Stuff I had no clue of: CNN was recently bought by Warner Bros Discovery. And they had a Sunday show called Reliable Sources that examined and critiqued all news sources for accuracy and honesty, including CNN itself. And that show is now history, as the new owners of CNN have axed it. I got this much information from an 8-minute segment of the last show that is on YouTube today.
What are these changes liable to mean to CNN’s news coverage, its accuracy and honesty? Apparently this show was doing well in the ratings, so if this is just a business decision, what could be behind it?
I would rather have posted this in the Politics forum, but I thought it would probably get pushed over here anyway.
Nitpick but CNN was already owned by Warner Bros, which was bought by Discovery (from ATT).
2 things,
CNN parent company was Time Warner which ATT spun off with HBO and the rest of their media stuff to the new company Warner Bros Discovery.
Turner Broadcasting System (1980–1996)
Time Warner (1996–2018)
AT&T (2018–2022)
Warner Bros. Discovery (2022–present)
Second is minor, news is not Café material and it is not really politics either. So off to MPSIMS.
What I’m reading (gift link) is that management wants more straight news on CNN and less opinion stories and programs. They want to appeal to Democrats and Republicans. And some of the recent changes are the result of Chris Licht taking over from Jeff Zucker as chair of CNN. They’ve also reduced or eliminated the frequent “breaking news” alerts.
So does that mean they are counting Reliable Sources as an opinion program? Does appealing to both parties mean they are going to give equal time to the batshit crazy on the Republican side? Or try to appeal to it without becoming Fox light?
I’ve always seen the problem with 24-hour news channels to be the innate repetitiveness, as there isn’t enough news to fill the time. So viewers dip in for a few minutes and then move on because they’ve already hard all the current news. It would be nice if they would add in a significant amount of world news to fill some of that space, since there is a lot of it that most US outlets never even touch on.
But whatever they do, reducing the opinion programs will lose more viewers than they will gain by broadening their news coverage (or so I predict). I wonder what they’ll do then.
Twitter is just buzzing about how Jake Tapper was “selling” Kushner’s book and allowing Dan Crenshaw to tell lies with no pushback, so something seems to be going on.
I wonder how Anderson Cooper will do in this new environment?
I used to watch some CNN. I can’t remember why I stopped watching it.