In a company meeting on Thursday, CNN’s recently installed chairman, Chris Licht, praised the perseverance of his colleagues. “This is an organization that has had gut punch after gut punch after gut punch. And most of the organizations out there wouldn’t have survived,” said Licht, according to an account in the New York Times.
CNN’s new ownership gut-punched its journalists
Licht didn’t elaborate on the gut punches, according to a source familiar with the meeting. Perhaps with good reason: One of them came directly from CNN’s new parent company — Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) — and hit hundreds of network employees. It came on April 21, when Licht announced the mothballing of CNN Plus, a $5.99-per-month streaming platform that had launched just three weeks earlier. “This decision is in line with WBD’s broader direct-to-consumer strategy,” Licht said in a memo.
It was also in line with corporate jitters. Those who like to assail corporate owners that don’t have the backs of their journalists just got a fresh and compelling case in point.
The plug was pulled just days after AT&T had spun off WarnerMedia — and with it, CNN — in a $43 billion transaction that created WBD with longtime Discovery mogul David Zaslav as its CEO. The shuttering was met with glee — “Schadenfreude,” said CNN host Brian Stelter on his own CNN Plus daily program — by the network’s many critics. Click here and here and here and here and here and here and here for well-circulated examples of the mockery, which carried on through the weekend of the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.
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FollowThe culprit in this case was not Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson or any of the creative types feasting on this huge media story. It’s Zaslav, who killed CNN Plus before it had a chance to roll out all its offerings. Programs from actress Eva Longoria (“Searching for Mexico”); sports journalists Cari Champion and Jemele Hill (”Speak.Easy.”); and former NPR journalist Audie Cornish (“20 Questions with Audie Cornish”) never saw a single stream.
Was CNN Plus really such a runaway disaster that the suits couldn’t wait for these talents?
“It’s too early to know if this product or this service was a success or a failure,” Stelter said on CNN Plus after the announcement.
Zaslav & Co. have explanations for their hair-trigger decision: Discovery had previous, unimpressive stand-alone streaming experiments in golf and food, and the new, merged company was hatching an “all in one” approach to streaming products (see this excellent CNBC story on why CNN Plus conflicted with the streaming strategy of Warner Bros. Discovery). As the CNN team pushed forward with its streaming plans pre-merger, Discovery executives felt constrained in providing advice to what was then a competitor, according to the New York Times. And these are not good times for streaming, as affirmed by Netflix’s headline-making subscriber loss in the first quarter.
On top of all this, executives of the combined company reportedly weren’t pleased with initial audience numbers. Over the service’s first two weeks, it scored 150,000 subscribers; an informed source insists that number tracked with a company goal of 2 million over the first year, and the Los Angeles Times called it a “respectable” haul.
A CNN streaming product was first considered by then-CNN Worldwide President Jeff Zucker in early 2020, according to CNBC, though he didn’t get the green light from AT&T to invest in the service until June 2021. That was after the announcement that CNN would soon change ownership. Perhaps Zucker and former WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar should have waited until the new management arrived before diving into the streaming business.
Whatever the background, Warner Bros. Discovery came into the world with an add-on platform populated with hard- and soft-news content. All the online jokes notwithstanding, the product was excellent, especially for a fledgling organization. This was no Fox Nation, the streaming service Fox News launched in November 2018 to numerous typos and nonsensical show descriptions, as in: “Brian [Kilmeade] travels to Nashville, TN to visit The Hermitage, home of Andrew Jackson, where he evolved in a military to political career.” (Boldface added to highlight incompetence.)
On CNN Plus, Kate Bolduan’s daily news roundup — “Five Things” — was as straightforward as its title suggests. Sara Sidner’s “Big Picture” provided a thorough look at developing stories. Chris Wallace’s interview show was alternatively informative and cringey, such as when film producer Brian Grazer took to complaining about the household help. Those gardeners!
There was much more content — more than the Erik Wemple Blog could digest over the short life of CNN Plus. Possibly more, too, than Zaslav and his crew could digest. The perception on the CNN factory floor, a CNN staffer told the Erik Wemple Blog, is that the brass didn’t watch CNN Plus.
Warner Bros. Discovery summarily dissed the work of hundreds of journalists, effectively greenlighting the ridicule that’s poured in from Fox nation and beyond. If nothing else, the backlash over the decision has alerted CNN’s new ownership that its news crew operates in the midst of a national politico-cultural quarrel, one that remains on blast thanks to years of predations by Donald Trump.
From time to time, CNN journalists stumble in ways that bring unwanted attention to the brand. That sort of stuff happens. But there is no excuse for conscious, self-inflicted harm, like this incident of backstabbing en masse. It’s almost as though the ground-shaking controversies in Discovery’s history — like the man-eating snake episode and the misadventures of Joanna and Chip Gaines — didn’t prepare the network’s executives for the pressure of running a top news outlet.
Executives are now struggling with how to contain the mess that they left in their own C-suite. What happens to the 300 or so employees hired to stoke CNN Plus? How to redeploy Wallace, one of CNN Plus’s marquee names? Where to place all the content — including CNN original series — that roosted on the streaming service?
Matthew Belloni, a founding partner of subscription news service Puck, explained to Stelter the new ownership’s mind-set: “They love the CNN brand. If you talk to David Zaslav, the CEO, he goes on and on about how great the CNN brand is, and how it’s the standard-bearer worldwide.” If true, then show it.
Source: WP
