To complement the thread about TV meteorologists being laid off, there are major changes coming to CNN, with some familiar faces likely to either lose their jobs or get shunted to late-night or early morning time slots.
The right-wing and historically unreliable UK tabloid the Daily Mail tried to present this as somehow related to Trump’s re-election without really explaining how, but AP has a more accurate story. CNN’s new CEO Mark Thompson is apparently trying to move to a digital subscription model and away from the falling ratings of the broadcast medium.
All I can say is, nice job, CNN – abandon your civic responsibility to fight the flood of daily disinformation we’re faced with now more than ever, in order to focus on profits instead. It’s everything that’s been wrong with American media in a nutshell, and exemplifies the very thing that allowed Trumpism to flourish like a deadly virus in the first place. CNN was never exactly the epitome of quality reporting anyway, but laying off this many staffers – some of them probably quite high profile – is only going to make bad things worse.
CNN has never really been about “civic responsibility to fight the flood of daily disinformation”, and indeed it could be credibly argued that they were a significant contributor to disinformation, ‘spin’, and the superficial ‘analysis’ of often partisan talking heads, highly reliant upon celebrity anchors to draw interest to an embarrassing degree. Thompson is frankly correct, if this was his rationale, that their efforts in the ‘broadcast’ medium of cable news is an unprofitable and dying venue. I’m sure that he’ll try to replace or supplement dismissed staffers using ‘AI’ with predictably awful results but frankly it probably won’t be that much worse than its error-filled reporting now, and the copy-editing and grammar may actually become better even if the semantic content is basically filler.
Stuff like this is why younger viewers coming to the classic 1976 movie Network have trouble understanding why it was seen as so radical and shocking in its day.
When it was released, it felt like science fiction, proposing that the flawed-but-honorable traditions of journalism would be fatally poisoned by the infection of profit-seeking by their corporate owners. Now, though, it’s like a documentary, and a tame and mild one at that.
CNN is certainly liberal, but I’m not aware they are a significant contributor to disinformation. I don’t watch news very much. Could you cite some instances of misinformation?
Who is this directed to? As the OP, I wasn’t accusing CNN of spreading disinformation; my point was its failure to counter disinformation by failing to engage in responsible journalism. Jon Stewart’s feud with the stupidity of “Crossfire”, of which @Stranger_On_A_Train posted an example above, is typical of CNN broadcasting bullshit instead of news.
I agree that Thompson is correctly carrying out the bidding of his masters and has little choice in the matter. The deeper problem, as others have pointed out, is the malign influence of the profit motive on journalism, where click-bait and sensationalism rule the day, and actual news is not usually material that attracts advertisers.
But it’s not about “a dying venue”. One might convincingly argue that radio was a dying venue around 1950 or so as television took over. Yet here in Canada, CBC Radio One blankets the nation from coast to coast with real news, insightful documentaries, and serious discussions on the major issues of the day. They can do this because it’s publicly funded and commercial-free, and I maintain that the CBC overall – radio, television, and digital – is an important contributor to Canada’s values and the unity of its culture.
In the US, NPR is pretty good, too, but they’re largely drowned out by the tsunami of commercial interests in American broadcasting. PBS can also be good, but they wimp out very quickly when a topic runs counter to the interests of a major sponsor, exactly mimicking the problem with all commercial media.
I don’t disagree about NPR and PBS, and I think that CBC is a national treasure for Canada which promotes multipolar discussion on issues. But CNN has never fit into that mold. When they were just mostly about “Headline News” it was fine as a snapshot of ongoing events but post-9/11 they really bent toward political analysis by a circle-jerk of talking heads and vapid ‘celebrity’ hosts which was never very informative or concerned about fact-checking, and is now just obsolescent as most Americans get their ‘news’ and commentary via various social media outlets. CNN’s ‘cable news’ operation is only relevant as a running running joke on Saturday Night Live as the station you watch while you are on the treadmill or waiting for your delayed flight at an airport. Their attempts to ‘get in on’ social media mostly consist of posting a screen capture of a Twitter post and then literally repeating everything in it in text below followed by some inane commentary. This would be literally more useful than what news reporting CNN actually does.
Just tune in and watch as they discuss literally any issue; it is all ‘spin’ and talking heads repeating each other, and almost never fact-checking themselves when they get facts obviously wrong. CNN just settled a $5M defamation lawsuit and admitted in court testimony to what could be charitably described as ‘less than stellar journalistic integrity’:
For example, Fuzz Hogan, a senior director of standards for CNN, acknowledged in testimony under oath that he had approved a “three-quarters true” story. Another editor, Tom Lumley, had said in an internal message that the piece was “80 percent emotion.” On the stand, Lumley said that it still wasn’t his favorite story, but based his assessment on the storytelling rather than the reporting.
Also, if your senior director of standards is named “Fuzz Hogan”, maybe consider using a psuedonym or petition for a legal name change, just for the sake of not sounding like a Mad magazine parody.
It’s always hard to find old threads but I posted one notable example a few years ago where CNN was posting about how ruthless Trump was against China while, at the same time, the Trump administration was handing out exemptions to Chinese steel producers.
Similarly, Trump’s crackdowns on immigration where, in truth, he was expanding worker visa counts, etc.
Kellyanne Conway was noted, in several articles, as having a constant connection to the news desk at CNN, feeding them some good lib-angering headlines, straight from the oval office.
CNN did more to campaign for Trump than any other media source short of Fox. Simply just billions and billions of dollars worth of free advertising.
Of course they are - they won’t nearly as many staffers when all they’ll be doing is broadcasting whatever the Trump administration approves for dissemination.
On this note, I’d just like to plug feedly, a free online RSS aggregator (i.e. a feed listing the articles posted recently from any particular content source). You can search up news sources, through the site, and it will add them.
General recommendations:
Check MediaBiasFactCheck. If the factual accuracy isn’t at least HIGH then don’t bother with it.
Lean towards business news. Business people need to know what’s actually happening in the world. They can’t be basing their decisions on partisanship and nonsense. (That said, I found Business Insider to be rather lame.)
Every country publishes news and many of those countries have reasonably high freedom of the press scores.
A good sources is a disinterested sources. Vietnam doesn’t have a thing to gain or lose in anything to do with Ukraine. Mexico doesn’t particularly care about Gaza.
The most knowledgeable sources are the ones who are closest to a situation - but also, potentially, the most interested in obfuscating and lying.
A journalist is only as good as they are skeptical and discriminating. They should be sourcing from many contacts, not just going to one easy-access source and repeating what they say, without question.
Slow is the basis for good news. The most recent developments, the gossip in the wind, etc. are all good and fine but Twitter isn’t news. News is made by building up evidence, going through peer review, and putting together a nuanced reconstruction of events that cuts through BS. The editorial process - e.g. requiring 3 independent witnesses in order to be able to publish that a thing happened - is what makes news true. Nothing else does.
If there is anything that you can double-check - some testimony as been published, some report made available, etc. - then double-check it. If what you read doesn’t match what was reported, drop that source like it’s nuclear waste.
Reading separate and opposite sets of partisan news is not a quick-and-easy way to find the truth. Fascists and Commies are, by some accounts, opposites. If you listen to their competing mouth organs, are you really expecting to find all the most salient and deeply researched facts?
If it says, “Opinion”. It ain’t news. That’s the legal magic word to get out of defamation, fraud, or other legal ramifications for saying things that ain’t so in a news-like way.
There is no easy way to get to the real unvarnished truth. There’s no one simple trick. You just have to put in the time. And do it right. You have to eat your greens and walk 10,000 steps every day. You have to double-check and cross-check your sources, and come up with your own questions to ask and investigate.
You’ll still never come to the truth. It’s all just best-guess analysis, for you and everyone you’re relying on.
Comedy and Late Night TV are not news sources. They’re the sugary treat of information and generally bad for you outside of as small, occasional treats.
Getting back to the OP and the actual article about what CNN is actually doing.
CNN has been actively working to cut down spending on cable news and go digital, with some sort of streaming service, for years. CNN+ and CNN Max failed completely before people could learn their names in 2022 and 2023, and the CEOs got tossed.
The latest one, Mark Thompson, is desperate to finally get a streamer launched, and he’s shifting money and staff from cable to do so. Sorry, wait, that’s news from last July.
He didn’t get the new service launched last year, as promised, so he’s cutting cable yet again. This is not news; this is what everybody in media has been told for years.
And why not? People tune in to the source in their silo, so in a Trump administration ratings are going to plummet. Anyway, panels with talking heads are dull. Younger viewers didn’t watch in the first place. CNN tried to be the neutral one - something that used to be vital to a rational society - and got endlessly mocked here and other liberal arenas just for the attempt. Cable news is dead. Admit it.
