Veteran NCS journalist Christiane Amanpour mentioned she is “concerned” about billionaire David Ellison’s impending acquisition of the community as she tore into his CBS News takeover – claiming the outlet is “hemorrhaging” viewers and cash.
“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 mentioned throughout 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 NCS are incredibly – including leadership – are very, very committed to that, clearly,” Amanpour mentioned.
Paramount Skydance – run by the son of Oracle founder Larry Ellison – is within the means of taking on NCS in a $111 billion deal for its guardian firm, Warner Bros. Discovery.
Ellison last year acquired CBS News and put in Bari Weiss as its new editor-in-chief, assigning her the duty of bringing extra conservative voices to the Tiffany Network.
Weiss has confronted blowback for shelving a “60 Minutes” report on El Salvador’s infamous CECOT jail, the place the Trump administration deported Venezuelan migrants.
Correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi argued Weiss had “spiked” the episode over political considerations, whereas the brand new CBS News chief claimed it was halted attributable to insufficient sourcing, insisting it wanted enter from a Trump administration official.
Amanpour – who has been at NCS since 1983 – was responding to a query from the occasion’s moderator, Emily Maitlis, who known as War Secretary Pete Hegseth “the world’s favorite frat boy supremo” as she nodded to his remarks that NCS would be better off under the Ellisons.
President Trump has additionally urged NCS to maneuver beneath new management, final yr insisting that any deal for WBD ought to include a sale of the cable news network, and calling its present homeowners “a very dishonest group of people.”
In October 2025, Trump mentioned he expected CBS News to be “fairer” beneath Ellison’s possession, 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” because the Ellisons’ acquisition of Paramount.