The potential ownership of CBS News and CNN under one corporate owner has generated months of fear, anxiety and loathing at both networks, but the Paramount–Warner Bros. Discovery settlement tries to resolve some of the issues with the establishment of an editorial independence board.
Per the terms of the consent decree reached with a dozen state attorneys general, the board will establish a set of guiding principles based on each network’s policies for “accuracy, independence, fairness and journalistic integrity.” The board will resolve any disputes between CBS News employees, CNN employees and management regarding any alleged violations of the principles. And it will monitor “adherence to ethical journalism as defined by journalism industry best practices and to editorial independence.”
The decree also sets up who can serve on the body, made up of five retired or active journalists who have worked for a minimum of ten years, and who will be appointed by the combined Paramount-WB board. No more than two members may be affiliated with the same political party.
Watch on Deadline
“No member of any government or governmental entity, including federal, state, and local governments, may approve or have approval rights over members appointed to the Editorial Independence Board,” per the decree. Officers, directors or non-journalist employees of Paramount-WB also are restricted from serving on the board, whose members will have terms of three years. Paramount would have 180 days to establish the board.
A separate settlement with the Writers Guild of America includes a provision prohibiting writer layoffs at CBS News broadcast for five years, the guild said.
What the AGs’ consent decree does not do is restrict a combination of CBS News and CNN. Nor does it give the board oversight over who runs the respective news entities, something that has been an issue as CEO David Ellison tapped Bari Weiss to lead CBS News after Skydance’s purchase of Paramount last year.
That has raised concerns that the network would be steered rightward, or even in a direction more favorable to Donald Trump. Weiss previously worked as an opinion writer for The New York Times and founded The Free Press, the center-right opinion and analysis site that Paramount also purchased. As part of her changes, she ousted the executive producer of 60 Minutes, while some of the correspondents who were fired have alleged politically motivated interference. Weiss has defended her input to the show, saying it is part of the news process.
As part of commitments to close its purchase of Paramount last year, Skydance said that it would install an ombudsman to take complaints over CBS News. The person they hired, Kenneth Weinstein, was not a journalist but the former head of the rightward Hudson Institute.
Other actions have triggered further suspicions, including that, like CBS News, changes would be afoot for CNN, including appointing Weiss to oversee that network as well. As he sought administration approval to purchase Warner Bros. Discovery this year, Ellison hosted a dinner for the Trump White House tied to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, and he appeared at the president’s State of the Union address.
Seth Stern, chief of advocacy of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, called the consent decree’s oversight board “worthless.”
He said in a statement, “It’s unclear how the attorneys general or courts can constitutionally hold Paramount accountable for the board’s actions or inaction without themselves interfering in content. The attorneys general might be fine with censorship when they’re the ones doing it, but what happens when successors with opposing political views inherit enforcement powers?”
California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who led the state AG lawsuit, told reporters that the independent board would “ensure independent, objective, fact-based reporting at CBS News and at CNN.”
An independent board is unusual, not not unprecedented. A special committee was set up in 2007 to oversee editorial integrity at the Wall Street Journal, as Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp was looking to acquire the news outlet from the Bancroft family trust. The committee, though, does have a say in major newsroom positions, as it has to grant approval for the appointments of an editor-in-chief and editorial page editor. Comcast committed to an ombudsman when it acquired NBC Universal, with concerns over corporate interference in the editorial process. David McCormick, vice president of standards at NBC News, had already been serving as ombudsman in 1993, and expanded his duties to other NBCU news properties.
