The deal has been struck, and the $8.4 billion merger has been approved. Skydance Media will soon be one with Paramount Global, the parent company of CBS. And the folks over at Skydance are promising big changes.
Recently, Skydance Media Chief Executive David Ellison and FCC Chairman Brendan Carr met to discuss the merger. Two days after the meeting, a letter was sent to the Federal Communications Commission summarizing the talks and highlighting the reasons why the business union should go through. Ellison promised that Skydance “will ensure CBS’s editorial decision-making reflects the varied ideological perspectives of American viewers.” Additionally, Carr told CNBC: “President Trump is fundamentally reshaping the media landscape. The media industry across this country needs a course correction."
Time to Overhaul CBS
The conference between Ellison and Carr happened about two weeks after Paramount and CBS settled a lawsuit from President Donald Trump. The president accused CBS’s news program 60 Minutes of editing an interview last year with then-presidential candidate Kamala Harris. Earlier this month, Paramount agreed to pay $16 million, which will reportedly go toward a future presidential library for Trump.
But that is far from the only inappropriate actions for which the news station has been accused. In April, CBS settled a lawsuit with Brian Beneker, a script coordinator for the TV Show SEAL Team. Beneker alleged that “he was repeatedly denied a staff writer job after the implementation of an ‘illegal policy of race and sex balancing.’” He further accused the company of having hiring quotas for “less qualified applicants from certain groups, namely those who identify as minorities, LGBTQ, or women,” the Hollywood Reporter explained.
Last year, CBS came under scrutiny when then-CEO Wendy McMahon chastised anchor Tony Dokoupil, saying he violated the network’s “editorial standards” because he asked difficult questions of anti-Israel author Ta-Nehisi Coates regarding the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack. Those same “standards,” however, were not upheld when it came to anchor Gayle King, who accused a Jewish father of an eight-year-old girl being held hostage by Hamas of playing politics. “But now, this seems to be all about politics. What do you say about that?” King asked. “You know, you have innocent children—Palestinians who are dying, innocent Israeli children who are dying, and no one seems to be able to say enough, stop that.”
According to The Washington Free Beacon, King earns around $10 million a year. She is known “for frolicking on yachts with Barack Obama and praising the Democrat on CBS’s airwaves as a scandal-free and ‘extraordinary’ president,” the outlet explained. “She’s also best friends with Kamala Harris campaign surrogate Oprah Winfrey, who spoke at the Democratic National Convention as King covered the event for CBS and lauded Harris’s ‘unique’ qualifications. She spoke in similarly glowing terms with Georgia’s Democratic gubernational candidate Stacey Abrams, telling her, ‘Everybody knows you’re extremely qualified.’”
An investigation by HonestReporting in 2024 found that one of CBS’s news producers in Gaza, Marwan al-Ghoul, praised terrorists at an official event of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). He was also found to have contacts with terrorists as a member of the Gaza City municipality council. The investigators wrote: “But according to a Fatah official quoted by WAFA, Gaza municipal council members are appointed by Hamas. And according to Reuters, Hamas is the body in charge of paying public sector workers.” HonestReporting opined that al-Ghoul’s position with CBS in Gaza raises “alarming questions regarding the network’s journalistic standards.”
In 2023, CBS News host Margaret Brennan suggested to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) during an interview that Palestinians cannot be anti-Semitic because “all Arabs are Semites,” the Free Beacon wrote. Later, she claimed while interviewing Secretary of State Marco Rubio that the Holocaust occurred because Nazis “weaponized” free speech. A CBS News editorial memo from 2024 reportedly instructed staff to “refrain from calling Jerusalem part of Israel.”
Former 60 Minutes executive producer Bill Owens resigned in April after the edited Kamala Harris interview. Stepping into his place is Tanya Simon, a journalist and producer at 60 Minutes for over two decades. She used to be the show’s executive director. Ms. Simon will be the fourth executive producer for the program since it began in 1968, and the first woman in the role.
A Paramount press release extolls her experience, saying she began her career at CBS News in 1996 as a researcher for 48 HOURS, where she subsequently rose to become an associate producer and producer before moving to 60 Minutes. “Her work has earned virtually every major broadcast honor, including multiple Emmy Awards, the Peabody and the DuPont-Columbia Award.” Ms. Simon holds a BA degree in comparative literature from Columbia University.
Now we just have to wait and see if she will take the show in a direction that won’t cause so much controversy. Meanwhile, Skydance Media has committed CBS to unbiased journalism, a promise that helped sway the FCC to accept the deal. “The new owners of CBS came in and said, ‘It’s time for a change. We’re going to reorient it towards getting rid of bias,’” Carr said. “At the end of the day that’s what made the difference for us.”
