Inside the Meltdown at CNN (after the ill-advised Trump Town Hall)

[W_HAMILTON]

58. In this particular situation, it may be a feature and not a bug.

The part of the article that particularly struck me was when it talked about how David Zaslav, Licht's boss, hired him "with a decree to move CNN toward the ideological center" coupled with this part:

...

David Zaslav cared more about other metrics. Success would be measured differently at CNN than it had been in the past. “This is a reputational asset for the company. It is not a profit-growth driver,” Licht said.

I asked him to define “reputational asset” in the context of an enormous, publicly traded, for-profit corporation.

“CNN, for Warner Bros. Discovery, is a reputational asset,” he said, emphasizing the phrase. “My boss believes that a strong CNN is good for the world and important to the portfolio.”

Even if it’s not making nearly the money it once did?

“So I’m told,” he said.

This sentiment struck me as particularly guileless coming from a newsman. Whatever Zaslav’s worldview, steering CNN toward the center was a business decision...

Zaslav cared about other metrics, huh? Not profitability, huh? When the fuck have you ever heard a corporate type not been concerned about profitability first and foremost? Sure, they might say they care about other things, but their actions reveal what really motivates them, and it is almost always making the biggest profit possible, usually at the expense of everything else.

So, what were these other metrics hmm? Could they have been appeasing "John Malone, a right-wing billionaire who stood to become a major shareholder on the new Warner Bros. Discovery board, (who) said that CNN could learn a few things from the reporters at Fox News?" Could they have been driving CNN -- one of Trump's biggest and most successful antagonists during his administration -- into the ground? And if not fully killing it and burying it, issuing an edict from up above to reset with Republican voters and try to win them over, knowing the only way to even attempt to go about doing that is by kissing up to these fascist liars?

Fuck Licht's CNN even more than usual. I was a regular viewer, even more so than MSNBC really. But I stopped watching as much when all this news started to trickle out about them taking a more rightward shift and fully removed them from my TV which I can do that now with my subscription model -- not just removing their channel from showing up, but not paying for their channel anymore at all.