{"id":160184,"date":"2025-09-16T05:52:09","date_gmt":"2025-09-16T05:52:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/160184\/"},"modified":"2025-09-16T05:52:09","modified_gmt":"2025-09-16T05:52:09","slug":"dan-rather-warns-against-ellisons-acquiring-cnn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/160184\/","title":{"rendered":"Dan Rather Warns Against Ellisons Acquiring CNN"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tLongtime CBS Evening News anchor and regular 60 Minutes<\/a> contributor Dan Rather<\/a> does not like what he sees happening at \u2014 and to \u2014 his old employer.<\/p>\n

\n\tBefore David Ellison<\/a> bought Paramount<\/a> Global and merged it with his Skydance<\/a> (forming Paramount Skydance), there were \u201cseveral instances in which the previous owners \u2026 tried to sort of dictate what kind of news comes on<\/a> \u2014 even on 60 Minutes,\u201d Rather told Andy Cohen on Cohen\u2019s SiriusXM radio show<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n\tInside of CBS News, 60 Minutes is considered a sacred vehicle for journalism. Or rather, it was considered that.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut then Shari Redstone, who previously controlled Paramount through her family\u2019s National Amusements, began to apply pressure to the editorial slant inside of CBS News and its famed newsmagazine program. Basically, the program needed to back off Trump (and the network had to settle a lawsuit<\/a> with him). In protest, Bill Owens resigned<\/a> as executive producer of 60 Minutes, and Wendy McMahon exited<\/a> as head of CBS News.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Ellisons, both David and his Oracle CEO father Larry, who helped finance the $8 billion Skydance-Paramount merger, like Redstone, have shown support for Trump in the past; both parties needed the president to make the merger go through.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt is a particularly tough time for anybody working at CBS News,\u201d Rather said. \u201cI still know many people there, and I\u2019m not ashamed to say that my heart is still there and probably always will be in a way, but this is an extremely tough time for them, and it\u2019ll be interesting to see how much, if any, pressure the new owners put on them to change the coverage to be more pro-Trump than to being independent news.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tRather continued that he doesn\u2019t want to be \u201cunfair to the Ellisons,\u201d but then he issued this warning: \u201cI think if they were to buy CNN<\/a>, it would change CNN forever and it might be another very serious wound to CBS News.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tLast week, the Wall Street Journal reported that David Ellison and his billionaire dad are preparing a bid<\/a> for all of Warner Bros. Discovery<\/a>, which owns CNN.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI do think \u2026 without preaching about it, but that we, all of us, all the Americans, have to be concerned about the consolidation of huge billionaires getting control of nearly all of the major news outlets,\u201d Rather said. \u201cThis is not healthy for the country, and it is something to worry about. \u2026 It\u2019s pretty hard to be optimistic about the possibilities of the Ellisons buying CNN.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tRather left CBS Evening News in 2005 amid a controversy surrounding his reportage of unauthenticated documents about George W. Bush\u2019s Vietnam War-time service in the National Guard. He was let go from CBS the following year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Longtime CBS Evening News anchor and regular 60 Minutes contributor Dan Rather does not like what he sees…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":160185,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[10673,28,15284,97477,18205,69141,4208,3094,10343],"class_list":["post-160184","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-60-minutes","tag-business","tag-cnn","tag-dan-rather","tag-david-ellison","tag-larry-ellison","tag-paramount","tag-skydance","tag-warner-bros-discovery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160184","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=160184"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160184\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/160185"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=160184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=160184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=160184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}