THIS IS CNN: Don Lemon goes berserker on Kaitlan Collins

Sure it is.

Even if the only 'ism' Zaslav believes in is capitalism, if he thinks turning CNN into Newsmax 2 is the best way to turn a profit, we're all in trouble.



For all those years Paley and Sarnoff ran network television news, they understood it as a prestige center / loss leader*, not a profit maker.

Still is, unless you're willing to bend your facts and bang your drum to attract an audience. Ailes is the relevant example here.

But the idea that Zucker was a hero for having done likewise in the previous CNN regime is kinda heartbreaking, too.

What people here and elsewhere say they want is just-the-facts-ma'am Headline News or CNN International circa 1990.

I'm not sure that's possible these days.

But it is something to be devoutly hoped for.




*which Licht, per the Atlantic piece, still seems to believe is possible. I have my doubts.

 

Great reply to a statement I didn't make.

Also, read the story.

 

Yes.

I could have just as easily said "if he thinks turning CNN into Pravda 2 is the best way to turn a profit, we're all in trouble."

But again, as delineated in the Atlantic piece, his interference in the Trump town hall was very specific and lends itself to one interpretation, not the other.

 

The subtext of the entire piece is that Zaslav is calling the shots, and that Licht may or may not be trying to resist.

For a man widely perceived to be carrying out the orders of his bosses on the board of Warner Bros. Discovery, Licht held some awfully strong views of his own. Certainly, he was under pressure to conform CNN to the whims of Zaslav; Licht told top staffers that he was continually fighting to “protect” them from editorial interference at the corporate level. Licht had heard the talk about his being a glorified errand boy. Perhaps because it contained some trace of truth, he seemed determined in our conversations to map out his own distinct worldview.

* * *

For a man widely perceived to be carrying out the orders of his bosses on the board of Warner Bros. Discovery, Licht held some awfully strong views of his own. Certainly, he was under pressure to conform CNN to the whims of Zaslav; Licht told top staffers that he was continually fighting to “protect” them from editorial interference at the corporate level. Licht had heard the talk about his being a glorified errand boy. Perhaps because it contained some trace of truth, he seemed determined in our conversations to map out his own distinct worldview.


For example, the late changes to the town hall panels seem to come from Zaslav, not Licht.

Two hundred fifty miles away, on the set in New York, CNN staffers were perplexed. The initial plan had called for Scott Jennings, a Republican who is less than enamored of Trump, to join his familiar grouping of pundits on the postgame show. CNN had flown Jennings to New York for the occasion. However, hours before the town hall, a switch was announced internally: Byron Donalds would be substituted for Jennings (who wound up coming on the air with another panel much later that night). Donalds, a Republican congressman from Florida, is an election denier—someone who, to use Licht’s language, says it’s not raining in the middle of a downpour. It was enough of a problem for some CNN staffers that Trump, the original election denier, was flouting Licht’s oft-repeated standard. But why was Donalds on CNN’s postgame panel?

This wasn’t the only peculiar personnel move. Sarah Matthews, a Trump-administration official who’d turned critical of her former boss, had been slated to appear on the pregame show. But she was abruptly nixed in favor of Hogan Gidley, a former White House staffer who remained devoted to Trump.

Live television is a volatile thing. People and sets and scripts are always being changed for all kinds of reasons. Still, CNN employees had reason to be suspicious. They wondered if some sort of deal had been cut with Trump’s team, promising the placement of approved panelists in exchange for his participation in the town hall. At the least, even absent some official agreement, it seemed obvious that CNN leaders had been contorting the coverage to keep Trump happy—perhaps to prevent him from walking offstage. At one point during the pregame show, when the words SEXUAL ABUSE appeared on the CNN chyron, one of Licht’s lieutenants phoned the control room. His instructions stunned everyone who overheard them: The chyron needed to come down immediately.

When the town hall ended, two postgame panels kicked off concurrently, giving network executives the flexibility to switch between reporting and analysis. One panel, anchored by Tapper, was a roundtable of journalists picking apart Trump’s lies. The other, led by Cooper, featured partisan pundits—including Donalds—debating one another. According to the mission that Licht had articulated for me, Tapper’s panel should have starred that night. But it didn’t. Licht made the call to elevate Cooper’s panel (a fact first reported by Puck). This decision may or may not have come from the very top: In the days after the town hall, Zaslav told multiple people that Tapper’s Trump-bashing panel reminded him of Zucker’s CNN. Yet even that MAGA-friendly version wasn’t good enough for Donalds. After criticizing the network on-air, the congressman stepped off the set and then, in full view of the crew as well as his fellow panelists, grabbed his phone and started blasting CNN on Twitter.


* * *

Lots of CNN employees on that morning call disagreed with Licht. They thought his execution of the event had been dreadful; they believed his tactical decisions had essentially ceded control of the town hall to Trump, put Collins in an impossible position, and embarrassed everyone involved with the production. These opinions were widely held—and almost entirely irrelevant. Everyone at CNN had long ago come to realize that Licht was playing for an audience of one. It didn’t matter what they thought, or what other journalists thought, or even what viewers thought. What mattered was what David Zaslav thought.

 

That works so well for NPR, PBS NewsHour, the POTUS channel on XM and that network Cuomo and Dan Abrams are on.
The marketplace has spoken, and it has done so in loud, angry voices spewing grievances and falsehoods. CNN is owned by a right wing wacko and is operated by a guy, Zaslav, paid literally more than $500 million a year. It will be Fox Lite well before primary season.

 

If Licht is playing for an audience of one — Zaslav— and I believe that he is, then who are we to think Zaslav is playing for? It’s John Malone, of course. And no one can argue what side that man supports.

 

Billionaire John Malone loves Fox News. But he owns a piece of CNN.

In November 2021, Malone sat down for an hour-long interview with CNBC, where he held forth on the state of the pay TV business — where he made his $10 billion fortune — and plenty of other topics.

One of them was CNN — at the time, owned by AT&T, but scheduled to become part of WBD, a company that Malone would own a piece of along with a seat on its board. Malone waved away one bit of recurring speculation — that WBD would want to sell CNN — and then offered some programming advice for the new company:

“I would like to see CNN evolve back to the kind of journalism that it started with, and actually have journalists, which would be unique and refreshing,” he said. Then he suggested a model: “Fox News, in my opinion, has followed an interesting trajectory of trying to have ‘news’ news, I mean some actual journalism, embedded in a program schedule of all opinions.”

Malone’s comments didn’t resonate much beyond a couple of places: At Fox News, which responded with glee, and inside CNN, where they sounded alarm bells.