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Media is being reorganized from the inside out and it is causing extreme anxiety among the employees of the news organization CNN.
In a major development, Paramount has settled its dispute with California Attorney General Rob Bonta and 11 other state attorneys general who had sued to block the $110 billion merger between Paramount's parent corporation, Viacom, and Warner Bros. Discovery, the parent of CNN. The terms of the settlement have been accepted by Paramount and the merger is now expected to close within weeks, creating a media conglomerate the size of which has never been seen before. The new corporation will include CNN, as well as the news division of CBS, and will be a subsidiary of the newly merged Viacom/WBD. The corporation will also include such well known film and television studios as Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros. The new corporation will also include the popular streaming services HBO Max and Paramount+.
And the people inside CNN are terrified.
"Everyone is very nervous," said another CNN source at the New York Post. "It's dark. It's like when you do hurricane coverage. You see the storm spinning off the coast of Haiti and moving towards Florida and you're just waiting and you're like, 'Oh, s-t'."
Another source close to the situation also predicted a 'bloodbath' at CNN and other new units, which he estimated would likely result in the loss of hundreds of employees under the new corporate structure, in addition to the jobs to be cut under the new company's cost savings goals. "Slashing and burning" he predicted would be the next step.
Those savings are expected to come in the form of $6 billion in "cost synergies," or in other words, several thousand layoffs over the next few months. But CNN staffers, for now, remain in the dark as to who will be doing the laying off and exactly when it will happen.
"Complete absence of information," a CNN staffer told The Post. "We have no idea what is going on and who is going to run the place."
CNN boss Mark Thompson is holding a town hall meeting on Wednesday to try to calm his staff down but, sources tell us, no real answers will be given to the daily queries until David Ellison, the CEO of Paramount, finally closes the WBD deal.
There is a lot of unease among CNN employees who have watched CBS News get shaken up by the same person who is now in charge of this new media conglomerate, Paramount. As The Post's Costas Lygas reported this week, Bari Weiss, who has pushed for balanced coverage, is the new boss of CBS News. A number of high level reporters have left under her, including several who were part of the once-dominant 60 Minutes team. The program has seen its worst ratings in over 25 years since Weiss came in and started to shake things up.
"From what I understand of what's happened at CBS News under David's direction, it's not working. It's been playing out for a while now, and it's fueling a deeper sense of dread and anxiety at CNN, wondering what's going to happen when he tries to do this at scale? It's not working at CBS, it's not going to work here," a CNN insider told The Post.
The foreign ownership of CNN has many at the Network anxious. The ownership structure of the newly merged company of Paramount and WBD (formerly Warner Bros. Discovery) will have a total foreign equity stake of 49.5%. Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Abu Dhabi will be minority stockholders in the newly merged media giant. The Federal Communications Commission last week approved the foreign ownership of the new media giant, noting that the foreign entities will not hold any voting stock in the company.
It's a pretty incredible insight into how entrenched the so-called "mainstream media" has become within the politico-media monoculture they themselves constructed over the decades, and just how apoplectic they become when finally confronted by some actual ownership accountability.
The First Amendment was never meant to guarantee a set of jobs for a particular group of people to spout the same brand of single-minded, monochromatic views on a daily basis. The Free Market has spoken.
