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More Bad Headlines About CNN

Posted on | February 16, 2023 | Comments Off on More Bad Headlines About CNN

As a news organization, you never want the story to be about you. The saying that “there’s no such thing as bad publicity” doesn’t apply to the news media, which lives or dies by its credibility, and the recent stream of news about CNN’s personnel problems isn’t helping them in that regard:

Chris Cuomo, the former host of Cuomo Prime Time on CNN, claims he was so devastated after his firing that he was “going to kill everybody and myself.”
Cuomo was fired back in 2021 when CNN had to pretend that it cared about journalistic standards in the wake of revelations that Cuomo was giving advice to his brother Andrew Cuomo, the disgraced former governor of New York, who’d been accused of sexual harassment by a number of staffers.
“I had to accept [my firing] because [otherwise] I was going to kill everybody, including myself,” Cuomo told Anthony Scaramucci during an interview on the latter’s podcast.
A few short months after Cuomo was fired, CNN president Jeff Zucker unexpectedly resigned from CNN due to his failure to disclose a consensual relationship with CNN executive vice president and chief marketing officer Allison Gollust. The relationship was reportedly an open secret at CNN, and Cuomo was the one who blew the whistle on the relationship.
CNN anchor Brian Stelter accused his former colleague of trying to “burn the place down,” in reference to CNN.
“He’s not going out quietly. There were reports he was going to get paid the millions of dollars on the remainder of his contract. As a source said earlier today, he was trying to burn the place down,” Stelter added. “He was going to court trying to burn the place down and claiming he had incriminating information. If this is the case, this is a domino effect that begins with Andrew Cuomo and Chris Cuomo being fired. That’s a remarkable domino event I think that’s part of the story.”
Stelter was later fired from the network in August 2022.
Cuomo certainly had an axe to grind — and still does, even though he quickly got hired by NewsNation after CNN booted him. Despite the new gig, he only gets a fraction of the audience he had at CNN, which, coincidentally, is a fraction of the audience that Fox News gets. Cuomo reportedly averages about 63,000 viewers a night at NewsNation.
“I will never be [No. 1] again,” Cuomo conceded. He is now suing CNN for $125 million, claiming the network is guilty of “smearing” his journalistic integrity. It’s cute the way this man-child who used to interview his own brother on CNN claims to have journalistic integrity.

This follows in the immediate aftermath of news that the executive producer of Jake Tapper’s CNN show got fired for a sexual relationship with a subordinate, which was the same thing that got Zucker fired. But beyond the apparent inability of CNN staff to keep their pants on at the office, their much larger problem is their ratings — or lack thereof. It is difficult to exaggerate just how bad CNN’s ratings are. This graphic shows the cable news ratings for Tuesday night:

As you can see, in every hour from 5 p.m.-midnight Eastern, the Fox News audience is between four and six times larger than the CNN audience. CNN isn’t just losing, they’re being humiliated. And it gets worse when you consider how tiny CNN’s audiences are in comparison to some other cable programs:

Yes, you read that chart correctly: There are entire hours of CNN prime-time that get fewer viewers than Paw Patrol on Nickelodeon at 11 a.m.

You may laugh at a kiddie cartoon if you wish, but Paw Patrol never promoted Michael Avenatti or the “Russian collusion” hoax.

As for the 63,000 viewers of Chris Cuomo’s NewsNation show — dear God, that’s a mere fraction of the audience for many YouTubers. “CodyB Fireworks” has 463,000 subscribers and got more than 2 million views on one of their fireworks shows in July. Tim Pool has more than a million YouTube subscribers and routinely gets more than 150,000 views on his videos. Police Activity has more than 4 million YouTube subscribers and frequently gets more than a half-million views on their videos. So not only is Chris Cuomo’s audience smaller than a YouTube commentator like Tim Pool, but he’s also got fewer viewers than either Cody’s fireworks or a YouTube channel that’s just bodycam footage of police shootings.

Chris Cuomo is a complete failure, but as for his lawsuit against CNN, I hope he bankrupts them. They deserve to lose every cent they’ve got.

(Hat-tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)



 

 

Category: CNN

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