Kara Swisher Would Cut Ties With CNN If Ellisons Took Control

Kara Swisher Getty Images

Kara Swisher is drawing a line in the sand on working with the Ellisons.

The podcast host, who recently inked a deal for CNN original series Kara Swisher Wants to Live Forever, has indicated that she’ll cut ties with the network if the sale of its parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery, goes through to David Ellison’s Paramount.

“They have no interest in journalism,” Swisher said at a Syracuse University awards ceremony on Monday in Washington, D.C. “I refuse to work an organization that doesn’t respect journalists.”

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Swisher is a CNN contributor who appears on airwaves but her primary platform, On With Kara Swisher, is a podcast distributed by Vox Media. The journalist has built her brand on both getting access to and slinging barbs at the oligarch class. Swisher inked an on-air deal with CNN in 2023 as a panelist and contributor.

“I created my own media organization where I make a lot of money, so I don’t have to. So for me to stand up and say ‘I’m not working for you hacks, I’m just not doing it’ and it’s not worth it to me,” Swisher added, as an aside.

The Syracuse event, the Toner Prizes for Political Reporting, was hosted by Scott MacFarlane, a former CBS News journalist who left the news organization amid the restructuring done by Ellison’s pick for editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss. MacFarlane landed at the left-wing influencer outlet MeidasTouch.

Swisher, at the event, said to MacFarlane about the Oracle tech billionaire, “I’ve spent a lot of time with Larry Ellison, and he’s a terrible person.”

The Ellisons haven’t been Swisher’s only target of late. The journalist also has tried to entice, unsuccessfully, Jeff Bezos to sell The Washington Post as the Amazon billionaire restructures that paper and cut hundreds of journalists in his latest pivot. “The issue is Jeff Bezos doesn’t want to sell it because he sees it as a tool now,” Swisher said in March of last year on ABC’s The View.

CNN, meanwhile, has been running house ads for Kara Swisher Wants to Live Forever, which premieres in April.