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This Is CNN?

“CNN isn’t able to hate Donald Trump more than MSNBC, and there isn’t room for two networks to do it.”

Andy Bloom

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A photo of the CNN logo

About a week ago, I noticed a headline in one of the many e-newsletters I receive proclaiming, “CNN Suffered Its Worst Ratings Week in Nine Years.”

The item seemed vaguely familiar to me. I thought perhaps I was reading an email from last year. In fact, I could have been.

“CNN Ratings Plummet 80 Percent to Start 2022” was one that I found from January 14, 2022. The article reported CNN averaged 548,000 viewers for the week of January 3, 2022. CNN finished third behind MSNBC with 746,000 and Fox News with 1,408,000.

CNN’s fortunes didn’t improve in February 2022. The month started with the resignation of long-time network president Jeff Zucker. The investigation that led to the firing of 9 p.m. (ET) anchor Chris Cuomo uncovered a consensual but undisclosed affair between Zucker and subordinate CMO Allison Gollust, which led to his resignation.

Weeks after Zucker’s departure, a New York Times article revealed that Gollust, the Chief Marketing Officer, influenced questions CNN asked Governor Andrew Cuomo – her former boss – in an interview, which led to her forced resignation. The marketing person? Come again?

The February ratings headline read: CNN’s Ratings Collapse: Prime Time Down Nearly 70% in Key Demo. While 25 – to – 54-year-old viewership was off 69%, total audience was off 68%. To be fair, CNN could say that the ratings in early 2021 spiked because of the January 6th incident at the Capitol. After all, MSNBC was down 62% in demo and 47% in total audience. On the other hand, Fox News Channel was up 6% in demo and 2% among total viewers.

There is an art to timing the start of a new job. I’ve taken over the reins of a few stations that seemed as low as they could go myself. Surely, this is what Chris Licht must have thought when he was named Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of CNN Worldwide in April 2022.

In early 2022, CNN was promoting CNN+, a long-planned streaming service. It launched at the end of March. In April, just prior to Licht’s arrival, CNN’s new parent company, Discovery, shuttered CNN+. It was a disaster that lasted one month.

Licht came from CBS, where he was Executive Vice President of Special Programming. He was also Executive Producer and showrunner for “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.” The show won an Emmy for “Stephen Colbert’s Election Night 2020: Democracy’s Last Stand Building Back America Great Again Better 2020.” For me, it was an ominous precursor regarding CNN’s prospects. But Licht wasn’t without serious credentials.

In addition to CBS content and Colbert bona fides, Licht’s resume included Vice President of CBS News and Executive Producer for “CBS This Morning,” which he helped launch in 2012. He previously served as Morning Joe’s senior producer and Scarborough Country’s executive producer.

In a memo Licht wrote to CNN staffers upon the announcement of his appointment, he wrote: “David Zaslav has given me one simple directive: To ensure that CNN remains the global leader in news.”

Before the Warner Media and Discovery merger, David Zaslav, who would become the CEO of the combined entity, said in an interview on CNBC, “I think overall we’d probably be better off if we just had news networks in America.”

Zaslav wasn’t the only one. John Malone, a Discovery board member and one of its major individual shareholders, said in an interview also on CNBC, “I would like to see CNN evolve back to the kind of journalism that it started with, and actually have journalists, which would be unique and refreshing,”

So it wasn’t entirely surprising when Axios reported in early June: “CNN’s new boss Chris Licht is evaluating whether personalities and programming that grew polarizing during the Trump era can adapt to the network’s new priority to be less partisan.” The report continues, saying that those who cannot adapt will be “ousted.”

A couple of weeks after the Axios report, Brian Stelter’s Reliable Sources had its lowest-rated month in two decades. Stelter had become one of the liberal faces of the network. By mid-August, Reliable Sources was canceled, and Stelter was out.

Licht’s next move was in mornings. It’s an area where he had particular expertise. Licht personally picked Don Lemon, Poppy Harlow, and Kaitlan Collins to host CNN This Morning.

Lemon could be the poster child for CNN Liberal. He failed at night. Why did Licht think he would be more successful in the morning? Not even Lemon bought the idea that it was a promotion.

Collins previously reported for Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller. Why did Licht expect her and Lemon to get along? There has been at least one significant blow-up on December 8th, and since then, a concerted effort to keep the two apart as much as possible.

The result? “CNN This Morning” just had its lowest ratings week since its debut three months ago.

According to “The Wrap,” Executive Producer Eric Hall is moving to “CNN Tonight.” It quotes an insider as saying, “The show can’t decide strategically what exactly it is, so it’s trying to be everything which can create whiplash for a viewer when segments seem off-brand in tonality.”

Because it never ceases to amaze me what my liberal friends think I invent, I’ve cut and paste the ratings from “The Wrap”.

CNN just notched its lowest ratings in nine years across all its day parts for the week of Jan. 16 through Jan. 22, 2023, according to Nielsen averaging just 444,000 viewers in primetime, 93,000 in the all-important age 25-54 news demographic and 417,000 in viewers and 80,000 in the demo for total day. It’s the first time since May 2014 that the network failed to reach 450,000 viewers.

By comparison, during the same period Fox News drew 1.4 million viewers and 176,000 in the demo while MSNBC notched 629,000 total viewers and 69,000 in the demo. In primetime, Fox News had 2 million viewers, 256,000 in the demo and MSNBC had 943,000 viewers and 91,000 in the demo.

 “CNN This Morning,” also suffered the lowest week since its launch just three months ago. It averaged just 331,000 viewers while “Fox & Friends” had nearly 1 million and “Morning Joe” drew 760,000.

These are weekly ratings. Nobody in radio or cable news should live or die by weekly ratings, but CNN keeps getting one lousy headline after another. There is a definite trend.

I’ve been on the receiving end of a few stories like this one. Sometimes they are unfair, although I think this one is not. Still, I have no idea what levels of internal resistance Licht is facing. I know I’ve been undermined at stations in ways that I couldn’t believe when they were happening. Someday, I’ll write about them. Maybe the irresistible object has met the immovable force at CNN?

There’s a cable news network for people who want a presentation from the left and the right. CNN isn’t able to hate Donald Trump more than MSNBC, and there isn’t room for two networks to do it. What seems lacking, and I haven’t done any research to prove it, is the Joe Friday network – “just the facts, ma’am” (or sir).

It seems to me that Licht has the support of Messers Zaslav and Malone. CNN can’t get there with Don Lemon, Jim Acosta – even in a reduced role – and most key people that are still on the air. Licht will have to do some serious house cleaning. If there is a position for a third cable network, even if it was the first one, it’s as the journalistic juggernaut and worldwide reporting behemoth that CNN was in the beginning.

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2 Comments

2 Comments

  1. Bob Bellin

    February 7, 2023 at 2:07 am

    This is a good piece. CNN is in real trouble, although the in demo numbers aren’t as bad as the overall ones. The real question is what they should do about it. My guess is that they’ve done research into a straight ahead news approach and that it doesn’t look promising. Further, they’ve been the “breaking news” sensationalist voice on cable for so long, it might be difficult to get viewers to CNN as a credible straight ahead news source.

    Maybe cable viewers aren’t looking for hard news from TV period. It could be that there’s an audience for a reality show channel featuring lots of frontal nudity…I wonder how that would do in demo?

  2. Andy

    February 7, 2023 at 3:01 am

    Bob,
    Thanks. We agree on this.
    If straight-ahead news isn’t going to work for CNN, then I don’t know where they go. I have no research for television. My radio research suggested that there was a hole for what I labeled “just the facts” news, but that research pre-dates Donald Trump’s escalator ride. I have no idea if it is still valid.

    In 1998 I had an idea that I called “Notorious TV.” It would have been, at the time, Morton Downey Jr plus Real World (and then Big Brother) meets what became TMZ (I just called it tabloid stuff)…but I was in the wrong place (Minneapolis) at the time…it would have had a lot of the front nudity you suggest. I just had no idea how to start a cable network – nor the resources. Damn!

    Who knows, maybe that’s CNN’s million dollar idea, because they are going no where doing what they doing now. Whatever it is.

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BNM Writers

It’s Time for News Radio to Clean Its Clock

With radio, the top of the hour always begins with a self-aggrandizing, overly-produced introduction to a program I may have been listening to for half an hour already.

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A photo of clocks

News radio is an interruptive format that swiftly moves listeners from one informative topic to
the next but over the years we’ve gotten bogged down with an insufferable amount of clutter: too many commercials, endless promos and teases, and pointless production pieces. All of it
interrupts the flow and cuts into the interesting information you promise to provide.

Let’s clean the clutter, starting with the anachronistic basis for it all: your hourly format clock.

I’ve never understood why radio stations root themselves to the clock. The show starts at the top of the hour and you bury your boring features at the end. Why? Why should the top of the hour be considered the beginning of anything? It’s not how people live their lives. Radio isn’t like TV where shows start at specific times. Hell, TV isn’t that way anymore.

But with news radio, the top of the hour always begins with a self-aggrandizing, overly-produced introduction to a program I may have been listening to for half an hour already. This is especially true with morning shows, where simple logic would suggest that people trying to get to work by the top of an hour begin listening at various times before then.

Who even owns a clock radio anymore?

The 21st century is nonstop. There is no daily news cycle, no beginning or end to anything but
news radio programmers still think of time in divisions of hours, minutes, and seconds. We still draw empty circles depicting analog clocks to plot hourly radio formats.

On news and talk stations, the top of the hour almost always begins with the hourly network
report. It’s the biggest of big-time radio, steeped in tradition, professionally detached, global. In other words, it sounds nothing like your radio station in your unique market and it contains the least interesting content you have to offer.

We cling to the networks at the top of the hour for their prestige, because that’s just how we’ve always done it. Any national or international stories of real interest to Americans, the latest Trump-Biden court decisions, for example, will be well covered in talk shows and you’ll probably want to drop it into your local programming, too. How about a one-minute segment twice an hour, 60 seconds of just the big national and world stuff, in 10-15-second boil-in-the-bag headline segments? I’m just spitballing here. You’re the programmer.

In my heretical news radio mind, the networks do great journalism but they still sound flat,
stuffy, and old-fashioned. They don’t sound like anything else on my station. I’ll dump the top-of-the-hour five minutes and cherry-pick the network sound bites. We’ll deliver them ourselves.

While I’m carving up your format and trying to get you thinking outside the box, do you need
traffic reports every ten minutes? Or, at all? Heresy, I know. Catch your breath and read on.

When we had real-time airborne local reporters telling us what they were looking at it had a gee-whiz factor and the information mattered because it was live, local first-hand reporting. I could imagine the scene as it was being described. Now we have reporters in booths looking at
computer feeds and doing shotgun-style traffic reports for multiple cities. Words without
pictures.

I knew an L.A.-based traffic reporter who did reports for Salt Lake City though she had never even been there. These so-called “real-time traffic” reports are nearly always recorded and delayed for playback. Does this practice serve any purpose at all except to deceive listeners?

Not incidentally, traffic reports are a prime target for AI exploitation. How difficult can it be to
attach state and local transportation agency traffic data to AI voice-to-speech generators? For all I know this is already being done. You can argue it’s cost-efficient but as a longtime morning news host/anchor/personality, I despise it. One of the greatest assets to any morning news team is the interaction between news and traffic people.

When Amy Chodroff and I started working together at KLIF a dozen years ago we had that human contact with remarkable radio veteran Bill Jackson doing traffic from an adjoining studio. Bill wasn’t just a voice, he was a talented news radio veteran and a valued part of our show. He was so good the company, Cumulus, put two more stations on his plate, ripping a valued team member away from us.

As hosts, Amy and I had to assume Bill wasn’t able to listen to the show anymore because he
was too busy gathering and preparing his reports for the other stations. Then he was shipped out of the building to do his work from home which made his insights and witty exchanges
impossible. We couldn’t talk to each other off the air. We couldn’t exchange glances, smiles, and hand signals or bump into each other in the hall. Our show suffered and our audience became a bit more detached.

Bill Jackson, real name Dale Kuckelburg, was also significantly detached from his career.

But I digress. The biggest problem with traffic reports is the shotgun approach I mentioned,
telling everybody in our listening area driving to their unique destinations how traffic is snarled thirty miles away. Good god, we have apps in our cars that do a much better job in real time.

How about the weather? What the hell, we’re swinging the ax here. Let’s be realistic.

There isn’t a day in my life that I don’t wake up with a fair idea of what weather I should expect. I don’t need someone on the radio telling me to carry an umbrella. If it’s iffy the immediate and highly local details are now available at the touch of an app. When the weather becomes of critical and life-threatening importance it’s a major news story and that’s when local radio news shines, making it the center of our continuous attention, not just a regular feature at scheduled times.

It’s your radio station, do what you think is best. I’m only suggesting that you might want to
reevaluate all the things we’ve all taken for granted for far too long.

News radio has always been an interruptive format. We promise listeners “the news you need” in the time it takes them to drive to work. They understand that they’ll receive useful and
interesting content in exchange for frequent subject switching and sponsorships. The great news stations know how to capitalize on that agreement but too many have sold their souls to
commercial clutter that chokes a news team’s ability to serve the promised meal.

As if 22 minutes of inane and repetitive commercials per hour aren’t bad enough programmers, struggling to do their work in a hurricane of increasing spotloads, add to the clutter with recorded promos that simply beseech listeners to keep listening while offering nothing of substance. Meanwhile, the same programmers tell talent to tease, tease, tease the subjects they’ll talk about six, twelve, and twenty minutes from now.

I know the business reality. Radio — especially news radio — is struggling to meet the profit insistence of corporate boards and the overhead needs of staying afloat locally. But at some point, we must answer the question, who do we have to serve first, our clients or our audience?

Station managers and their corporate masters have to stop issuing profit mandates without
offering programmers the opportunity to do their jobs, to provide more valuable content while
limiting commercial minutes, sponsorship rhetoric, and eliminating distracting bells and
whistles.

Clean your clock. Stop filling empty circles with stuff that made sense 50 years ago but is merely clutter today.

The only way to think outside the box is to get rid of the box.

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BNM Writers

AM 680 WCBM Leapt Into Action As the Francis Scott Key Bridge Collapsed

Our employees live and work here and know what’s important to our listeners.

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As Americans woke up to a cargo ship hitting Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge Tuesday morning, the crew at AM 680 WCBM was already hard at work gathering the facts.

Just before 1:30 AM, a cargo ship lost power exiting the Baltimore harbor, striking a support beam that toppled the 47-year-old structure. In the wreckage, six people working on the bridge died, while drivers were rescued from the rubble in the chilly waters of the Curtis Bay.

The AM news/talk station — which celebrated its 100th anniversary Thursday — went wall-to-wall breaking coverage, something most outlets now avoid because of budget concerns. 680 WCBM morning host and Program Director Sean Casey told BNM in an email exchange how his crews handled the breaking news.


BNM: When did you guys hit the air with breaking news coverage?

Sean Casey: We first broke in with updates at 3:30 AM, approximately two hours after the bridge collapsed. Breaking news updates continued every half hour until 6 AM.”

BNM: How did you coordinate coverage in those moments?

SC: Full wall-to-wall coverage started at 6 AM and included full newscasts as well as interviews with state and local law enforcement agencies, eyewitness call-ins, and our national news partners. Our producer made call-outs and our news department shifted to full-blown local coverage.

BNM: How much experience did you have in putting together coverage of an event like that on the fly?

SC: Having been on the air during 9/11, I used the same formula that listeners want to know: Who, What, When, and Where? The why will come later.

BNM: How does your coverage show the importance of both local radio and AM radio?

SC: In times of breaking news events that impact our listeners, local AM radio stations are more in tune with the local listening audience. Our employees live and work here and know what’s important to our listeners. We also know the local players and officials and can get immediate reaction.

The talk component of our news/talk format offers listeners a chance to vent, share, and communicate with each other in good and bad times. This is why AM radio is still relevant. In some emergencies you can lose your cell service or have too weak of a signal, AM radio remains viable for in-car listening and at home with battery backup.

The AM 680 WCBM morning host and Program Director concluded his thoughts by noting the importance of a team effort, not only in coverage of breaking news events but also in operating a successful station and business as a whole.

“One of the biggest concerns we have is budgetary. More and more AM stations are abandoning the format because of its expense. Very few can afford a live and local news staff and show hosts,” Casey told Barrett News Media.

“Now more than ever, it’s vital that there be synergy between ownership, sales, and programming to maximize ratings and revenue so that we can continue to deliver vital information to listeners in our market.”

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BNM Writers

News is the Only Thing Missing From Election Coverage

Coverage of the election is, as we’ve discussed, still very horse-race-centric, and there’s been, of course, coverage of the various Trump court cases, but where is the coverage of exactly what the candidates plan to do if elected?

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The first thought I had when I heard NBC had hired Ronna McDaniel as a commentator for $300,000 a year was to wonder how many actual journalists they could have hired for that money. Then, I recalled that NBC had laid off dozens of news staffers just a few months ago. Then, I remembered that I had just recently written a column decrying news organizations throwing pretty much anybody on the air as a “pundit” and this….

This was worse. It’s one thing to grab some rando who happened to be a minor functionary for the Executive Branch. It’s another to hire someone whose job was to promote election denialism and pretend that her opinion is something valuable for viewers. And, yes, it’s just as ridiculous when news organizations hire former presidential press secretaries (that’s you, Jen Psaki and Sean Spicer), their very jobs were to spin everything in their bosses’ favor and now you’re going to pay them big salaries for, um, what? Because they “have a name” or you’re afraid someone else will snap them up? Why them?

The McDaniel deal lasted five days, one completely unilluminating interview, and one unexpected Chuck Todd spine-growing outburst, so it’ll all blow over soon enough. The problem is, though, the part about having fired several news staffers, and what it means in an election year on both the national and local levels. If you have the money to hire an alleged pundit – any alleged pundit – you have the money to hire reporters, and I don’t mean anchors or opinion show hosts.

Coverage of the election is, as we’ve discussed, still very horse-race-centric, and there’s been, of course, coverage of the various Trump court cases, but where is the coverage of exactly what the candidates plan to do if elected? Who’s probing Project 2025 and why isn’t it front-page, first-segment news? Who’s pressing the Biden administration on Gaza? Is anyone reporting on the candidates’ record on climate change?

Beyond prescription drug prices, is anyone digging into the broken healthcare system and demanding answers from the candidates about what they’ll do to fix it (and not letting Trump get away with “I’ll have a better plan, a beautiful plan” without a single specific detail, like they did in 2016)? Why didn’t anyone focus on, for example, the GOP candidate for governor of North Carolina and his incendiary past comments well before the primary?

Pundits are not going to do the legwork on the issues; they’ll just talk about swing states while John King and Steve Kornacki point at their touchscreen maps. We need reporting on the things that matter (and can affect that horse race, even if most people have made up their minds). It shouldn’t just be Pro Publica and scattered independent journalists doing the dirty work.

Honestly, I don’t want to hear the complaints about the quality of the candidates or how this is a rerun or any of that. (We’ll leave that to The New York Times.) We are a horribly underinformed electorate and we got the horse race we deserve. It might just be idealists like me who think that, just maybe, the news media can play a role in educating the public and bursting the bubbles and echo chambers. This country has survived and prospered for a few centuries with the press shining a light on injustice and corruption.

Now, when we need that most, they’re more concerned with what they think will bring them ratings and money (although someone will have to explain to me who thought having Ronna McDaniel as a paid commentator would draw a single viewer to NBC).

Here’s a thought: Don’t lay off reporters, especially in an election year.  Assign them to dig deep on issues that matter to the voters.

Let the pundits talk about that.

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