Think an ‘independent’ editorial board will protect CNN from political meddling? Think again.
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- Paramount says its Editorial Independence Board will protect CNN from its own political interference, but the board will be utterly toothless
“They’re not worth the paper they’re printed on.”
The speaker was media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, who had accepted a sheaf of guarantees of editorial independence for the revered Times of London and the Sunday Times in order to secure government approval to take over the newspapers in 1981.
Among Murdoch’s undertakings were that the newspapers’ editors would maintain control of their political policies and that the editors would have full independence from Murdoch’s orders about the mix of news and opinion in their pages. Additionally, four “national figures” would be placed on an oversight board to insulate the papers from his interference, and the independent board would have to approve the firing or hiring of the top editor.
This ‘independence board’ has no power, no authority and will likely do nothing to preserve the integrity of CNN or CBS.
— William Grueskin, veteran of Rupert Murdoch’s takeover of the Wall Street Journal
Harold Evans, who served as editor of the Times for a year before Murdoch fired him, reported in his memoirs that “Murdoch broke all those guarantees.” When a top British Cabinet member confronted him with these promises, Murdoch responded with the crisp assessment above.
Those words should be kept in mind as we contemplate the “News Editorial Independence Board” that Paramount boss David Ellison pledged to install to protect CNN and CBS News from his editorial meddling after he takes over Warner Bros. Discovery in a $111-billion deal.
The transaction appears to be likely to happen, now that Ellison settled a lawsuit brought by California and 11 other states to block the deal. Among the promises Ellison made to settle the lawsuit is the creation of the news board.
As my colleagues Stephen Battaglio and Meg James reported last week, media observers and merger opponents doubt that the board will have any real authority. They’re right to be skeptical.
“This ‘independence board’ has no power, no authority and will likely do nothing to preserve the integrity of CNN or CBS,” says William Grueskin, who was deputy managing editor of the Wall Street Journal when Murdoch acquired the newspaper in 2007. Grueskin resigned from the Journal a few months after Murdoch acquired it, and is now on the faculty of the Columbia University School of Journalism.
Grueskin views the board’s creation essentially as a sop to the states to lend credence to their commitment to protect the public interest while approving the merger.
“The fact that all these attorneys general signed onto it,” Grueskin told me by email, “just shows how desperate they were for a beard of respectability to attach to their deal.”
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Murdoch’s takeover of the Times papers established that pattern. The independent oversight board “was a conceit invented by ... the Thatcher Government to allow Mr Murdoch to take over these papers in the first place,” Andrew Neil, a conservative journalist who succeeded Evans as the newspapers’ editor, testified to Parliament in 2008. “It was not really put in place to protect the independence of the editors.”
History tells us that promises by news proprietors to preserve their properties’ independence from their own partisan ideological predilections are typically honored in the breach.
Murdoch is Exhibit A for this reality, but he’s not the only figure to view his promises of hands-off operations as malleable. Nor is independent news reporting the only victim. Meta Platforms established an independent board in 2018 to weigh Facebook users’ complaints about decisions to block certain content. The board was vested with an irrevocable $130-million trust to cover its operations for at least five years. The company agreed in May to provide $13 million to cover the board’s operations through 2028 — a significant reduction from the initial grant in terms of the annual outlay.
Meta is now contemplating shutting down the board entirely after 2028, perhaps turning its deliberations over to an artificial intelligence-powered entity, according to Casey Newton of the tech website Platformer. A Meta spokesman told me by email that “nothing has changed” about the company’s “commitment to funding the Oversight Board,” and cited the $13-million infusion. He didn’t comment on Newton’s report.
A reading of the oversight board provision in the settlement with California and the other states reveals it to be tattered with loopholes.
The board doesn’t even have to be established for six months after the deal is closed — more than enough time for Ellison to place his stamp on CNN. The members will be appointed by the merged company’s board of directors, which obviously places its own independence in doubt from the start.
The board is to comprise five “established journalists,” active or retired, with at least 10 years of experience. The settlement says they are to have “credentials” for at least three years, though it doesn’t define “credentials.”
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Bizarrely, it mandates that no more than two members can be “affiliated with the same political party.” This resembles a requirement traditionally imposed on members of government bodies with an odd number of members, aimed at preventing one or the other party from having supermajority control.
But in this case it seems to anticipate that some of the board members can be political actors with past journalistic experience, who are hardly scarce in American politics. The settlement says that no appointee can be a “member of any government or governmental entity.” But that opens the door to former government officials, whatever their partisan coloration.
A board member can be fired only for “good cause,” meaning “fair and honest reasons, regulated by good faith on the part of the employer, that are not trivial ... or pretextual.”
This is an especially slithery proviso, as we’ve seen in Donald Trump’s effort to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, who ostensibly is legally protected from arbitrary removal except for “cause.” The term is so vulnerable to interpretation that Cook was forced to fight the attempted dismissal in federal court for nearly a year, until the Supreme Court held in June that she and other Fed governors were subject to a “for cause” protection in the Constitution.
That brings us to the board’s actual responsibilities. It is tasked with “establishing a set of guiding editorial principles based on CBS News and CNN’s Standards & Practices” aimed at achieving “accuracy, independence, fairness, and journalistic integrity.” No one could object to any of that, in principle.
The devil lies in how one defines any of those standards; writing as one with several decades of experience in the news biz, I can tell you that every one is subject to interpretation and debate. “Accuracy” and “fairness,” to name two, often are in the eye of the beholder.
The board will be asked to resolve “any disputes between CBS News employees, CNN employees, and management” of the merged company. Grueskin asks, “What does ‘resolving’ even mean? How would a top editor of either news organization be required to do anything this board says?”
It might be instructive to ponder how this putative board might have acted after Ellison acquired CBS in 2025. He immediately began remaking CBS News to suit his ideological affinity with President Trump, in part by installing Bari Weiss, a conservative culture warrior with no experience running a large national news operation, as the editor in chief of CBS News.
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Weiss took aim at “60 Minutes,” a CBS program that had a decades-long record to speaking truth to power. Longtime producers and reporters for the program have asserted that she tried to infuse partisan elements into deeply reported segments already approved by multiple layers of editors and deemed ready for airing. That provoked several to resign.
We don’t know how the board would have “resolved” the vociferous objections voiced by the program’s staff since it hasn’t yet been established.
But the controversies that have erupted over “60 Minutes” just in the last few months give a hint of the disputes the board might face in the future and should raise concerns over how a panel appointed by management and (according to the settlement) required to report to the company’s board of directors will behave.
It’s true, as Grueskin told me, that in the news business as in most other businesses, “you buy the company, you get to do what you want.” News proprietors have often, if not invariably, seen that commercial success depended on subscribers having faith that the information they’re getting is accurate and fair. The creation of independent oversight bodies always suggests that the owners can’t be trusted to do that on their own.
That’s a problem for the public interest. Placing a board over CNN and CBS but making it a cat’s-paw of management, as Ellison proposes, doesn’t look like much of a solution.
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Ideas expressed in the piece
- The column argues that an editorial-independence board is unlikely to protect CNN and CBS News if the owner can shape the newsroom and the board lacks clear authority to overrule management. It invokes Rupert Murdoch’s broken guarantees to the Times newspapers as a warning that owners’ promises of editorial autonomy can prove unreliable.
- It contends that the proposed board’s structure weakens its independence: the merged company’s directors appoint its members, it need not be formed until as long as 180 days after the deal closes, and its powers to investigate or compel action are unclear.[1][4]
- The column also questions whether broad standards such as accuracy and fairness can meaningfully guide decisions about disputed coverage, and argues that the board’s management-facing role may leave journalists without an effective remedy.
- It presents the CBS News changes under David Ellison, including Bari Weiss’s appointment and disputes over “60 Minutes” segments, as reasons to doubt that the board would constrain owner influence.
Different views on the topic
- California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta defended the settlement’s board as a meaningful way to protect CNN and CBS News’ integrity. New York Atty. Gen. Letitia James’s office likewise said the structure would meaningfully help protect editorial independence and would be enforceable under the consent decree.[1][3]
- Supporters can point to specific duties in the agreement: the five-member panel is to set editorial principles, monitor adherence to them, and resolve certain disputes between newsroom employees and management. Members must be experienced journalists, may serve three-year terms, and can be removed only for good cause.[3][4]
- Ellison has also publicly pledged that, under his ownership, journalists would answer to facts and the public rather than a political party or cause.[2]
