Now that the long-awaited AT&T-Time Warner merger is complete – with the company now known as WarnerMedia – the new CEO John Stankey is holding town halls in New York and Atlanta to talk about the newly formed company, and to field questions and concerns from staffers.
Slate’s Felix Salmon wrote about the Turner town hall in Atlanta, noting that while Stankey seems to be saying all of the right things on TV – including a recent appearance on New Day – his definition of editorial independence should have CNN journalists “worried”, particularly based off an answer to a question from Anderson Cooper (who moderated the Atlanta town hall last Friday). Salmon cited the tweets below from the New York Times’s Edmund Lee:
When Cooper asked how he defines editorial independence, he said:
Advertisement“There’s a 2 way street on commitment to editorial independence. The obvious one…is folks like me in management don’t come and visit you on a particular day if you say something I don’t particularly agree with
— Edmund Lee (@edmundlee) June 22, 2018
“or maybe was not in the best interests of AT&T, and that’s a hard, ironclad commitment that that’s not going to happen.
— Edmund Lee (@edmundlee) June 22, 2018
“The second part of editorial independence is that freedom is earned by people who work hard and report factually and do their jobs well and that’s what CNN does.
— Edmund Lee (@edmundlee) June 22, 2018
“So when the reporter does their job the right way, does it factually, does it fairly, management’s job it to ensure they can do that in the fashion they want. I believe very strongly in this.”
— Edmund Lee (@edmundlee) June 22, 2018
Salmon writes: “Stankey sounds like he’s given himself the job of determining whether any given piece of reporting is fair and factual. And once he has that job, he’s going to find it very hard to shirk the responsibility: If the president of the United States, to take one obvious example, complains to Stankey that a broadcast was unfair and not factual, then it’s going to be hard for Stankey to say that it’s not up to him to make that determination . . . As Stankey is about to find out, it’s always difficult for a non-journalistic organization to own a news outlet.”
But Vanity Fair’s Joe Pompeo writes that “it sounds like there weren’t any fire alarms going off inside CNN’s Atlanta and New York newsrooms” following Stankey’s town hall appearances, and CNN ceo Jeff Zucker “wasn’t concerned about the remark in question.” One CNN staffer recalled Zucker saying, “Stankey did a terrific job. He gets journalism.”
Another told Pompeo about Zucker, “Jeff staying was a giant sigh of relief. If that were to change, then I think everybody’s attitudes would change. I think a lot of this is about what happens with Jeff and John over the next few months.”
But according to a source, Pompeo writes, “What everybody wants to know is: how’s he gonna react when there’s a scandal? How’s he gonna react when Trump hits us really hard hard? When somebody screws up? Hopefully, it’ll be a while before we have to find out.”
Additionally, CNN’s Brian Stelter wrote about his new employer in his Reliable Sources newsletter on Friday:
