The CNN Sacrifice

Oliver Darcy: “Once upon a time, a chief executive openly signaling that he’d reorient a newsroom to appease a sitting president would be a five-alarm corporate scandal, the sort of fire that would send the company’s public relations teams sprinting through the hallways to extinguish.”

“Indeed, the notion that Ellison would assure the president that he would overhaul the news network’s editorial posture to be more obedient to him and his administration should be a downright scandal that Paramount would seek to address. As one veteran media executive confided to me, ‘This is Pravda style stuff’—the playbook of Russian oligarchs, not aspiring Hollywood moguls hoping to buy themselves a sprawling entertainment conglomerate that houses an iconic global news network.”