fair and Balanced” lie. It’s simplistic and duplicitous and never said in good faith.
Ironically, The right wing has done such a good job convincing conservatives that neutral, reality-based journalism and commentary is liberally-biased, the conservative viewers they they *think* they’ll attract to CBS, CNN, etc. won’t come.
Modern conservatives (the kind who avoid CNN or CBS because they think they are liberal) don’t want even rightward-leaning “balanced” media. Those audiences now are conditioned to want the kind of “right wing” media that FOX, OAN, NewsMax, represent. That’s what they’ve gotten for a generation now (since right wing talk and FOX News ascended 30+ years ago). So anything that plays to both sides in their mind and shoots down the middle will still feel weak and liberally biased, and the audience will hemorrhage, because actually neutral and left-leaning audiences will depart and there are already plenty of outlets serving the conservative audience, meaning those folks will have no reason to go to CNN or CBS.
So we end up where we started: it’s about killing off non-conservative brands (the Washington Post, LA Times, CNN, CBS) while claiming you are trying to save them. Leaving only the conservative ones. And that’s why they can’t just do what would be the sensible thing here and spin-off CNN to make the deal more palatable. They need CNN because that’s a big part of the plan.