Corporate Media Is about to Get So Much Worse

A $110 billion merger between Paramount and WBD, an FCC built for leverage, and the slow corporate rewrite of what “news” is allowed to be.

Kristoffer Ealy is a political scientist, political analyst, and professor in Southern California. He teaches American Government and political behavior, with a focus on political psychology, voting behavior, and political socialization. Subscribe to his Substack, The Thinking Class with Professor Ealy.

Illustration by Riley Levine

I was hoping it wasn’t going to come to this, but I braced myself for it anyway. Anyone who has been paying attention to the media landscape over the past year knew this moment was coming. Warner Bros. Discovery was never going to remain independent forever. The debt load was too heavy, the streaming wars too brutal, and Wall Street’s patience too thin. A merger was inevitable. The only real question was which corporate giant would end up holding the leash — and, more importantly, who was going to get walked.

I wrote extensively about this possibility because corporate consolidation in media never ends well for journalism, audiences, or frankly anyone who enjoys creativity that hasn’t been focus-grouped into emotional beige. Still, if a merger had to happen, I found myself rooting — reluctantly, the way you root for the less bad option at a buffet where everything looks questionable — for Netflix to win the bidding war. Netflix at least understands distribution in the modern era. Paramount represents something else entirely: legacy consolidation dressed up as innovation, the media equivalent of your grandfather buying Jordans and insisting he’s still got it.

And because the universe apparently enjoys testing my blood pressure, the worst-case scenario has arrived. Paramount is preparing to take control of Warner Bros. Discovery in a deal valued at $110 billion. One hundred and ten billion dollars. To put that in perspective: that is enough money to fund the entire CPB public broadcasting budget for roughly the next thousand years. Instead, we’re using it to create a single corporate entity that owns Batman, CNN, SpongeBob SquarePants, Harry Potter, and the Golf Channel simultaneously, which is either the most American thing that has ever happened or proof that we deserve whatever comes next.

I won’t sugarcoat it. It sucks.

But none of this should surprise anyone. Corporate America doesn’t merge companies to improve journalism or storytelling. It merges them to reduce costs, centralize power, and reassure investors who panic anytime quarterly growth slows by half a percentage point. The language executives use is always optimistic — “synergy,” “alignment,” “efficiency” — words that do a lot of heavy lifting in press releases while meaning absolutely nothing to the four hundred people who just found out their jobs were eliminated. David Zaslav, the outgoing WBD CEO, called it “maximizing value for shareholders.” Everybody else calls it Tuesday.

Outside of the obvious entertainment implications — DC superheroes, Harry Potter, Looney Tunes, massive film libraries, cable infrastructure, streaming assets, even Warner Bros. Discovery’s minority stake in AEW wrestling — the real story here isn’t Batman or Bugs Bunny. It’s news. Specifically, it’s what happens to CNN, one of the most recognizable news brands in the world, when it ends up under new ownership during a political moment when the people in power have made no secret of their feelings about unfriendly coverage.

Because if you’re reading this, you’re probably less worried about who owns Superman and more worried about what happens to CNN. And that concern is completely justified. CNN has already spent the past several years trapped in an identity crisis so severe it sometimes feels like the network is hosting an internal debate about whether reality itself should receive equal time with bad-faith arguments. I’ve written repeatedly about how CNN NewsNight has devolved into a nightly exercise in platforming professional contrarians — most notably Scott Jennings, a man who has somehow turned the ability to say factually incorrect things with enormous confidence into a lucrative television career.

Jake Tapper, meanwhile, has increasingly treated political coverage like a theatrical performance where maintaining access matters more than telling the truth. Tapper, you may recall, wrote a book about Biden’s cognitive decline while still employed as a CNN anchor, then promoted it on Megyn Kelly’s show — Megyn “Santa Is Definitively White” Kelly — and, as a bonus, announced on that same appearance that he had personally apologized to Lara Trump. For implying the Trumps might be problematic. Jake Tapper apologized to Lara Trump. Read that sentence again. Take as long as you need.

The network’s obsession with “both sides” optics has produced television that often feels less like journalism and more like a panel discussion moderated by human resources, in which one panelist has sources and facts and the other has vibes and a Twitter following, and both are treated as equally valid inputs into the democratic conversation. And as frustrating as that has been, here’s the uncomfortable truth: it can absolutely get worse. Much worse. And we may be about to find out exactly how much worse it can get.

CBS News didn’t suddenly wake up one morning and decide to drift toward conservative appeasement. Institutional decline rarely works that way — it’s rarely dramatic, and it almost never announces itself. It happens gradually, through executive hires framed as balance, through editorial recalibrations justified as audience outreach, through legal departments quietly reminding producers which fights are worth having and which ones might complicate regulatory approval processes. It looks like caution. It feels like professionalism. It is, in practice, a slow surrender.

Enter Bari Weiss — the patron saint of corporate media’s desperate attempt to appear intellectually rebellious while remaining structurally safe. Weiss has built an entire brand around convincing powerful institutions that criticism from the right can be neutralized by hiring someone whose professional identity revolves around reassuring conservatives that elite media finally understands their grievances. She presents herself as a brave heterodox thinker willing to say what others won’t. In practice, she reliably lands in the same ideological places, on the same predictable issues, with the consistency of a GPS that only knows one destination.

Her influence at CBS has coincided with exactly the kind of internal turbulence you’d expect when editorial culture starts shifting underneath people who were hired under a different set of assumptions — producers quietly reassessing which pitches are worth making, reporters calibrating how far to push on stories that might generate the wrong kind of attention from the wrong kind of people. Nobody sends a memo. Nobody has to. The result at CBS wasn’t ideological diversity. It was institutional anxiety cosplaying as courage, and the people who paid the price for it weren’t the executives who made the call.

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Anderson Cooper stepping away from 60 Minutes wasn’t necessarily a dramatic signal on its own. People make decisions about their lives for complicated personal reasons that don’t require a media conspiracy theory. But timing matters in journalism, and institutional departures rarely happen in complete isolation from organizational turbulence. When one of the few journalists capable of holding both CNN and 60 Minutes together decides it’s time to exit one of those rooms, it’s not unreasonable to notice the room he left and ask what changed in it. 60 Minutes is not just a television program. It’s an institution that takes decades to build credibility and roughly eighteen months of ownership pressure to quietly hollow out.

When companies facing federal oversight begin elevating voices marketed as “reasonable critics of liberal media,” it rarely signals genuine editorial independence. It signals anticipation. Executives preparing for regulatory scrutiny often attempt preemptive credibility with the political actors who control merger approvals and broadcast licenses. They don’t need to be told explicitly. They watch what happens to companies that don’t play ball, and they adjust accordingly. That context matters enormously when Brendan Carr — Trump’s FCC chair, who has been openly enthusiastic about using regulatory leverage as a tool against media organizations he considers ideologically problematic — is the person whose agency gets to decide whether this $110 billion deal moves forward. Regulatory pressure doesn’t require explicit threats. The mere possibility of delay, investigation, or license complications is often enough to reshape corporate behavior long before any official action occurs. You don’t have to say “nice broadcast license you have there.” The message arrives without anyone saying it out loud.

Which brings us to one of the strangest developments in this entire saga: Netflix walking away from the Warner Bros. Discovery deal shortly after CEO Ted Sarandos — one of the most powerful executives in modern entertainment, a man who turned Netflix from a DVD mail service into the dominant global entertainment platform — held a White House meeting connected to the acquisition discussions. When someone at that level makes a quiet trip to Washington during an active megamerger negotiation, people notice. Soon afterward, Netflix exits the race. Paramount advances. Maybe coincidence. Maybe timing. Maybe the increasingly obvious reality that large media mergers now unfold under political gravity fields that simply didn’t exist a decade ago.

And here’s something worth saying plainly that most coverage of this story glosses right over: the political money tells you something real about these two ecosystems. According to data tracked by OpenSecrets, Netflix employees directed nearly 100% of their tracked political donations — roughly $4.4 million — toward Democratic candidates in 2024. Reed Hastings, Netflix’s co-founder and executive chairman, personally contributed $7 million to a pro-Harris super PAC and has donated more than $20 million to Democratic causes over the years with his wife. The man is not hiding his politics. He’s practically monogramming them on his luggage.

Now compare that to the ByteDance side of the ledger. Jeff Yass — the billionaire whose firm Susquehanna holds roughly a 15% stake in ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company — contributed more than $96 million to Republican causes in the 2024 cycle alone, making him one of the single largest donors to conservative politics in modern American history. To put that in perspective: Netflix’s entire workforce leaned Democratic to the tune of $4.4 million. One man on the ByteDance investor side dropped $96 million in the other direction. These are not equivalent political ecosystems. They are not even in the same zip code of equivalent.

Now, I want to be careful here, because corporate political donations don’t automatically dictate editorial outcomes — corporations pursue profit, not ideology, and they will bend whichever direction the regulatory wind is blowing regardless of what their employees give to ActBlue. But ownership networks shape incentives, and incentives shape editorial climates over time — quietly, incrementally, and almost never in ways that make the front page until you look back three years later and realize the coverage changed and you can’t quite remember when. The choice between a Netflix-adjacent media world and a ByteDance-adjacent one was never just about streaming infrastructure. It was also, in a very concrete and financially documented way, about whose political worldview sits closest to the center of gravity when someone has to make a decision that the lawyers can’t make for them.

Either way, the message to corporate media executives is unmistakable: survival increasingly depends on staying in the good graces of political authority. And that is not a message that is compatible with the kind of journalism a functioning democracy actually requires.

After all that doom and gloom, you might reasonably be wondering whether there’s any good news. There is. It’s already happening, and it has been happening for several years, quietly and without nearly enough credit: independent media has begun filling the vacuum that corporate consolidation keeps creating. In entertainment, creators are bypassing traditional studio systems entirely. Keke Palmer’s launch of KeyTV is a perfect example — a creator-driven digital platform designed to reach audiences directly without waiting for institutional approval or surviving three rounds of notes from an executive whose primary concern is whether the content tests well in suburban Ohio. The significance isn’t celebrity branding. It’s ownership. Palmer owns her platform. That is a fundamentally different relationship with an audience than “we will continue to employ you as long as the ratings hold and nobody in Washington calls to complain.”

The same transformation is happening in news, and it is not a small thing. Don Lemon didn’t disappear after CNN showed him the door; he rebuilt independently and found an audience that followed him there. Jim Acosta moved directly into audience-supported journalism through Substack, where he isn’t required to share a panel with anyone whose job description is “say the opposite of the truth with confidence.” Roland Martin didn’t wait for corporate media to decide Black audiences deserved serious coverage — he built Black Star Network himself, years before most legacy executives were willing to acknowledge the market existed, let alone serve it.

That kind of infrastructure building matters because it creates an ecosystem that doesn’t depend on the goodwill of any single corporate parent, any single merger approval, or any single FCC chair with a political axe to grind. Joy Reid, Katie Phang, and a growing list of others are discovering that independence offers something corporate media increasingly cannot provide: the freedom to report without first calculating which fights might complicate the next merger approval or make the wrong advertiser uncomfortable. These aren’t consolation prizes for people who got pushed out. They are the beginning of a parallel media infrastructure built on different incentives — and those different incentives are exactly what makes it valuable.

And audiences followed them. This is the part corporate executives consistently misunderstand about what’s happening to media trust. Public confidence in journalism isn’t collapsing because people suddenly hate reporters. It collapses when audiences — who are, on average, smarter and more media-literate than most executives give them credit for — sense that news organizations are performing caution around power rather than challenging it. Viewers recognize institutional fear faster than executives realize. And when they recognize it, credibility goes with it.

I know many of my readers have friends or family members who still rely exclusively on corporate television news — people who have the evening news on as background noise the way other people have a fish tank, and who would look at you with genuine confusion if you suggested getting their information from a Substack written by a political science professor from Fullerton, California. And yes, this is the moment where I suggest getting them to subscribe to Lincoln Square or my Substack. I’m only half kidding. Because the broader point is serious: media ecosystems change when audiences change habits. They don’t change when executives have epiphanies. They change when viewers leave.

Whatever is unfolding right now — aggressive enforcement actions, regulatory favoritism, consolidation deals navigated under friendly oversight — none of it exists beyond the reach of democratic correction. Antitrust enforcement can block or unwind mergers. Courts can halt unlawful executive actions through injunctions, and they already have, repeatedly. Administrative rules imposed without proper procedure can be struck down under federal law. Agency leadership shifts with elections, and enforcement priorities shift with them, sometimes almost overnight. These mechanisms aren’t theoretical. They’re built into the architecture of American governance precisely because concentrations of power — in industry, in government, in media — eventually produce enough dysfunction to trigger correction. The question is always timing and participation.

We can loosen the corporate grip on media. We can restore regulatory independence. We can challenge consolidation that prioritizes shareholder comfort over democratic accountability. We can support independent journalism financially, which is the most direct and immediate thing any individual reader can actually do right now. But none of that happens automatically. It happens when enough people show up — in elections, in subscription decisions, in the simple daily act of refusing to treat obviously false things as though they deserve equal time with the truth.

CNN may very well emerge from this merger weaker, safer, flatter, and more cautious. Corporate executives may continue mistaking neutrality theater for credibility, confusing the performance of fairness with the practice of journalism, and genuinely believing that a panel featuring one person with facts and one person with grievances constitutes a balanced exchange of ideas. Political pressure will continue reshaping legacy newsrooms in ways that frustrate anyone who still believes journalism should comfort the afflicted rather than accommodate the powerful. And the people inside those newsrooms — the producers, the reporters, the researchers who still show up every day trying to do it right — will continue doing quiet, invisible work to hold the line against institutional cowardice that their bosses will later take credit for surviving. That part of the story almost never makes it into the coverage. But it’s real, and it matters.

What’s also real is that the audience for honest, direct, unfiltered journalism is not shrinking. It is migrating. The people who used to watch the six o’clock news are finding their way to podcasts and newsletters and independent outlets, not because they gave up on information but because they haven’t. They still want to know what’s happening. They just want to know it from someone who isn’t simultaneously calculating whether the answer will upset an advertiser, complicate a merger, or generate a phone call from a congressman who controls a broadcast license. That’s not an unreasonable thing to want from journalism. It’s actually the minimum. And the fact that independent media is gaining ground by simply meeting that minimum tells you everything you need to know about how far legacy institutions have drifted from it.

But journalism itself does not live inside corporate headquarters. It never did. It lives wherever people are willing to ask hard questions without first checking whether the answer will complicate the quarterly earnings call. It lives in the independent outlets being built right now, by the journalists who left, and by the audiences who found them.

The mergers might reshape networks. They might hollow out brands that took generations to build. They might produce a media landscape that looks, from the outside, like journalism while functioning, on the inside, like a very expensive public relations operation on behalf of whoever controls the regulatory environment this particular year.

But they don’t get to decide whether the public stays informed. That part is still up to us.

And if you’re reading this, you already made your choice.

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