Status founder Oliver Darcy lost his noodle Thursday night in his newsletter over Netflix backing out of its proposal to purchase Warner Bros. Discovery and its litany of properties that include CNN, paving the way for the bid from David Ellison’s Paramount Skydance (which includes CBS). Darcy argued “CNN staffers have every reason to be worried” and predicted it’ll undergo a “MAGA-fication” akin to what he said has happened at CBS.
Back in reality, though, anyone who’s watched CBS News thus far under Bari Weiss would find that, outside of the first few weeks of Tony Dokoupil’s CBS Evening News, nothing has changed in terms of its tone and tenor. Day after day, it exuded liberal bias.
Darcy said near the top of his piece “CNN Braces for Ellison’s Control” that, chiefly among the changes, the merger “landed like a meteor” at CNN as, along with the reality it “all but guarantees brutal layoffs,” “alarm bells went off as staffers began to panic over the suddenly very real prospect that they could be working for Bari Weiss before the end of the year.”
Darcy dished plenty of anonymous sources looking for fainting couches:
Within minutes of the news crossing the wire, my phone lit up with messages from anxious employees fretting about the future. ‘We are doomed,’ one staffer candidly said. “We are f**ked,” said another. “Everybody is reeling about the obvious things,” said a third.”
“The panic at CNN right now is off the charts,” one insider told Status of the larger mood that had arrested the network.
Of course, he validated their concerns: “CNN staffers have every reason to be worried about the future. What is unfolding is as plain as day. Trump, who has despised CNN more than another other institution throughout his political career, wants to neuter the network. He wants to break it.”
After citing Trump’s past comments about Warner Bros. Discovery being up for sale and claiming he has sources that told him the administration was ebullient Thursday about Paramount Skydance’s triumph, Darcy argued this was a conspiracy all along that “Trump...helped all but deliver CNN into the hands of an ally.”
Democrat strategist and D.C. Huddle co-host Dan Turrentine explained the real reason on X Thursday night:
As I said on @theDChuddle this morning, Paramount put on a master class in DC bully ball influence. I used work with the Larry’s Oracle team when a tech lobbyist. They were incredibly sophisticated and potent. Son clearly learned well. Combined with the deep pockets, it was a…
— dan turrentine (@danturrentine) February 26, 2026
Such nuance doesn’t exist in the DNA and Darcy’s farcical underlings. Instead, we’re left with this statement divorced from reality that Ellison “has already demonstrated a willingness to steer the news outlet under his control, CBS News, into more MAGA-friendly waters” and thus “it’s quite obvious” CNN will suffer the same fate.
Darcy even mourned CNN as it’s currently constructed, pitching yet another mini-fit over the fact that Scott Jennings is still allowed to exist and that CNN isn’t like it was during the snarky, condescending, and venomous days of Jeff Zucker:
To be sure, CNN under WBD has already retreated from the aggressive Zucker-era postured that enraged Trump. The network has platformed bad-faith MAGA pundits like Scott Jennings. It has increasingly aired Trump’s live remarks, filled with lies, at length. And more. That’s not to say CNN has become friendly to Trump—some anchors remain tough as always—but the fire that had once defined the organization has undeniably dimmed. Even that hasn’t satisfied Trump, who demands total loyalty. With Ellison in charge, the changes are likely to be far more dramatic. If staffers didn’t like the Chris Licht era, wait until Weiss is steering the ship.
Reiterating “layoffs also loom” because “CNN will almost certainly be merged in some fashion with CBS News, creating enormous duplication across the two operations” and insinuated some may leave like Anderson Cooper, whom he said “didn’t want to work for Weiss” and thus ducked out of 60 Minutes.
He closed by also mourning the possibility a second CNN streaming platform in CNN All-Access could go the way of CNN+ and reiterating this fear porn that illustrated the disgustingly partisan nature of CNN staffers that they’re more worried about “the MAGA-fication of CNN” than layoffs
But as for his claims about CBS News now being MAGA TV, what he and his fellow media reporters at every outlet from Variety to The Washington Post, The Wrap, etc. seem to ignore is CBS’s recent track record.
We could take this any number of places, such as their multiple contributions to the liberal media’s lynch mob against the U.S. men’s hockey team (here, here, and here) or their negative reactions to President Trump’s State of the Union.
Or we could cite the examples of bias by omission on stories such as pro-democracy newspaperman Jimmy Lai being sent to jail by the Chinese Community Party for what will be a death sentence, the raw sewage bursting into the Potomac, a report the Biden administration spied on Susie Wiles, or that an Obama White House counselor quit her job at Goldman Sachs due to close ties to Jeffrey Epstein.
There are also plenty of rampant ideological fluffing as well, such as softball interviews alongside liberal historian Jon Meacham and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson or fawning over Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance.
On issue after issue, the ideological needle has yet to consistently move toward the center at CBS and there’s nothing Darcy et al can do to claim otherwise.
