As someone who pays a lot of attention — for professional reasons — to the leftist loons in the mainstream media, I often wonder how they see themselves. It’s sort of like pondering whether the craziest people in an insane asylum ever have lucid moments where they realize that they’re crazy.
My suspicion is that any who do immediately run away as far as they possibly can.
The cable news network CNN remains something of an enigma. CNN invented cable news and had great bipartisan respect for a long time, despite originally being owned by leftist loon Ted Turner. Turner was a businessman who didn’t let his politics get in the way of his income, which allowed CNN to thrive back in the Gulf War days. Oddly, the network did its hardest leftward shift in the post-Turner era.
Like so many people and companies, CNN was broken by the ascent of Donald Trump during the 2016 United States presidential election. At the time of his first election, the CNN higher-ups insisted that the goal was to be a centrist alternative to Fox News on the right and MSNBC on the left. Of course, “centrist” is a very relative concept in most of American media. CNN had already shifted to the left, but it became a cheap MSNBC knock-off when Trump was elected.
America needed a cheaper MSNBC like it needed a fatter Lizzo, and CNN had begun digging its own shallow grave, even though it wouldn’t be apparent for a while.
There has been a bit of a course correction in Atlanta at CNN headquarters to adjust to the new Trump reality. Scott Jennings, for example, is a reliable voice to counter the cacophony of Trump Derangement Syndrome shrieking at the network. He was recently given a raise, so it seems as if he’ll be on air there for a while. That being said, CNN’s principal voices like Dana Bash, Jake Tapper, and Kaitlan Collins remain some of the greatest beneficiaries of the fact that we don’t jail people for journalistic malpractice.
CNN is still struggling for ratings relevance. It is currently doing better than MSNBC, but that’s a bar that an earthworm could easily clear. Fox News remains dominant, almost quadrupling CNN in daily viewership.
During the perceived leftist media heyday of the Biden years, CNN tried to claim a stake in the increasingly competitive streaming market. Its offering was called CNN+, and its claim to fame at launch was that the network had hired Chris Wallace away from Fox News after almost 20 years there. He was to be the centerpiece of CNN+.
It turned out to be a failure of Titanic proportions. CNN brass began shuttering the service less than a month after its laughably incompetent launch. Here’s something I wrote in the Morning Briefing when CNN+ fell apart:
The subscription service is averaging about as many daily users as a dirty bathroom in a small-town diner. It’s not even a month old and the higher-ups are ready to bail. This failure reflects directly on CNN, of course. The once-respected news network has been hemorrhaging viewers for years, having devolved into bad self-parody in the Trump and post-Trump era.
It’s almost impossible to put a finger on who its core audience is now. My guess is that it’s just other CNN employees who aren’t at work at the time.
Well, bless their hearts, the CNN powers that be want to give it another go.
CNN is planning to roll out a subscription streaming service this fall, its latest attempt to gain a foothold in the market. A CNN spokesperson confirmed plans for the service, which would be a mix of live programming and on-demand content.
Maybe the network has learned from its mistakes. Let’s just say that I remain skeptical. If Jennings is given prominence on the streaming service I might be convinced that they are trying. The core problems at CNN that made CNN+ sink remain, however. The TDS voices are still the loudest and highest paid at CNN, and have shown no sign of changing. Objectively, President Trump has come out of the gate pretty well, but you won’t hear that on CNN unless it’s Scott Jennings’ turn to talk.
Perhaps CNN can get some of the laid off and fired MSNBC hosts to subscribe. That is a growing market demographic, after all.
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