When the Media Eats Itself: Watching CNN Get Swallowed Whole
There’s something darkly poetic about watching Jake Tapper announce live on air that his network’s parent company is being bought out, telling everyone in the studio that it “affects everybody I’m looking at right now.” It’s like watching the Titanic’s captain announce over the PA system that yes, that scraping sound was indeed an iceberg, and no, the lifeboats won’t be necessary because the ship is unsinkable. Except in this case, we all knew the iceberg was there, we watched the ship aim straight for it, and now we’re supposed to act surprised when the water starts rushing in.
The media has been complicit in creating the conditions for its own demise for years now. Back in 2016, CNN and other networks gave Trump wall-to-wall coverage because it was good for ratings. They’d literally cut away from significant news events to show empty podiums waiting for him to speak. The man was a walking engagement algorithm—MAGA supporters wanted to see their emperor, progressives hate-watched in horror, and the advertising dollars rolled in. Nobody seemed to consider that normalizing someone who openly talked about attacking the press might, you know, eventually lead to the press being attacked.
Now Paramount, owned by the Ellison family with their clear political leanings, is buying Warner Bros Discovery, which owns CNN. California’s Attorney General is reportedly contesting it as a violation of antitrust laws, but let’s be honest about what we’re facing here. The Trump administration’s Department of Justice isn’t exactly going to be rushing to block a deal that consolidates more media power in friendly hands. Someone in the discussion threads pointed out that many states have their own antitrust laws that they haven’t exercised in years because the feds usually handle it. Maybe it’s time they dusted those off.
What really gets under my skin, though, is the broader context that emerged in these discussions. People started talking about the surveillance state, about how everything we do online has been recorded since the 90s, about how AI is making it easier than ever to sort and analyze that mountain of data. One person made a chilling point: governments have been sitting on enormous amounts of data about individuals for years, but they never had the processing power to track everyone simultaneously. Now, with AI, they can. Real-time surveillance of entire populations, automated alerts for anything deemed “hostile,” and yes, there will be false positives, but when has collateral damage ever stopped anyone with power?
This is where my DevOps brain kicks in and I start thinking about the infrastructure behind all this. The data centres being built, the processing power being deployed, the energy consumption—it’s staggering. We’re speedrunning toward a surveillance dystopia powered by technology that we’re told will “revolutionize work and make society better.” Meanwhile, the same technology is being used to consolidate control, suppress dissent, and monetize every aspect of our lives.
The thing is, CNN’s average viewer is 70 years old. Their cable viewership is around 850,000 people, with only 100,000 in that coveted 20-55 demographic. In a world where YouTube has 200 million daily active users and TikTok has over a billion, CNN is barely a rounding error. If they’d spent the last 15-20 years actually building an audience among younger generations instead of chasing short-term ratings with Trump spectacle, maybe they wouldn’t be in this position. Maybe they’d have a loyal, engaged audience young enough to actually fight this consolidation rather than waiting for bingo night at the retirement home.
But they didn’t. They chose the easy money, the rage-bait, the both-sides-ism that treated fascism as just another political viewpoint worth debating. They sanewashed Trump’s ramblings, they spent more time covering his empty podiums than Bernie Sanders’ actual campaign rallies, and they wonder why nobody trusts them anymore.
Here in Melbourne, we’ve watched the Murdoch empire dominate Australian media for decades, so this feels grimly familiar. The difference is that at least we still have the ABC, despite constant attacks and underfunding. The Americans are watching their entire media landscape get carved up by tech billionaires and oligarchs in real-time, and the people who are supposed to sound the alarm are the same ones who helped build the bonfire.
The most frustrating part? It didn’t have to be this way. Democrats had Trump dead to rights—twice impeached, mountains of evidence, January 6th televised in real time, fake elector schemes documented, classified documents in his bathroom. Any competent prosecutor with that portfolio should have had him convicted before he could run again. But they slow-walked it. They worried about norms and institutions. They treated an existential threat like a faculty senate dispute. They had leverage and chose lectures. They had urgency and chose timelines.
So yes, this media consolidation is terrifying. Yes, it represents a massive threat to what remains of independent journalism in America. Yes, the surveillance infrastructure being built around us all should keep us up at night. But let’s not pretend we didn’t see this coming. The people in power—whether in politics or media—made choices that led directly here. They valued short-term profits and procedural niceties over long-term survival.
Now we’re left hoping that state attorneys general can somehow stop mergers that the federal government actively wants to happen, while the surveillance state watches everything we do and AI makes it trivial to process it all. Jake Tapper can write all the books he wants about this (and I’m sure he will), but the time to act was years ago. The question now is whether anyone has the spine to actually fight back, or if we’re all just going to watch the slow-motion collapse while scrolling through our feeds.
I’d say I need another latte to deal with this, but honestly, the caffeine isn’t helping the anxiety anymore.