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On the morning of February 28, the day the United States and Israel launched an attack on Iran, CNN, with its vast network of journalists stationed around the world, snapped into action. Jeremy Diamond, the network’s Jerusalem correspondent, reported on Israel’s killing of Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader. Across the Gulf, an array of other CNN reporters provided firsthand accounts of Iran’s retaliatory strikes. In the days that followed, Clarissa Ward interviewed a senior Kurdish official about a possible ground offensive, and Frederik Pleitgen documented his journey into Iran via a winding mountain road. 

In the landscape of TV news, CNN’s ability to ramp up international coverage at a moment’s notice remains unparalleled. But last month, its corporate owner, Warner Bros. Discovery, agreed to an acquisition by Paramount for thirty-one dollars a share, besting Netflix’s $27.75-per-share offer in a deal that will net WBD shareholders an extra eleven billion dollars. Suddenly, CNN’s niche fell under threat. In conversations about CNN with Donald Trump, David Ellison, the owner of Paramount, reportedly promised “sweeping changes,” leaving network staffers “upset” and “shaken.” His father, Larry, the founder of Oracle, has said of Trump, “I support him, and I want him to do well.” David Ellison later stated that CNN’s editorial independence “needs to be maintained,” but the anxiety very much remains. On Friday, Pete Hegseth—the secretary of war, as he likes to be called—remarked, “More fake news from CNN.… The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better.”

Many CNN staffers fear that Bari Weiss, whom Ellison chose to lead CBS News, will bring the same deference to the White House that she has sought to impose on 60 Minutes. But they are perhaps even more worried about the cost-cutting that Paramount will inevitably inflict on CNN: Over the past two years, Paramount has amassed a hundred billion dollars in debt, a burden Ellison is keen to stabilize. Paramount is already contemplating laying off 15 percent of the workforce at CBS News. CNN has more than thirty-five hundred employees around the globe—and it’s unlikely all would remain as part of a merger.

Not long ago, there had been cause for hope. Mark Thompson, CNN’s president, has spearheaded an effort to transition away from the cable business, securing seventy million dollars from WBD last year that he has used to hire around a hundred people to the digital team, swapping them in for some two hundred TV-side employees who were laid off. That strategy has started to pay off. According to a CNN spokesperson, over the first three days of the US-Israeli war on Iran, the network’s digital platforms reached their biggest audience of the year; on TikTok, the CNN account added a half million subscribers—a welcome new audience for a network projected to make six hundred million in revenue this year, far less than the billion it generated during the 2016 presidential race.    

Yet between Trump’s hostility to CNN and Paramount’s debt load, securing the network’s financial health may matter less to the Ellisons than using it as a political and financial tool to further Oracle’s booming government business, which includes cloud computing contracts with the Air Force and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The Ellisons are “willing to throw the economic interests of their news holdings under the bus if it boosts their other business before the Trump administration,” Seth Stern, the advocacy director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, told me. Laura Martin, an entertainment industry analyst at Needham & Company, agreed that CNN employees are right to be worried. “We know what’s going to happen under the Ellisons. Either the network gets shut down—which would be the worst case for CNN—or it’s going to turn into what’s happening at CBS, which is a nightmare.” 

Assuming regulators approve Paramount’s acquisition of WBD, this will be the third time CNN’s corporate owner has changed in the space of a decade. In the closing months of the 2016 election, AT&T announced a deal to acquire the network’s original owner, Time Warner. After Trump won for the first time, the New York Post reported that the new parent company would seek to “neutralize” Jeff Zucker, who had overseen CNN’s assertive coverage of Trump, including the controversial decision to publish allegations that the president was a Russian intelligence asset. Trump even reportedly raised Zucker’s leadership in a private meeting with the CEO of AT&T. “The news business doesn’t seem to be central to AT&T’s content strategy,” an analyst interviewed by the Post observed. “They seem much more interested in the entertainment brands.” Sound familiar? 

Zucker survived that merger, but resigned in early 2022 amid falling ratings and a scandal in which anchor Chris Cuomo helped his brother Andrew, who was the governor of New York, strategize a response to allegations of sexual harassment. By then, AT&T was flipping CNN and the rest of its entertainment business to Discovery Networks. Chris Licht, Zucker’s replacement, signaled a desire to depoliticize the network to suit the interests of David Zaslav, the CEO of the newly formed Warner Bros. Discovery. Licht would last only thirteen months on the job, a disastrous tenure that saw him regularly bash CNN’s past coverage of Trump and the COVID-19 pandemic and launch a morning show that failed to boost ratings. Days after the publication of a bruising profile in The Atlantic, Zaslav fired him.

Analysts I spoke with suggested that the effort to reorient CNN away from politicized coverage was less consequential than the network’s lackadaisical approach to building a digital income stream. More than twenty million households canceled their cable subscriptions between 2016 and 2022, so TV ratings would likely have fallen no matter what CNN did. “Cable is an industry that’s in the declining stage of its life cycle,” Scott Robson, an analyst with S&P Global, told me. “It’s hard for them to show impressive growth or profits for shareholders at this stage.” What really caused trouble was how the timing of the merger torpedoed CNN+, a foray into digital streaming that could have had potential if not for its embarrassingly limited programming. Zaslav pulled the plug on CNN+ after less than a month, and used the savings to help write down the debt he’d amassed in creating WBD. 

With Thompson, who was hired in 2023, CNN embarked on a new bid at digital reinvention. Reading CNN.com now costs seven dollars a month, a fee that also covers a revamped direct-to-consumer app, CNN All Access, where subscribers can watch livestreams of the network’s domestic and international cable feeds, original documentaries, and short-form videos. At a town hall in January, Thompson told staff that the company had surpassed its subscription goals for 2025. (CNN declined to make him available for comment.)

Thompson’s efforts are much further along now than CNN+ was during the last corporate handover. Still, the Ellisons will be keen to write down the hundred million in debt they’ll be carrying upon the completion of the merger, just as Zaslav did the last time around. “I would guess they’d cut a lot of costs,” Martin told me. “They’re going to overpay by a lot with this new bid, so they’re going to have to.” 

Paramount has already identified six billion dollars in “synergies” with WBD that can reduce costs via “technology integration,” “procurement savings,” and “optimizing the combined real estate footprint.” Naturally, the emphasis on extracting savings by cutting back on technology throws the fate of the digital buildout into question, especially as ownership looks to consolidate all of CNN’s news offerings under their streaming service, Paramount+. Puck recently reported that Thompson won’t stick around for the transition. (A spokesperson from CNN declined to comment on that report.)

In terms of coverage, CNN likely won’t replicate Fox News, but it will look to stay in Trump’s good graces by doing “a lot of both-sidesism, false equivalencies, and a lot of boring and uninteresting newscasts where opinions of differing validity are given equal weight,” Stern said. The tone may come to sound much like the Weiss-era CBS Evening News: bloodless and bland.

It’s hard to imagine such a strategy leading to a turnaround. As Rick Davis, a longtime CNN executive, told CJR’s Adam Piore in 2024, when it comes to MAGA diehards, “we’re never going to get ’em back.” With that in mind, the current political environment could actually present a different business opportunity for CNN. Given Trump’s flagging poll numbers and the raft of rising, telegenic Democrats, perhaps dusting off the Zucker playbook makes sense—the rebranded MS Now has ridden that wave to some of its highest viewership since the first Trump administration. “In the cable news business,” Robson told me, “leaning to one side or another helps with the audience.” Like it or not, partisan news sells. 

Whatever the particulars, it’s almost certain that the CNN that emerges under Paramount will be a smaller, more Trump-friendly place—a regrettable outcome for viewers, but fine for the Ellisons. “I don’t know that they particularly care if they have devalued CBS News or CNN irredeemably in their pursuit of Trump’s good graces,” Stern said. “Those holdings are nothing to them. They’re pocket change.”

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