Should Paramount Skydance's pending acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery pass government approval, CEO David Ellison says he will push to restore CNN's credibility.
"Really, who we want to talk to is the 70% of Americans — and really around the world — that identify as center left, as center right," Ellison told CNBC this week. "And we want to be in the truth business. We want to be in the trust business. And that’s not going to change."
The acquisition would give Ellison’s Paramount control of CNN and CBS News, the latter of which he tasked Bari Weiss to oversee in late 2025.
Ellison and Weiss are hardly the MAGA sycophants the legacy mediaportray them as. But they are certainly less liberal and less zealous than CNN is today. And thus CNN’s future is one of, if not the biggest stories in media in 2026.
While most of the focus has been on CNN’s potential editorial direction under Paramount, reportedly with Weiss playing a role, the bigger question is whether a rebound is even viable.
Last month, OutKickpublished an analysisshowing that CNN lost more than 40 percent of its total day and primetime audiences from 2017 to 2025. As a result, the network is far less profitable. In a January SEC filing, parent company Warner Bros. Discovery said it expects CNN to generate $600 million in profit, down from $1 billion in 2016.
Donald Trump walks off the stage during a break in the CNN Presidential Debate at the CNN Studios on June 27, 2024, in Atlanta, Georgia. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Perhaps most concerning is the lack of increased interest during heavy news cycles. I began covering cable news ratings in 2020. While CNN trailed Fox News and MS Now (then known as MSNBC) it regularly saw the largest spikes during major breaking news periods, whether political turmoil, military action, scandals, or natural disasters. That suggested casual viewers, the normies who do not typically watch cable news, still defaulted to CNN as their trusted source, if not reflexively. That is no longer the case.
In February, CNN averaged just 807,000 viewers in primetime, compared to 1,136,000 for MS Now and 2,612,000 for Fox News. Measuring total day viewership, CNN drew 564,000 viewers, behind MS Now’s 708,000 and Fox News’ 1,718,000.
Here is how the networks fared last Saturday after the U.S. and Israeli military strikes on Iran:
Source: The Latest & Most Breaking News With OutKick
