Here’s why:
CNN White House Correspondent John Harwood offered this reasonable analysis. A short while later, he announced he’ll no longer be at the network. It’s pretty clear that CNN’s new leadership is aiming to become a lesser Fox News. pic.twitter.com/bDd8gBcgMt
— Charlotte Clymer 🏳️⚧️🇺🇦 (@cmclymer) September 2, 2022
I don’t generally watch the 24 hour news networks at all, but this is spectacularly egregious. Harwood made a reasonable statement about the current US political situation, and got fired by an upper management that is probably heavily Republican.
Just switch it off. It’s not hard.
Yeah this cannot be good: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/aug/24/the-changes-at-cnn-look-politically-motivated-that-should-concern-us-all
More media capture by the right wing? Full on Schmittian assault upon the enemy…US.
Taking it into that faux wrestling video with Trump attacking CNN…CNN turns heel. Joins MAGA (NWO arc from WCW).
Get rid of your television completely. I haven’t had one for decades, and discovered I don’t miss it at all. I also refuse to pay for tv, so as to further enrich the rich by turning all public things into private piggy banks.
Internet, tv, and phone should not even be separate private services, but public utilities.
The CNN boss is Chris Licht, who was previously in charge of Stephen Colbert’s show. So, huh?
CNN’s new bosses are the people who run the Discovery networks, BTW. You know, the channels that were founded as a kind of commercial PBS, but which now focus on “the paranormal” and similar trash. They’re ruining HBO, too (acquired along with CNN as part of Time Warner).
@3 gotta look higher up than Licht
How about billionaire GOP men who want to make lots of money by turning CNN into another Fox?
I’m sure the part where a bunch of highly privileged white men are literally in charge of the news and media is completely fine, fair and not at all fascist. /s
https://www.vox.com/2022/8/26/23322761/cnn-john-malone-david-zaslav-chris-licht-brian-stelter-fox-peter-kafka-column
Just disabled the CNN app on my phone, not sure if I can uninstall it altogether…
Well, it is said, “No news is good news”
And “ignorance is bliss”.
Guess I can get my information from that street corner preacher or something…
THE ANTI-CHRYSLER IS HERE!!!
Cue the really bad car jokes and puns.
Not sure how closely related but describes the operating environment we are in: https://theconversation.com/carl-schmitt-nazi-era-philosopher-who-wrote-blueprint-for-new-authoritarianism-59835
@5: Does that mean we can expect Jake Tapper to be kicked out soon?
The firing of Brian Stelter, probably their best host, shows where they’re headed.
As I’ve mentioned here occasionally, I don’t watch TV anything, and I haven’t in over 31 years. I know that precisely because my partner and I turned off the TV and cut the cable in December 1990 shortly after our son was born. It was specifically because we were up early (thanks to the baby) with the TV on CNN. There was Wolf Blitzer blathering on about the US war with Iraq at 5:00 or 6:00 in the morning. She turned to me and said, how much is the cable costing us and I said, “Oh something like $30 a month.” We agreed that was too much for this propaganda spew. I’ve never regretted the decision.
Walter Solomon @11: From what I’ve seen, Stelter was a classic “both sides” “journalist”. I saw him recently get schooled by Masha Gessen on that point.
I can’t remember the last time I watched cable news. It’s probably been at least 10 years. There’s not enough news that matters to fill 24 hours, but we have 24 hour news networks. So they started filling things out with editorial content. That’s how we got Fox News. Gradually, the editorial content took over from the real news. That’s where we got OAN and Newsmax and all the other garbage out there.
We went from 24hr news, to 24hr news plus editorial content to 24hr editorial content in about two decades.
I just read in Heather Cox Richardson’s daily email, that “a source told Dan Froomkin of Press Watch that Harwood had been told last month he was being let go, despite his long-term contract, and that he used his last broadcast to send a message.”
I’ve been following the law/journalism twitters tracking the Trump/Mar-a-Lago documents cases, and that’s what I’ve seen retweeted as well.
Call me old fashioned but I still watch TV.
Free to air only.
A kot of good docos even if quite afew repeats, some good lve sports sometimes though getting frustartingly diminished and corrupted by pay-TV and the odd good or atleats nice ye candy and fun movie. Plus yes some news shows though am Aussie so have our ABCand SBS as my main viewing channels here.
Yeah, the only TV We’ve watched in decades has been videos: mostly kid shows for our growing son (many of them wonderful!), who’s now 21. So, the TV is pretty much off, other than an occasional movie that we get from the library (my wife is a librarian).
But I probably watch more than an hour or two of video on my computer every day, much of it by following links I find posted here on Pharyngula, especially the Endless Thread. CNN being destroyed is, I think, a big deal. Yes, they have always been frustratingly both-sides-ish, but they had reached a point, I think, where reality could no longer be denied. Some excellent reporting, commentary, and interviews are going to go silent. And we never have had enough truth to balance the increasingly insane lies.
I watch cable TV, but haven’t watched “news” for years.
I used to watch 60 Minutes until Steve Croft asked Obama leading, hostile questions, and Leslie Stahl threw puff ball questions at Antonin Scalia. I had stopped watch network “news”, when the supposedly respected Tom Brokaw started equivocating on the Iraq “War.”
There’s plenty of garbage on the internet, but plenty of thoughtful sites like this one to choose from.
I thought you might be amused by this take on the changes at CNN, from the Washington Post:
“CNN exits seen as part of shift to a less politically charged tone”
In Britain even the supposedly impartial BBC has long been suborned by the Tories.
With 8 major newspapers owned by billionaires supporting the idiot & corruption party, a big chunk of the population will remain brainwashed all their lives.
In Germany we have the Springer concern with the awful Bild-Zeitung, a cellulose variant of Pox News.
Just saw an online advert for a CNN piece complaining about the “wokeness” that’s ruining the new Lord of the Rings show. Which boils down to complaining that putting brown people into a show based on novels that pretty much never mentioned skin color ever is destroying it. Yeah, that definitely sounds like CNN is getting less political.
microraptor @22: Tolkien certainly mentioned skin colour, mostly (but not always) in a comparative way. So, in the prologue to tLotR,
Elsewhere, the ancestors of the Númenóreans are described as mostly “fair-skinned” but with some who are “swarthy”.
Stelter wasn’t a bothsides person, just watch his last show. It appears that all the people who speak out against Trump and oppose the endless bothsiding panels are being purged from CNN now. Harwood regularly spoke truth to power, and he got kicked out. Erin Burnett hasn’t been seen for weeks, Acosta might be next, or Don Lemon.
The loss of one news network by itself isn’t the big deal, but who will tell the truth to Americans after CNN is dead, maybe MSNBC? They need to make profits too, and are dependent on advertising dollars. I read on Twitter today from a former CNN insider that their advertising dollars always went up when the likes of Santorum came onto panels. Some anchors there will effortlessly adapt, like Brianna Keilor or Tapper, and others might just jump ship and do something else. But the network is as far as I can see, toast, thanks to their new MAGA owners misjudging the market.
Id have to turn it on to turn it off. I’ll pass.
CNN getting Murdoched without Murdoch.
I’m pretty sure Harwood made his statement already knowing that he had been forced out along with Brian Stelter.
What’s your point? Do you actually think the fact that he was showrunner for Colbert determines his politics? The guy is ambitious and probably doesn’t have much in the way of personal ethics. Licht announced that CNN wanted to “regain the trust” of the GOP, and to that end he sat out of sight in a room in Congress, having numerous one-on-one sessions with Republican members of Congress. Of course Licht didn’t originate this policy but the owners of CNN clearly picked him for a reason.
I know that people here are ignorantly in disdain of Twitter, but there have been extensive discussions there by media analysts of what is happening at CNN, including the firing Stelter and Harwood and the network’s outrageous mischaracterizations of Biden’s speech and “the two marines”, and numerous people have tweeted their intention to stop consuming CNN.
@22 “Just saw an online advert for a CNN piece complaining about the “wokeness” that’s ruining the new Lord of the Rings show.”
The headline is:
As noted on Twitter (which, unknown to people here, has become the primary communication medium of intellectuals) by Steve Silberman, it should have read “Racists protest inclusion of Black actors in ‘Lord of the Rings'”, and James Fallows added
Someone also retweeted a piece by progressive media analyst and critic Jay Rosen about “Many people believe” as dissociative language, a propaganda technique that makes people more susceptible to suggestion.
Then you should look more because that is blatantly stupid and wrong. Stelter was let go precisely because he isn’t.
Did you actually bother to watch the video? Stelter said there wasn’t a lot of information and there were multiple narratives, but called out Russia for being “not a free society; even asking questions about this could raise red flags in Moscow” and then points out the reasons to be skeptical of Russia’s video. And then he interviewed Masha Gessen, with his first comment noting that Russia put out contradictory messages, and he listened carefully as she explained why one shouldn’t pay any attention to Russian sources at all (which I think is unrealistic–even Amy Goodman will report on what they say and then characterize it, as Stelter did), and invited more of her analysis, rather than pushing back at it, arguing with her, etc. as bothsidesing journalists invariably do, if they would ever have Gessen on the air in the first place, and if they did they would have a bunch of braying fools on with her to drown out her voice. Your conclusion about him, even from just this one video, is absurd.