Interesting find, serious question: does it matter?
Having an entirely separate staff, with a separate website, publish content under your name without your input ought to be a five alarm fire for editorial staff. But there’s some affiliate cash up for grabs so some senior exec somewhere okayed it.
There’s a tech angle here too: if it weren’t for SEO they might we’ll be operating out of cnnunderscore.com or whatever, but the SEO juice of a page on cnn.com is too tempting to pass up.
I wanted to buy a ultra-sonic cleaner for my garage/workshop. I need it to clean out parts. I searched for reviews on Youtube, and I noticed that the big "ultrasonic cleaner on Amazon" manufacturer Vev[*123]or seem to more or less have donated a cleaner to about every workshop genre Youtuber in the last 1 to 3 years. Or paid them to shill. Dunno.
I mean I was flabbergasted to the extent of the manipulation. I didn't think it was this bad. And I did end up buying their cleaner ...
*123 I just don't wanted to SEO help them.
Answer: You don't know. You're just speculating.
In Canada, for example, it's hard to throw a stone and not hit a foreign-owned PostMedia news outlet.
Move slow, break countries.
What matters to me is the validity of the content being produced, regardless of who produces it. If foreign-owned outlets do a better job than locally-owned outlets at providing factual, complete, and as-objective-as-possible reporting, that's fine with me.
When I consider events or situations I've had direct knowledge of, or where I've had access to direct witness accounts and raw footage that I trust, some of the worst reporting in my opinion has been from CBC News. With CBC being a Crown corporation, CBC News could perhaps be considered the most inherently "Canadian-owned" of the mainstream news outlets.
On the other hand, for such situations, I've generally found reporting from Postmedia's various outlets to be among the most accurate, complete, and objective of that from the mainstream outlets, even if it may be considered foreign-owned.
As we've seen time and time again, the content produced is only "valid" if your personal interests happen to align with those of Rupert Murdoch, or whomever.
CBC definitely has its own problems but being beholden to the biases of the billionaire class isn't one of them.
If he wasn't going to investigate this, who would? CNN? USA Today?
It's disclosed on a banner across the top of literally every cnn-uncensored page that's being 'outed' here. He could have saved the entire research/dig by simply screenshotting the top of any of the pages. That wouldn't have the same energy or 'Ahah!' though.
Wikipedia is the most reliable source of news/perspective on issued but it can get contaminated if entities given the "reliable sources" label republish unreliable or biased dreck.