Veteran CNN journalist Christiane Amanpour said she is “concerned” about billionaire David Ellison’s impending acquisition of the network as she tore into his CBS News takeover – claiming the outlet is “hemorrhaging” viewers and money.
“Clearly I’m concerned, and I’m not sure how much I’m allowed to say about the corporate thing that’s underway, but I am obviously as a person, as a journalist with a record concerned,” Amanpour said during a journalism summit in London Wednesday.
“I’m concerned based on what’s happened to the other things that he’s taken over already, like CBS News, right?” Amanpour added. “I mean, do I have to list what’s happening there? I mean, hemorrhaging viewers, probably hemorrhaging money, this ideological realignment of CBS and the destruction potentially of ‘60 Minutes.’”
“I would like to think that we would have the very basic, which is editorial independence. I’m hoping for that. I know many of us at CNN are incredibly – including leadership – are very, very committed to that, clearly,” Amanpour said.
Paramount Skydance – run by the son of Oracle founder Larry Ellison – is in the process of taking over CNN in a $111 billion deal for its parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery.
Ellison last year acquired CBS News and installed Bari Weiss as its new editor-in-chief, assigning her the task of bringing more conservative voices to the Tiffany Network.
Weiss has faced blowback for shelving a “60 Minutes” report on El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison, where the Trump administration deported Venezuelan migrants.
Correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi argued Weiss had “spiked” the episode over political concerns, while the new CBS News chief claimed it was halted due to inadequate sourcing, insisting it needed input from a Trump administration official.
Amanpour – who has been at CNN since 1983 – was responding to a question from the event’s moderator, Emily Maitlis, who called War Secretary Pete Hegseth “the world’s favorite frat boy supremo” as she nodded to his remarks that CNN would be better off under the Ellisons.
President Trump has also urged CNN to move under new leadership, last year insisting that any deal for WBD should include a sale of the cable news network, and calling its current owners “a very dishonest group of people.”
In October 2025, Trump said he expected CBS News to be “fairer” under Ellison’s ownership, saying, “Larry Ellison is great, and his son David is great. They’re friends of mine. They’re big supporters of mine.”
Just two months later, Trump claimed that “60 Minutes” “has treated me far worse” since the Ellisons’ acquisition of Paramount.
