Newsletters on the media are channeling gloom inside CNN after Warner Bros. Discovery spun them off, much as Comcast spun off MSNBC. Insiders are worrying about CNN being able to exist. There's panic at Anderson Cooper's disco, and his pay will probably shrink.
Former CNN reporter Oliver Darcy cited anonymous CNN insiders to lament that Warner Bros Discovery spinning off CNN into a separate company is not encouraging news. That division’s boss is now Gunnar Weidenfels, whom Mr. Darcy describes as an infamously "ruthless cost cutter."
CNN has to deal with reality. The Hollywood Reporter notes that Nielsen’s new gauge of TV usage for May shows that streaming captured 44.8 percent of viewing time in the United States for May, beating the combined tally of 44.2 percent for cable and broadcast -- cable 24.1 percent) and broadcast (20.1 percent). YouTube and Netflix, the two biggest streamers, accounted for 20 percent of all TV use, nearly beating the broadcast total by themselves.
“Everyone is wary and tired and there is so much change that we don’t understand what direction the company is going in,” one prominent network journalist told Darcy. The “rank and file are nervous like the pre-cuts time” and have “no confidence and no trust” in leadership, said another. A third observed, “There are people who think CNN won’t exist at some point. Hard to believe that will happen, but there are people who feel that way.”
Puck's Dylan Byers is another ex-CNN media reporter. Earlier, he said what Oliver Darcy cannot countenance: Fox News has “effectively quadruple[d] CNN’s audience—not just on any given weeknight, but increasingly during major national and international breaking news events where CNN once dominated” for far fewer costs.
Byers asked about the cost-cutting: "Why, for instance, would Gunnar pay Anderson Cooper $18 million a year when Kaitlan Collins draws the same ratings at roughly a fifth of the salary?" In the end, Byers argued, “market forces will reshape the business into what consumers want it to be rather than its own grandiose vision of itself.”
We also note that the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on Wednesday on President Biden's incapacity at the White House in the last year of his term. Democrats largely boycotted it. ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, and NPR all skipped over it that night. And then there's Jim Acosta dramatically proclaiming the awesomeness of PBS and NPR, which underlines where they land on the political spectrum with our taxpayer support.
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