An Editorial Board Will Not Save CNN, but a Return to Reporting Might

In a matter of weeks Paramount Skydance is expected to close its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery and, with it, to place CBS News and CNN under a single corporate roof, at which point David Ellison will preside over the largest television news combination in the country. Twelve state attorneys general, having spent months threatening to unwind the merger on the theory that one owner of two newsrooms was itself a threat to the republic, settled instead for a consolation prize that reads like a term sheet written by people who have never closed a newscast.

A five-person “Editorial Independence Board” has been announced. It will be charged with drafting “News Editorial Principles,” with refereeing disputes between journalists and management over alleged bias, and with monitoring “ethical journalism” and independence from owners and shareholders. The board members must have practiced journalism for at least a decade; no more than two may be affiliated with the same political party; officers, directors, and shareholders of the combined company are barred from serving; Ellison’s board appoints them within 180 days of closing; they serve three-year terms and may be removed only for cause; and they report upward through a chief compliance officer.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta has described the arrangement as a mechanism to “ensure independent, objective, fact-based reporting,” while Connecticut’s attorney general, who preferred that the newsrooms be sold outright, has treated the board as the lesser evil. Media-law professors, with the reflex that now greets every corporate ethics panel, have already reached for the word “toothless.” A board appointed by Ellison’s own directors is not a priesthood, and it is not a substitute for an editor. It is a settlement exhibit, useful to attorneys general who needed a press release and to a buyer who needed the deal to close. If the newsrooms intend to remain congregations of the same sermon, five carefully balanced résumés will not stop them; if they intend to stop being congregations, they do not need five résumés so much as they need people in the chair who treat a disputed fact as a professional problem rather than as a jersey to be defended.

That, and not the consent decree, is the only interesting development in the story, and it began before the states arrived with their briefcases. Ellison acquired Paramount, installed Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News, and said aloud what the industry had spent a decade treating as a kind of secular heresy: that a national audience still wants reporting that is balanced and fact-based, and that CBS ought to be the place such an audience can find it. The notes to staff spoke of truth, understanding, and the possibility of argument across party lines. The old guard answered with the language of mutiny, with high-profile firings, and with lectures about “eroded trust,” as though trust had not already departed during years of loaded chyrons, anonymous-source pile-ons, and the polite fiction that every public controversy contained only one moral adult.

Weiss has been awkward inside a television building she did not grow up in, and the execution has at times been as loud as the theory; Ellison has remained loyal to the wager nonetheless. The wager is not that CBS should become talk radio. The wager is that the network forgot, for a long stretch, how to look like a reporter.

CNN is the harder case, which is precisely why the shared roof matters. The network that once owned breaking news now inhabits the ratings basement of its own construction, drifting in ordinary weeks around a few hundred thousand viewers and posting primetime numbers that are a fraction of Fox’s and a memory of the era when people turned to CNN to learn what had happened. Year-over-year comparisons bounce with the news cycle; the longer line does not. Viewers did not misplace the remote so much as they lost the habit of believing the voice on the other end of it. A merger will not restore that habit, and neither will a board created to satisfy a multistate settlement. Placing CNN inside a company that is at least willing to say that verification still outranks narrative might.

The Hollywood Reporter’s account of the panel is useful precisely because it is modest. The board is to work from the two outlets’ existing standards and practices, to confine itself to news and editorial content intended for the United States, and to hear disputes about “alleged reporting bias or failure to meet agreed reporting fairness standards.” That last clause is the war in miniature.

For a generation, “fairness” inside these buildings too often meant protecting the approved story from the unapproved voter. A board that recovered the older meaning—two sides where there are two sides, named sources where they exist, a correction where the desk got it wrong—would amount to a cultural shock. A board that treated fairness as a staffing spreadsheet would be CNN with better letterhead. Ellison chooses the five names, and that choice will tell more than the decree. If he fills the seats with people for whom the story is still the resistance, the settlement was theater; if he fills them with people who have actually been made to pay for a bad fact, CNN might remember why anyone watched it in the first place.

The skeptics are not inventing their doubts. News Corp. has long maintained an independence structure of its own, and owners still own. The combined company is not going to let a freelance ethics panel approve the budget or dismiss a prime-time host. Connecticut sought divestiture because it did not trust Ellison, which is a political sentiment rather than an editorial method. Distrust does not tell a producer what to put on the air. The method does: whether a viewer can sit through an hour of CNN without being able to predict the adjective that will attach itself to the proper noun.

California has a parochial reason to care. These remain the pipes that set the weather for coverage of Sacramento, of Hollywood, and of every activist who has confused a chyron with a statute. When those pipes silt up with narrative, the state acquires a permission structure for bad policy and a ready apparatus for smearing anyone who notices. When they carry facts, the same state is forced to argue in public, which is not a conservative victory so much as the minimum condition of having a press at all.

The Editorial Independence Board will not raise CNN from the ashes, but respectability might. If Ellison means what he said when he took hold of CBS News, that the audience is not the adversary and that the job is still to find out what is true, then placing CNN in the same company is the first useful thing that has happened to that network in years. If he does not mean it, the board will convene, the principles will be issued, and the ratings will remain where the propaganda left them: small, loyal, and easy to ignore.