via pjmedia:
New CNN chairman and CEO Chris Licht is not to be envied. He has taken over a cable news network that is bleeding profits and viewers with little prospect of improvement anytime soon.
Licht discovered, to his horror, that the network was massively dependent on Donald Trump for ratings. Without Trump to headline CNN’s news coverage, no one was very much interested in the biased commentary and left-wing slant to the news that became CNN’s hallmark.
CNN’s profits are expected to fall below $1 billion for the first time in many years. And its prime-time coverage is drawing less than 700,000 viewers a night. Clearly, Licht had to do something.
Friday morning, Licht convened a virtual editorial meeting to discuss some of the changes he wants to make at the network.
“I want to acknowledge that this is a time of significant change, and I know that many of you are unsettled,” Licht said, according to the Hollywood Reporter, who quoted multiple people on the call. “There will be more changes, and you might not understand it or like it.”
Wow. CNN’s Brian Stelter closed his show by saying “We must make sure we don’t give platforms to those who are lying to our faces.” Then, he was fired — and the very next hour Jake Tapper let Dan Crenshaw lie to his face with no fact-checks or pushback. Journalism at CNN is dead.
— Pete Rostow (@pete_rostow) August 22, 2022
Is Don Lemon the Next to be Purged from CNN?
Spencer had the news about CNN’s Brian Stelter this week. He’s gone. The host of “Reliable Sources” was given the ax amid CNN’s front office shake-up and reorganization of the news outlet’s coverage, which has been pilloried as pro-Democratic Party propaganda. The new management at CNN wants to return to the days when CNN was more straight news, less drama, and not the subject of attacks over media bias for peddling explicit Democratic National Committee talking points.
Longtime legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin also announced he was leaving, opting to retire and write a book. Toobin had emerged from the wilderness after The New Yorker fired him in 2020 following a humiliating incident where he exposed himself to the magazine’s staff during a Zoom call. When Stelter was given the boot, people asked if Don Lemon, another insufferable fixture at the network, would be next. That could be in the cards, as a source is spilling the names of who’s next on the butcher’s bill. Yes, Don Lemon is on there:
They go on "The final 'stay or go' has not been finalized and more names will be added"
— Jon Nicosia (@NewsPolitics) August 19, 2022
h/t Ed Driscoll