Stephen Smysnuik
Can billionaire owners actually save journalism?
Can billionaire owners actually save journalism?
Image: Unsplash
The Topline
- Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison wrote a New York Times guest essay defending his trustworthiness as the potential new owner of CNN
- Ellison is pushing for a nearly $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, which would put CNN — alongside CBS News — under his family's control
- A coalition of a dozen Democratic state attorneys general and the Writers Guild of America have filed separate lawsuits to block the deal, with the states’ trial set for March 2027
- In response to the states’ lawsuit, Ellison has threatened California Attorney General Rob Bonta with moving Paramount out of California unless a settlement to resolve the merger can be reached
- Other examples of billionaires owning major news outlets include Jeff Bezos owning The Washington Post, Patrick Soon-Shiong owning the Los Angeles Times and Canada’s Thomson family owning The Globe and Mail
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Rich owners keep businesses afloat
This fight over Paramount’s proposed takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery isn’t just about whether the merger would reduce competition .
Ellison says the real anxiety is about public trust. Can Americans trust a billionaire with close ties to President Donald Trump to steward CNN responsibly?
Ellison’s answer is — brace yourself — they sure can.
He says he's voted for candidates from both parties, that he holds views that would be called both conservative and liberal, and that he does not intend to bend CBS’s or CNN’s newsrooms to his own politics.
“I believe that news should be based on facts and truth,” Ellison writes, adding later, “[o]ur journalists will continue to answer to the facts and to all the people they serve — not to any party or cause.”
His broader pitch, stripped down, is that scale is needed to save journalism in the streaming era. Netflix, Amazon and Apple, he says, have already eroded the influence of former media titans like Paramount and Warner.
His proposed takeover would provide the actual resources needed to fund the kind of expensive reporting struggling outlets can no longer afford alone.
Translation: His deal is essential in order to salvage mainstream news outlets in the modern era.
That's not a fringe position, and The Boston Globe offers some proof. The Boston Red Sox owner (and billionaire!) John Henry bought the paper in 2013 for $70 million and has largely stayed out of the newsroom.
He invested in expanding its digital operation while avoiding the political pressures that come with owning a major news outlet in the Trump era. The outlet turned profitable around 2018, and by 2024 had grown to more than 330,000 subscribers, up from over 245,000 when he bought it.
Axios noted in February that Henry has faced "almost none of the pressures" that have pushed other billionaire owners toward interference.
This may largely be because his wealth is less entangled with federal government contracts — but it shows that billionaire owners are capable of staying the heck out of newsrooms and growing revenue at the same time.
The reality is that many struggling newsrooms are faced with two realities: one where a wealthy owner has the resources to sustain and grow the business, and another where there is no investment and the operation shrinks.
A media company backed by real capital can outlast the ad-revenue collapse that's gutted journalism over the past two decades, allowing it to stay afloat while repositioning to a revenue model that fits the current state of the industry.
Of course, this isn’t the only way to fund a newsroom — and there's still space for independent, publicly funded or crowdfunded news organizations — but this way can work too.
Just as long as ownership stays out of the newsroom.
Rich owners skew the coverage
Every time a powerful rich person buys a news organization, the public is expected to assume they have the best intentions.
The problem surfaces when you look at the history of billionaires taking over newsrooms — including Ellison himself.
After Skydance took control of CBS News last year, he hired Bari Weiss — a commentator known for combating "woke" culture — as the network's first-ever editor-in-chief.
Weiss has since delayed a 60 Minutes segment on Trump-era deportations, calling it "not ready.” Staffers claimed it reflected political pressure, not editorial judgment. A further exodus of 60 Minutes correspondents only added to the turmoil .
And this was after the Ellison-owned Paramount paid $16 million to settle President Trump’s lawsuit against 60 Minutes, which press-freedom groups called a baseless pressure campaign.
Both Ellisons have cultivated close relationships with Trump, who has publicly endorsed the merger and praised the younger Ellison by name.
When the Trump administration approved Ellison’s takeover of Paramount, it gave him full control of CBS News. A merger with Warner Bros. would hand Ellison control of what The White House calls “Fake News CNN” in its official statements.
We’ve seen how this can go awry. When Jeff Bezos purchased the Post in 2013, he promised to stay out of the newsroom — and he did. For a while.
But in 2024, he personally killed the publication’s endorsement of Kamala Harris for president, which was followed by a notable shift to the right in the paper’s opinion pages. Four former Post editors have since said the paper's independence has eroded under Bezos's ownership.
Meanwhile, from 2023 to 2025, the paper lost more than $277 million over three years, exceeding what Bezos paid for the paper a decade earlier. More than 300 staffers were let go in February 2026, shrinking the newsroom from over 1,000 people to under 800.
In other words, a billionaire owner started to meddle with the newsroom while its decline gained steam.
At The L.A. Times, Patrick Soon-Shiong moved to personally approve opinion headlines and even floated an AI-assisted “bias meter” to flag his own reporters' work to readers, which prompted an exodus of senior journalists.
Revenue has fallen sharply since Soon-Shiong bought The L.A. Times in 2018, dropping to $237 million in 2024, down from $500 million in 2019.
Both instances suggest the public isn’t interested in the billionaire slant. That kind of interference erodes public trust in the news, contributes to falling revenues and leads to job losses.
No wonder a recent Harris Poll found 53 per cent of Americans believe billionaires pose a threat to democracy.
Ownership of media outlets is, ultimately, what determines editorial independence over time. A hands-off owner today is one bad news cycle, one political friendship or one business conflict away from becoming a hands-on one tomorrow. This, in turn, impacts how every single one of us relates to the news, to each other and to the world around us.
Or — we can just take Ellison’s word for it.
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