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Late Thursday, as rumors swirled about an incident at Brown University, the network's Kaitlan Collins posted on social media, pointing out the conflicting information and guiding the public to her channel's 9pm newscast.

While the network is hardly a perfect news source, her message rang true for a lot of people. It is one of the outlets where you can find reality-based and mostly trustworthy reporting – especially during crises such as the one taking place in the vicinity of a New Hampshire storage facility.

A Precarious State During a Business Struggle

However the news network, now four and a half decades old, finds itself in a precarious situation as two giant media conglomerates vie for ownership of its corporate owner, Warner Bros Discovery.

Whatever the outcome, the future of CNN has turned into a high-risk game of mergers and acquisitions, rather than as a question of what helps the news-consuming public.

“This is yet another example of the profound systemic issues with origins in decades of regulatory actions,” said Victor Pickard, author of “Democracy Without Journalism?” and a professor of media policy at the University of Pennsylvania.

The conjecture about who will own Warner Bros Discovery – could it be Netflix or Paramount Skydance? – fails to grasp a more important point.

“It is often framed as a corporate drama with key players as the central actors, but there is hardly any discussion of the societal benefit,” Pickard said.

The Complicating Element: The Former President

The network's predicament is further muddied by Donald Trump’s views about a network he has consistently labeled as perhaps his main “fake news” adversary.

Think back to the cries of “CNN sucks!” at the president’s rallies, his administration’s punitive suspension of reporter Jim Acosta’s press credentials, or his clashes with Collins in press briefings.

Trump now asserts that the network requires new ownership. You can read that as ownership that will shield him from negative coverage and examination. That is one reason why he appears to support Paramount Skydance, which has made a aggressive takeover attempt.

He has grounds to favor that company more. For one thing, it is controlled by David Ellison, son of the pro-Trump Larry Ellison, one of the world’s richest people.

The company, parent of CBS News, also recently installed the right-leaning Bari Weiss, known for her “anti-woke” beliefs, as the editor-in-chief of that historic news network.

A Future of Further Uncertainty

Significantly, if Netflix is successful, CNN and other cable outlets would first be spun off into a standalone company. This might be a relief to many at the network, but it’s far from a safe harbor. That arrangement could position CNN for a future sale. It never ends.

According to Timothy Wu, a great deal of this is illegal, anyway. The prominent critic of big tech’s dominance wrote recently that anti-trust laws should disallow both deals.

“Each proposed deal would be bad for the country, and both should be contested by the government,” Wu recently wrote.

The Core Problem and a Potential Solution

Whatever happens in this situation, the bigger problem endures.

“What we have now is a very system hostile to democracy, but we shouldn’t give in to a sense of powerlessness,” Pickard noted. Policy decisions – dating back to the 1930s and 1940s – helped to build this profit-obsessed monster, and new policy decisions can address it.

Can reform occur in an era where the Federal Communications Commission chair refuses to acknowledge that the agency is independent? Overhaul is a distant prospect now, but that is not to say it will never happen.

Measures that bolster independent news organizations, aid local journalism, finance public media, and outlaw the concentration of media power in too few hands are not only possible – they are essential for a functioning democracy.

In the world of media ownership, larger is not superior. And news organizations like CNN shouldn’t be pieces in the latest merger game.