The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Cue the ‘Paw Patrol’ Theme Again

Posted on | June 7, 2023 | Comments Off on Cue the ‘Paw Patrol’ Theme Again

The laughingstock of the cable news industry is once again the butt of the joke, as CNN fires their CEO Chris Licht after just a year:

CNN Chairman Chris Licht has been fired, according to sources at the network. Licht’s tumultuous, year-long tenure was marked by controversy after controversy as he tried to make the network more “middle of the road” in its outlook.
But Licht was handicapped by one, significant roadblock: he had no idea what “middle of the road” meant.
Licht didn’t necessarily want to emulate Fox News as much as he wanted to de-radicalize CNN. The pushback was enormous. His firing of long-time employees like Don Lemon — the farthest left news personality on the network — set off a mini-revolt among the hard left staffers who didn’t like the idea of CNN going soft on the enemy. And his decision to give Donald Trump a town hall platform caused left-wing heads to explode all across America.
The former producer for Stephen Colbert’s top-rated late-night show angered employees right off the bat when he made the decision to cancel CNN’s nascent streaming service, CNN+. The company took a $1.5 billion write-down, and the failure of CNN+ will likely go down as one of the most spectacular collapses in TV history. Despite a $300 million ad campaign, no more than 10,000 people were watching it at any one time.
David Zaslav, the chief executive of CNN’s parent, Warner Bros. Discovery, informed CNN staff. “For a number of reasons, things didn’t work out, and that’s unfortunate,” Mr. Zaslav said, according to a recording of his remarks. “It’s really unfortunate, and ultimately that’s on me. And I take full responsibility for that.”

“Things didn’t work out” — to put it as mildly as possible. As bad as CNN already was, somehow Licht managed to make it even worse. Did I mention they keep losing to Paw Patrol in the cable ratings?

Ace of Spades points out that liberals (including CNN staffers) are trying to pretend that Licht is to blame for CNN’s decline when, in point of fact, they’ve been more or less permanently stuck in third place (behind Fox and MSNBC) for at least 15 years. Licht was brought in to try to fix the network’s problems, and his firing is evidence that CNN’s problems are beyond repair. Better to shut it down than to keep wasting money in a futile effort to salvage a fundamentally broken institution.



 

 

Category: CNN

Comments

Comments are closed.