‘Is John Malone Responsible for Axing Your Show?’ Brian Stelter Guest Addresses the Elephant in the Room During CNN’s Reliable Sources Swan Song

A guest on CNN’s Reliable Sources addressed the elephant in the room during its final broadcast — asking whether an influential executive was responsible for the show’s demise.

During the show’s last-ever panel discussion on Sunday, Claire Atkinson — chief media correspondent for Insider — referenced John Malone, a prominent shareholder of CNN’s parent company Warner Bros. Discovery, during a discussion about the future of the network. Malone denied being directly involved in the cancellation of host Brian Stelter’s show, but has been open about his desire to see CNN become more centrist. (“I would like to see CNN evolve back to the kind of journalism that it started with, and actually have journalists,” Malone said last year, citing Fox News’ Bret Baier and Brit Hume as positive examples.)

In the first half of the broadcast, Stelter and his guests mostly danced around the subject of Malone and Warner Brothers Discovery leadership. But Atkinson broached the topic head on.

“I think that’s a good question that people are asking: Is John Malone responsible for axing your show?” Atkinson said. “I don’t know the answer to that. I think people might suspect it’s political. He’s a libertarian who believes in not paying taxes if he can avoid it … He said he’s not directly not involved. That’s an interesting quote. But then, I think he’s a businessman. He’s looking at where the money is, where the audience is. And the viewership on the left is split between CNN and MSNBC, and the viewership on the right is all at Fox News. They have a bigger audience, lots of money, and perhaps he’s saying, ‘You know what, if we shift a little bit this way, maybe we’ll get that, too.'”

“There definitely will be more change,” Stelter added.

Watch above, via CNN.