Ellison Wants ‘Independence’ For CNN. He’ll Have To Start Over

Whenever I’m feeling a little down about the way some things are going in 2026, I like to remember that a bunch of malicious content creators recently lost their jobs in an overhaul at CBS and that the same thing is on the verge of happening at CNN. Perks me right up.

David Ellison, the Paramount Skydance chairman and loose associate of President Trump, is currently tied up in litigation after 12 states, whose attorneys general are all Democrats, sued to block his company’s merger with Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns CNN. In an op-ed for The New York Times on Tuesday, Ellison called the collective lawsuit what it is: a move to keep him away from one of the Democrat Party’s most precious institutions — CNN.

“The issue is whether I can be trusted as a steward of Warner’s CNN,” he wrote. “There has been speculation about my politics, my loyalties, my intentions.” That’s a nice way of putting it. What Ellison means is that Democrats and members of the dying news media (also Democrats) have been furious with his conduct so far overseeing CBS — a company he took in a separate merger last year — and are terrified he will behave similarly when he overtakes CNN.

Recall that Ellison’s most remarkable change at CBS to date was to switch out some leadership in its news division in hopes of blunting the bleeding of its audience, something almost every traditional news operation, whether TV or print, is experiencing. He put journalist Bari Weiss in charge, and she did the unthinkable — she took an interest in the work her employees were producing and challenged them to approach their journalistic political endeavors with curiosity and fairness rather than a deep-seated hatred for Republicans and Trump supporters. That some longtime correspondents, producers, and executives left or made the poor choice to publicly undermine their bosses, resulting in their termination, was a consequence of their own doing, not of Ellison’s.

Ellison went on in his op-ed to say newsrooms like CNN and CBS should “reflect the whole world, not one side of it,” something that “requires independence.” He also said staffers at both should expect to “continue to answer to the facts and to all the people they serve — not to any party or cause.”

That’s a nice sentiment, but surely Ellison knows that CNN is anything but independent. That his op-ed comes after Dr. Anthony Fauci’s diary entries just became public, revealing the exact opposite, should even be a little embarrassing for anyone who might openly state such a thing.

No, the people at CNN are very much in bed with the permanent Washington bureaucracy and the Democrat Party, which exists first and foremost to defend that bureaucracy. If Ellison sincerely believes that should no longer be true, “independence” is the last thing CNN needs. What it needs is to be torn down, top to bottom and — just like at CBS — given a new directive by someone who cares to see it through. A lot of people will have to be fired, and a lot of people will leave on their own.

That’s the only way CNN can be what Ellison claims he wants it to be.