On Thursday evening, as rumors about the Brown University gunman swirled, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins posted on social media, noting the confusion and directing people to her network’s 9pm newscast.
CNN is certainly not a flawless news source, but her words rang true to me. The network is one of the outlets where you can find reality-based and largely dependable reporting – especially in breaking news situations like the one that was developing near a New Hampshire storage facility.
But CNN, now 45 years old, is in a precarious situation as two huge media conglomerates vie for ownership of its parent company, Warner Bros Discovery.
Whatever the outcome, the fate of CNN has become part of a high-stakes game of corporate ownership, not as a question of what benefits the information-seeking public.
America’s media system isn’t set up for that lofty goal. It’s set up for corporate profitability, for shareholder gain, for ever-increasing size and ever-decreasing competition.
“This is yet another example of the deep structural problems with roots in decades of policy decisions,” said Victor Pickard, author of Democracy Without Journalism? and a University of Pennsylvania media policy professor.
The speculation about who will own Warner Bros Discovery – will it be Netflix or Paramount Skydance? – misses a larger point.
Dollar General, the retail giant that promises “convenience, quality brands and low prices”, has agreed to pay at least $15m to settle claims that it overcharged customers at many of its 20,000 US stores.
After a 137-year struggle, the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina has finally received full federal recognition from the U.S. government.
When 10-year-old Bayan Al-Ankah was fatally shot in the head by the Israeli military while in a displaced persons camp in Gaza last week, according to her family, she became one of several hundred Palestinians killed during a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel. Mediators Qatar and Egypt worry that the truce is threatened by near-daily Israeli attacks in Gaza.
Republican US representative Elise Stefanik – a staunch ally of Donald Trump who calls herself “ultra-Maga” – is ending her campaign for New York governor and will not seek re-election to Congress.
The US military launched airstrikes against dozens of Islamic State targets in Syria on Friday in retaliation for an attack on US personnel, two US officials said on Friday.
