Faced with the stalled-out purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount CEO David Ellison attempted damage control on the pages of the New York Times on Tuesday morning.
Ellison, who sought fit to hand control of CBS News to conservative gadfly Bari Weiss despite her lack of experience in running a straight news organization, claimed in his op-ed that he values “journalistic independence” and claimed he would not “put a finger on the scale” if he took control of CNN.
After stating, “I have regularly voted for candidates of both parties; I hold some views that would be called conservative and others that would be called liberal,” the son of billionaire Oracle founder Larry Ellison maintained, “Our journalists will continue to answer to the facts and to all the people they serve — not to any party or cause. These were founding principles for both CNN and CBS News, for legends like Ted Turner and Edward R. Murrow, and it is exactly that kind of independence that has always fueled the greatness of ‘60 Minutes.’"
Despite the legion of problems that have beset CBS News and “60 Minutes” under the stewardship of Weiss, which has led to an exodus of correspondents and viewers alike — and without addressing them — he wrote, “There is much ground to recover. By Gallup’s latest measure, just 28 percent of Americans trust the news — the lowest ever recorded. The temptation is to say the problem lies elsewhere. Our obligation is to look inward and say: We can do better. We are in a moment when Americans trust few institutions, but journalists haven’t always helped their case by refusing to engage with critiques.”
Resistance to the Paramount takeover began last November when Larry Ellison reportedly made clear to President Donald Trump that massive changes at CNN would take place with The Guardian reporting, "Ellison often speaks to connections at the White House but, in at least one of the calls, engaged in a dialogue about possibly axing some of the CNN hosts whom Donald Trump is said to loathe, including Erin Burnett and Brianna Keilar."