William Paley Built CBS. The Museum He Founded Just Seated the Man Who Controls It.

William S. Paley built CBS, then founded a museum to keep broadcasting's history. Two weeks after Skydance closed its takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, the Paley Center board of trustees has added the man who now controls CBS. David Ellison, chairman and CEO of Skydance, is one of four new trustees announced Tuesday, alongside Mattel's new chief executive Roger Lynch, Meta president and vice chairman Dina Powell McCormick, and Charter Communications CEO Chris Winfrey, according to Variety.

Recording Academy and MusiCares CEO Harvey Mason Jr. is also joining the center's Los Angeles board of governors, per Billboard.

Nonprofit board seats are mostly ceremonial. Read together, though, this list is a remarkably honest snapshot of who holds power over American media in late 2026, and it is worth reading closely.

Who Actually Sits on the Paley Center Board of Trustees Now?

Start with Skydance. Paramount closed its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery on October 6, and the combined company took the Skydance name, under the control of Ellison and co-CEO Ynon Kreiz, as reported by WFTV citing the Associated Press. The deal brought two of Hollywood's five biggest studios together with CBS News and CNN.

Kreiz was already a Paley trustee, now listed under Skydance in Variety's roster. On the Los Angeles board, Casey Bloys and George Cheeks are listed under Skydance too. Counting Ellison, that makes four people affiliated with one company across the center's two governing boards, and David Zaslav, the former Warner Bros. Discovery chief, remains a trustee as well.

The rest of the roster reads like a merger diagram. Platforms are everywhere: Neal Mohan of YouTube, Eddy Cue of Apple, Adam Presser of TikTok USDS, Ryan Roslansky of LinkedIn, Alex Norström of Spotify, Asha Sharma of Microsoft's Xbox and David Baszucki of Roblox. Sports commissioners Roger Goodell, Adam Silver, Rob Manfred, Gary Bettman and Don Garber all have seats.

Why Is a Toy Company CEO Joining a Media Board?

Because Mattel stopped being only a toy company a while ago. Kreiz spent eight years pushing the company toward film, television and games, a strategy that produced the "Barbie" blockbuster, and then stepped down on October 2 to become co-CEO at Paramount Skydance, according to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, which carried the Reuters report. That same story noted Mattel shares rose just 5% during his tenure, against a nearly 200% gain for the S&P 500.

Lynch is a media operator through and through. Before Mattel, he ran Condé Nast from 2019, led Pandora and was the founding CEO of Sling TV, per Pulse 2.0. His Paley seat is less a toy-industry nod than a recognition that intellectual property now moves freely between shelves and screens.

The symmetry is hard to ignore. The old Mattel chief and the new one now sit on the same board, one of them representing the studio that owns CBS.

Why Does Meta's President Belong in a Broadcasting Museum?

Powell McCormick is the most telling addition. Meta named her president and vice chairman in January, with a mandate to guide strategy and multibillion-dollar investments, according to the Associated Press via PBS NewsHour. She spent 16 years at Goldman Sachs, served as a national security adviser at the start of President Trump's first term, and is married to Sen. David McCormick. Trump praised the hire as a "great choice."

Her presence on a media history board makes sense on its own terms. Meta runs Facebook and Instagram, where a great deal of today's video and news actually gets watched. It also signals how closely the people running media's largest platforms now sit to Washington, which is a reality any institution devoted to studying media's social impact will eventually have to discuss in public.

Winfrey's seat completes the picture from the other end. Charter is the pipe, the cable and broadband company that still delivers much of what everyone else on the list produces.

Can an Institution Run by the Industry Still Judge It?

Paley describes itself as a nonprofit that "leads the discussion about the cultural, creative, and social significance of media," per the Paley Center. The board, it says, provides "crucial input on strategy and operations." Those are reasonable goals. They become harder to meet when the people providing input are also the ones whose deals, layoffs and mergers make up the story.

Consider the Los Angeles board. Bela Bajaria is still listed there, days after Netflix ousted her as chief content officer, as Variety reported. Jesse Collins, whose company won Emmys for Super Bowl halftime shows, per Billboard, and is producing Netflix's U2 halftime set, per NFL.com, sits there too. Such overlap is what makes the boards useful for access. It is also what makes them unlikely to host the hardest conversations about consolidation.

Ellison's statement leaned on the center's mission of "preserving the stories that have captivated audiences around the world." Maureen J. Reidy, the center's president and CEO, called the new group "visionary." Neither framing is wrong. The archive will be in good hands, and the people who now own most of what goes into it will be among those keeping it.