The suits in the executive suite at the newly minted uber-conglomerate that owns CNN have a problem. Their leading news media brand is the woke Batgirl of television news. The April merger of two already powerful entities, Discovery and Warner Media, spawned an even larger corporate communications goliath, Warner Bros. Discovery. Unlike previous management, the bosses at this new monolith appear, for the moment at least, to be adamantly unwilling to burn good money on progressive establishment propaganda that nobody wants to watch.
Not All Flops Wear Capes
[substack align=”right”]“Projections from S&P Global Market Intelligence say CNN’s profitability is on a pace to decline to $956.8 million this year. That would mark the first time since 2016 that the network had dipped below $1 billion in profit, according to three people familiar with its operations,” dominant media comrade The New York Times wrote in an enlightening report on the network’s woes published Aug. 2.
Gigantic operations need to carve out sturdy large-scale profit streams to remain viable. The company has created shockwaves in Hollywood this month by entirely shelving its new Batgirl film after test audience screenings proved so disastrous that the reportedly PC-infested venture was judged to be “irredeemable” as a public offering. Batgirl is reportedly being wiped from existence – the film won’t even be made available for streaming, never mind a cinema release – because it is said to be so awful it could tarnish all future films in the DC Comics brand pipeline.
Apparently for WB-Discovery, Brian Stelter is the cable news version of comic book diversity girl power. There’s no need for any test screenings at CNN; the problem has long been identified. The network’s viewership cratered as its President Trump-bashing became all-encompassing since 2016. Thus the need for a similar cleansing of the leftist superheroes that go before the camera, costume tights and all.
CNN – Too Big to Succeed
The Times’ article, however, makes it clear that a less woke CNN will still utterly fail to serve as a quality news source. Potential new revenue streams are tied into the same toxic ruling establishment spider web that caused the network to trod its calamitous progressive regime path in the first place.
The Times states:
“However the numbers are crunched, inside CNN the hunt is on for new revenue. To help solve the financial puzzle, [new CNN Chairman Chris Licht] has tapped Chris Marlin, a longtime friend who was recently an executive at the Florida home builder Lennar. Mr. Marlin — whom some CNN employees have taken to calling ‘Fish Man,’ a takeoff on his surname — had no experience operating a cable news network, having worked at the law firms Foley & Lardner and Holland & Knight.
“Mr. Marlin has floated a variety of revenue-generating ideas since joining CNN, including striking advertising deals with major tech companies like Microsoft. Mr. Marlin has also mentioned selling sponsorships to corporate underwriters, extending CNN’s brand in China and expanding CNN Underscored, an e-commerce initiative.”
(Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Here’s a question that answers itself: Is getting even more in bed with Big Tech and China really a cure for news media wokeness?
Licht has repeatedly pledged that CNN under his watch will be dedicated to faithfully covering “hard news,” downplaying the “spectacle” of alarmist (read: heavily biased) posturing. Yet here we have a fellow player in the dominant media game, The New York Times, revealing that he has appointed an executive sharpie to seek ways to further entwine the network with the already-oversized influence of Big Tech and the blood-stained money of a communist superpower that has proven irresistible to far too large a segment of corporate America.
Fed-up citizens disgusted with what the imperial media complex has become today are thus faced with a conundrum. Is the woke rot the true core of the problem at CNN – or does the sheer size of Big Media today, with all the internationalism and compromised money ties that come with it, make that bias inevitable?
