Once the would-be governmental watchdogs listened to their copies of “Kenny Rogers Greatest Hits” and folded their much-ballyhooed legal roadblocks standing in the way of David Ellison’s bid to take over Warner Bros. Discovery and fold it into his Paramount Skydance empire, it didn’t take much time to wrap things up and get the mega media deal of 2026 finally done. (Those “ticking fees” had already started piling up at $7 million a day, and the closing leaves the new company carrying some $80 billion in net debt.)
So on this first Tuesday in October, under the newly christened name of “Skydance,” it is time to get down to the business of making this new company actually work.
Yesterday, the answers to questions about just who will run what in the new Skydance corporate food chain were announced. The biggest position was filled by newly named Co-CEO, Ynon Kreiz. Until last Friday, he was the CEO of toymaker Mattel, Inc., where he pushed for the “Barbie” movie to get made. Now he is sharing top leadership responsibilities with David Ellison himself.
The name we were following most closely was Mark Thompson, the Chairman and Editor-in-Chief of CNN, who was reportedly unsure whether the new owner wanted him to stay on. Thompson told his staff on Monday morning he had agreed to stay in his current role. (Though Oliver Darcy of Status reported last night that Thompson and other top CNN execs do not yet have a new contract in hand, and their current deals are set to run out next year.)
Those of us who have been following all the palace intrigue over who would end up leading CNN were also waiting to see what role the leader of Skydance’s other news organization, CBS News, would end up with in the rolled-up mega company. And it turns out that the network’s version of “Gozer the Destructor” in the form of its Editor-in-Chief, Bari Weiss, will apparently continue to do just what she has been doing, with her mission to turn “The House That Murrow Built” into something more palatable to the folks who felt it was just another liberal newsroom. So far, her moves haven’t been a roaring success.
Both Weiss and Thompson report to the Co-CEOs, and it is Kreiz who gets to handle day-to-day management and integration. The CNN and CBS News leadership will soon be holding countless meetings to plan the newly combined world they will all be working in. While we’ve seen that some media pundits have suggested that Skydance will be in no hurry to combine the two news operations, we think that is a lot of wishful thinking that may make their former colleagues feel a little less paranoid in the near term. Nothing in the consent decree reached with the state attorneys general restricts a combination of the two, and Thompson’s own memo to his staff conceded that the specifics of how CNN will operate inside the new company have yet to be finalized.
You see, the promises made in putting together the Warner Bros. and Paramount media empires were that a lot of money would be saved through that favorite term of corporate speak: Achieving Synergies. In plain English, that means combining similar efforts and expenses to save money and put those savings to the bottom line as quickly as possible. Skydance’s target is to find some $6 billion in “run rate synergies” within three years.
The newsgathering infrastructure between CBS and CNN overlaps significantly, from real estate to real people. A plan has to be devised to put the two organizations under the same roof as much as possible. One key example is considering the two networks’ newsroom footprints in New York City. Between CBS’s plant at the Broadcast Center on West 57th Street and CNN’s expansive operation at the Hudson Yards complex, there is room for a significant consolidation. (The people part comes with one wrinkle: the separate settlement with the Writers Guild, according to the guild, prohibits writer layoffs on the CBS News broadcast side for five years.)
We would imagine that the fight over which newsroom absorbs which will, much like when the Ghostbusters confront Gozer in the movie, be epic, even if it takes place mostly behind the scenes. Though with the amount of leaks there are in both organizations, the ugliness will probably end up detailed in various reports along the way.
Thompson may have the larger base, with the existing footprints in NYC and the major Techwood complex in Atlanta. Whether that is enough to override Weiss’s relationship (and political capital) with the Co-CEOs (or at least one of them) is the part worth getting out the popcorn for.
As if that weren’t all enough to keep everyone occupied for some time, there is also the very important challenge of charting the future for both news organizations in the world of digital media.
Neither CNN nor CBS has had massive success turning their legacy news brands into huge digital hits. With audiences for legacy television programming continually declining, becoming leaner and meaner while finding more eyeballs and ad dollars on their digital platforms will quickly come under the microscope. This is an area where CNN, under Thompson, has built something in the aftermath of David Zaslav’s shuttering of the network’s original “big bet” to create a digital winner with CNN+.
Though as a number of reports have noted, Mark Thompson is 69 years old. How much longer he wants to be doing this kind of work—especially if it involves skirmishes over what editorial independence each newsroom will have—may be the most watched element of this seemingly unavoidable turf war. The consent decree does give those skirmishes a referee: a five-journalist Editorial Independence Board that Skydance has 180 days to set up. Its members will be appointed by Skydance’s own board of directors, which David Ellison chairs.
We will spare you the recounting of Bari Weiss’s tumultuous first year at CBS News, which coincidentally is reaching its first anniversary today. The very same day that Skydance began trading on the New York Stock Exchange under its new symbol of SKYD.
Which should remind everyone that when all is said and done, the only thing that will ultimately matter in the upcoming forced marriage of CBS News and CNN is how much money they are contributing towards their parent company’s bottom line. The real Destructor here won’t be Bari Weiss or Mark Thompson. It will be a $6 billion synergy target. That’s the giant marshmallow man that will be stomping its way through everything.
Everything else is just a distraction.
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