Just hours after Netflix ceded the fight for Warner Bros. to Paramount, CNN‘s CEO Mark Thompson tried to alleviate anxieties over the pending new owners in a staff memo: “Despite all the speculation you’ve read during this process, I’d suggest that you don’t jump to conclusions about the future until we know more.”
Newsrooms, though, are notoriously made up of skeptics, for good reason in an environment of layoffs and buyouts, and, more recently, corporate efforts to woo President Donald Trump. Despite Thompson’s message, the mood among many at the cable news network on Friday was “beyond bleak,” per one source.
Paramount has yet to comment on its specific plans for the network after emerging as the winner for WBD, but in the months since Warner Bros Discovery put itself up for sale, there has been rampant speculation about what life will look like if the David Ellison-led company owned CNN.
Fears only accelerated after the Wall Street Journal reported in December that Ellison made assurances to Trump that he would make major changes to the network, long a target of the president’s. Ellison’s appearance at Trump’s State of the Union address, as a guest of one of his most stalwart congressional supporters, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), probably didn’t help soothe fears of the network’s future editorial direction.