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