If it were, say, just a decade ago, cachet and power would be conferred on Skydance founder and CEO David Ellison, the soon-to-be chief of Paramount and its once-holy grail of TV news, CBS.
Too bad it’s not 10 years ago.
The names Edward R. Murrow, Mike Wallace and Walter Cronkite — the people who built CBS News into the paragon of TV journalism — might come up in casual conversations among old-timers like yours truly, reminiscing about how network news once controlled the political and social agenda.
Or maybe they would surface in a journalism class after CBS’s current management last week settled a weird lawsuit, filed by President Trump, in order to keep in the good graces of the White House and get the Skydance-Paramount merger through his FCC regulators.
But I can guarantee that the 42-year-old Ellison — the son of mega-billionaire Larry Ellison of Oracle fame,