Paramount Skydance Corp.’s plan to install an independent editorial board for CBS News and CNN threatens to bring unwelcome interference in how the organizations cover the news, according to media industry insiders and observers.

The creation of the board is part of a legal settlement that allows Paramount to merge with Warner Bros. Discovery Inc., putting CBS News and CNN under one corporate owner.

The board overseeing the two newsrooms will be chosen by the combined company’s board of directors and include five journalists. It is required to have political balance, with no more than two members affiliated with the same political party. The board is in charge of establishing a set of guiding principles and resolving disputes around these principles between the journalists and management.

The requirement was put in place “to ensure independent, objective fact-based reporting,” according to California State Attorney General Rob Bonta, who led the settlement talks after 12 states and the Writers Guild sued to block the merger on antitrust grounds.

But the additional supervision has added to concerns over censorship and freedom of the press already heightened by President Donald Trump’s decision to block the news outlets MS NOW, CNN and Politico from the White House last week. Adding an editorial board to oversee CBS News and CNN could hurt their independence if executives see the need to kowtow to the administration, according to Carol Marin, a former correspondent at CBS’ 60 Minutes and now a senior faculty fellow at the Center for Journalism Integrity & Excellence at DePaul University.

“I don’t see it in any way as a bulwark against corporate interference,” she said in an interview.

Cory Booker, a Democratic senator from New Jersey, said he’s particularly concerned that the editorial board will be picked by and report to Paramount leadership. Booker said he doesn’t believe the board will stop Trump from influencing the cable news network.

“We have already seen what this administration does to the press — the President just barred reporters from the White House,” Booker said in a statement Tuesday.

For now, CBS is operating along with other outlets in challenging Trump’s ban on CNN. The network didn’t participate in pooled White House video coverage this week, joining Fox, ABC, CNN and NBC.

“The public has a vital interest in receiving accurate, independent information about its government,” the networks said in a joint statement. “No administration should restrict a news organization because it objects to its reporting.”

CNN, Politico and MS NOW have filed suit against the Trump administration, calling his ban unconstitutional. A judge could rule as early as this week.

The editorial board also adds another layer of oversight at CBS News. After Paramount merged with Skydance Media last year, Chief Executive Officer David Ellison named Kenneth Weinstein, the former head of a conservative think tank, as an ombudsman to review complaints of bias within CBS. While Weinstein hasn’t been particularly involved in the CBS newsroom, some staffers are still nervous about what an editorial board might mean, according to a CBS News employee, who asked not to be identified discussing sensitive information.

In addition to creating the editorial board, there’s been speculation that other changes at CNN and CBS will include combining each organization’s operations in London and Los Angeles, the person said. Both outlets have cut staff in recent years. In May, Paramount shut down its CBS News Radio unit.

CBS News referred questions about the new board to Paramount’s corporate office, which didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Despite the talk of combining some operations, the two news organizations are very different from one another, with CBS focused more on domestic issues and general news, while CNN leans into political coverage and has a more global presence. Marin said that the further homogenization of the news industry by putting more outlets under the same ownership could hurt diversity in media coverage.

“CNN and CBS are not always historically of the same mind of the importance of one story over another, or how to cover one story or another,” Marin said. “So how do they put their newsrooms together and not lose their real independence, their individuality, their individual voices?”

Ellison pledged to keep both news organizations independent in March. During the settlement negotiations, he fought to retain CNN rather than divesting the news network, as some politicians had called for.

Staffers at CNN are wary that the merger could result in drastic changes that negatively impact the company and are shaken by what’s happened at CBS.

After acquiring media startup the Free Press last year, Ellison named its founder Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News. Her tenure has seen inner turmoil, including exits of major talent like Anderson Cooper and Scott Pelley, declining ratings for CBS’s evening news broadcast and 60 Minutes, and a high-profile mishap where Weiss delayed the airing of a 60 Minutes segment that had already been promoted over the air.

Both Ellison and Weiss have spoken publicly about making CBS more balanced in its coverage, but some critics have argued that the network has instead moved more rightward in deference to Trump, who is an ally of both Ellison and his father Larry Ellison, the billionaire co-founder of Oracle Corp.

With Ellison aiming to cut $6 billion worth of costs at the merged company, there’s also the specter of more layoffs at both news organizations. One of the big questions is whether Ellison will keep CNN CEO Mark Thompson, according to news veteran Jonathan Miller, who is the CEO of the investment company Integrated Media Co. Miller said that keeping Thompson might inspire more confidence and stability during the merger.

He said that an independent editorial board isn’t an unheard-of concept in news. Miller, who previously served as CEO of digital media at News Corp., pointed to the company’s newspaperThe Times of London, which installed a board after media mogul Rupert Murdoch acquired the publication to protect it from his interference. The board existed from 1981 until 2022.

Kelly McBride, a senior vice president at media nonprofit the Poynter Institute as well as the public editor at NPR, said that roles similar to an editorial board can be found at other news organizations, but that it’s becoming less common. McBride, who assesses complaints and questions from the public about NPR’s reporting, and works with its journalists to resolve any issues, said that these types of positions have to maintain complete independence from the organization.

In looking at the duties and structure of the editorial board for CBS and CNN, she said that there likely will be more details ironed out as Paramount and Warner Bros. move closer to their merger, though she did note one oddity.

“If they’re going to have this group of five people, two from one political persuasion and two from another political persuasion, that’s also going to be really weird because in most cases, journalists don’t identify their political persuasion,” she said.

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