The great political sage (and former Texas agriculture commissioner) Jim Hightower once said, “There’s nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos.” A progressive Democrat in a state that was rapidly turning hard-red Republican, Hightower knew whereof he spoke.
And yet, that’s exactly where CNN sits, alongside stinky armored not-rats and sun-blasted paint, trying to find a durable and lucrative audience amid a serious ratings swoon, while also attempting to avoid that speeding semi-truck called industry-wide transformation. Short-term decisions made for financial exigencies may already be having long-term consequences. Like a five-day-old dead armadillo, CNN is starting to smell a little.
A year after changing corporate daddies to Warner Bros. Discovery and division leadership to Chris Licht, it’s fair to wonder where the preeminent TV news brand is headed.
As CNN showed in the early days of the Ukraine invasion, it still had the reach and bench of talented correspondents last year to thoroughly cover a big international story from multiple angles. None, and I repeat none, of its broadcast and cable competitors marshaled the same resources in such a comprehensive way. The only news organizations with anything like CNN’s global credibility are the surging The New York Times and a fading BBC.
Its online site, CNN.com, has been a semi-secret powerhouse too. It trails only the Times and, still somehow, Yahoo.com among the top U.S. news-publishing sites, according to SimilarWeb.com.
CNN.com had 1.78 billion visits over the past three month, with two-thirds on mobile, which made it the 34th-most popular site in the U.S. and 88th biggest on the planet, said SimilarWeb. That makes the website a force multiplier for the cable network, expanding its reach, reputation and revenue generation, especially during high-profile news cycles.
CNN.com traffic remains nearly double FoxNews.com (No. 119 globally, 997 million visitors past three months) and miles beyond digital afterthought MSNBC (No. 4,769 globally, 55 million visits).
Where CNN is not ahead is in, um, cable news.
Back when the Warner Bros. Discovery deal was aborning in late 2021, power-behind-the-throne and future WBD board member John Malone said he hoped CNN would get back to doing journalism.
That was a shot, ultimately, at all three cable news networks and their Trump-era obsessions with political divisions, partisan personalities and endless hot takes. Last summer, Malone took his journalism critique a bit further, telling the New York Times he hoped the news networks would do a better job distinguishing between news and opinion.
CEO David Zaslav and Licht duly tacked to the center. Company executives have made much of the number of Republican politicians and other conservative commentators they’ve had on air in recent months. The big-name/big-polarization personalities of primetime are largely gone.
Licht, meanwhile, has been trying to turn the morning newscast into something more like the personality-driven Morning Joe on MSNBC or CBS This Morning, both of which Licht previously headed.
He installed former primetime star Don Lemon into CNN This Morning with Poppy Harlow and Kaitlan Collins. The initial product did not thrive, especially after the run-and-gun Lemon said GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley was not “in her prime,” among other on-air gaffes and off-air conflicts with co-hosts. That fueled an Oscar-night rebuke from Michelle Yeoh and a time-out for “training” for Lemon.
Morning ratings, meanwhile, have been brutal: 360,000 total viewers/just 73,000 in the demo, versus Fox News’ 1.2 million total/170,000 in the demo. In response, two weeks ago, Licht swapped in new executive producers Laura Mensch and Chris Russell to stanch the stench.
Licht is also unveiling a new midday news block, CNN News Central, that debuts beginning this week. Two three-hour blocks of midday programming will emanate from New York and Washington, with new sets and a graphics-heavy look designed to evoke election-night bells and whistles.
And the suddenly personality-free primetime is being filled with one-off Town Hall programming and extended interviews.
So, big changes all the way around.
But there in the middle of the road, the company has mostly discovered the previously mentioned stiffening Cingulata and yellow stripes, but not much in the way of actual viewers.
Primetime ratings are down 61% this month, Nielsen says, and in the prized 18-49 demographic, the audience is down 40% over the past year.
That’s the worst of the Big Three, at a time when it’s tough to be a cable network, or a news operation in a non-campaign year. Cord-cutting across the industry whacks the big players such as CNN and ESPN worst because they make the most from both advertising and carriage fees. But bad numbers are bad numbers, and CNN is delivering a lot of bad numbers.
A company spokesman told the New York Post that CNN viewers are the youngest of the Big Three and the most in the demo that advertisers covet. Most importantly, “the impact of CNN’s journalism and the reach of the brand cannot be measured by a single metric.”
For his part, Zaslav told folks to perk up in a pep talk reported by the Post.
“Ratings be damned,” Zaslav said. “Let’s focus on who we are. This is our mission. This is our legacy. And this is our journey together.”
But the journey Zaslav has taken CNN’s remaining viewership and staff on has been quite a rough one, with a deeply problematic potential legacy that may manifest for years to come.
CNN lost hundreds of employees when Zaslav took over, in part because of his immediate closure of the newborn CNN Plus streaming service. WBD executives also closed CNN’s original-production division, which made documentaries, series and other projects.
Those moves may have made sense given WBD’s crippling $55 billion in debt (now hacked to a still brutal $48 billion). But they don’t position CNN to thrive in a post-cable future.
Subscription service CNN Plus was supposed to be the future as cable TV continued to shrivel. Whether a stand-alone niche service, particularly at the mammoth scale that launched CNN Plus, could reach sustainability is a reasonable question to ask.
So, maybe something like CNN Plus won’t ever make sense as a replacement for the cable network. What then?
Will live CNN news programming join HBO Max, just as Discovery Plus content is doing, to create a somewhat undersized analogue for the traditional cable bundle?
Live network news programming from NBC and CBS is already part of Peacock and Paramount Plus, respectively. Maybe that’s the next step, but will it generate the resources needed to sustain CNN operations, and at what subscription price?
Similarly, the decision to ax CNN’s original production unit clearly saved money. But if Zaslav wants to generate more cash by selling programming to third-party outlets, it won’t be coming from CNN, whose documentaries, films and specials might otherwise continue to be attractive, award-winning, audience favorites.
Great journalism is expensive, the opposite of evergreen, and sometimes dangerous, as demonstrated by this week’s seizure of The Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich by the Russian government for, basically, being an American reporter in wartime.
But CNN matters. In its four decades of operation, the network has been an important source of reliable, in-the-moment coverage of major events in the U.S. and far beyond. It would be heartening to see Zaslav and Licht demonstrate a deeper appreciation for the public trust and irreplaceable asset they’ve been gifted to run, and to make sure it’s positioned to thrive for decades to come. ■
