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This past Thursday night, amid swirling speculation about the Brown University gunman, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins took to social media, highlighting the uncertainty and pointing viewers to her channel's 9pm newscast.

Although the network is hardly a perfect news source, her message seemed accurate for a lot of people. It is one of the organizations where you can find fact-based and generally reliable reporting – especially during fast-moving events such as the one developing near a New Hampshire storage facility.

A Vulnerable Position Amid a Business Tug-of-War

However CNN, now middle-aged, finds itself in a precarious position as two giant media corporations vie for ownership of its parent company, Warner Bros Discovery.

No matter the result, the fate of CNN has been drawn into a high-risk game of mergers and acquisitions, rather than as a question of what benefits the news-consuming public.

“This represents another instance of the profound systemic issues with origins in many years of regulatory actions,” said Victor Pickard, writer of “Democracy Without Journalism?” and a media policy professor at the Pennsylvania University.

The debate about the future owner of Warner Bros Discovery – is it going to be Netflix or Paramount Skydance? – overlooks a larger point.

“It gets presented as a corporate drama with powerful individuals as the main characters, but there is scant discussion of the public interest,” Pickard explained.

A Further Factor: The Former President

The CNN scenario is made more complex by Donald Trump’s views about a network he has frequently denounced as perhaps his primary “fake news” foe.

Think back to the shouts of “CNN sucks!” at the president’s rallies, his administration's retaliatory suspension of reporter Jim Acosta’s press credentials, or his tense exchanges with Collins in White House briefings.

Trump now says that CNN needs new ownership. You can read that as ownership that will protect him from journalistic oversight. That is a factor in why he seems to come down on the side of Paramount Skydance, which has made a unsolicited offer.

Trump has reason to prefer that suitor more. For one thing, it is controlled by David Ellison, son of the pro-Trump Larry Ellison, one of the world’s richest people.

The company, parent of CBS News, also recently installed the right-leaning Bari Weiss, famous for her “anti-woke” beliefs, as the top editor of that venerable news network.

A Future of Further Instability

Notably, if Netflix prevails, CNN and other cable outlets would first be carved out into a independent unit. Such a move could be a relief to many at the network, but it’s far from a safe harbor. That arrangement could pave the way for CNN for another sale. The cycle continues.

According to Timothy Wu, much of this is illegal, anyway. The prominent critic of big tech’s dominance stated that competition laws should disallow both deals.

“Both acquisition attempts would be detrimental to the country, and both should be challenged by anti-trust authorities,” Wu recently wrote.

The Core Challenge and a Path Forward

Whatever happens with this particular battle, the underlying crisis endures.

“The present media landscape is a highly structure that undermines democracy, but we ought not succumb to a sense of powerlessness,” Pickard noted. Policy decisions – from the 1930s and 1940s – helped to foster this overly commercial monster, and revised policy decisions can tackle it.

Will that happen in an era where the Federal Communications Commission chair will not confirm that the agency is independent? Change is highly improbable now, but that is not to say it will be impossible forever.

Measures that bolster independent news organizations, bolster local journalism, subsidize public media, and prohibit the concentration of media power in a handful of hands are within reach – they are vital for a robust democracy.

When it comes to media ownership, size does not equal quality. And news organizations such as CNN must not be pawns in the most recent corporate chess match.