On Monday, Chris Wallace announced that he was leaving CNN after a three-year stint that paid him around $7 million per year. But Wallace won’t be the only CNN employee departing the network in the coming weeks and months.
According to new reports from Puck News and the Daily Mail, CNN plans to lay off “hundreds of employees” and some “top stars” as its ratings continue to crater.
CNN’s disappointing election night returns underscored the bleak future the network faces. In 2016, CNN was the most-watched television network on air during election night, averaging 13.3 million viewers in primetime. Yet on Tuesday, CNN averaged just 5.1 million in primetime, losing to MSNBC for the first time in its history.
The network has set several viewership lows over the past four years, in primetime and total day viewership. CNN lost more than 40% of its year-over-year viewership last week, following Trump’s victory.
CNN’s declines are particularly concerning given the salaries of some of its talents – specifically, Anderson Cooper, who reportedly makes $20 million a year.
Cooper, who does not draw a fraction of what Fox News’ Jesse Watters and MSNBC’ Chris Hayes’ do at 8 pm, is not worth an eight-figure salary. Nor are Erin Burnett and Wolf Blitzer worth their respective salaries of reportedly $6 million and $7 million.
However, talents with long-term guaranteed contracts are not easy to dismiss. Often, it’s the easier-to-fire producers and coordinators who bear the consequences of network declines, thus the plan to lay off “hundreds of employees.”
In the meantime, new CNN CEO Mark Thompson plans to focus less on television ratings and more on digital and streaming.
“Since former BBC director general and New York Times Company C.E.O. Mark Thompson took over the network more than a year ago, he has embarked on an ostensibly future-facing strategy that prioritizes digital and streaming growth over linear… all while hoping to manage the decline of the cable asset to prevent this transformation from turning into Chernobyl. On one level, this strategy seems obvious, particularly given the rapid acceleration of cord-cutting, and the fact that the linear asset still pays the bills,” Puck reports.
The issue is branding.
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Whether it’s linear television or streaming, the network does not give viewers an adequate reason to choose CNN over the bevy of other media options. At least viewers of MSNBC, which is also diminishing, know what they are getting with MSNBC: hyper-partisan left-wing propaganda.
What is CNN at this point? We aren’t sure. And we aren’t sure CNN knows either.
CNN is not quite as hard left and anti-Trump as it was under Jeff Zucker. But it’s certainly not the straight-news operation it was supposed to be under Chris Licht.
Perhaps CNN can be best described as a news network that desperately wants to convince viewers of its credibility but is marred with hosts irreparably damaged by TDS and the Marxian mind virus.
It’s not working. CNN lacks as much credibility as it does cachet.
Abby Phillip, Laura Coates, Kasie Hunt, and John Berman are C-level players cast as stars. Jim Acosta is a buffoon. And re-signing Brain Stelter to play praetorian guard for lying corporate media is nauseating.
CNN is broken. There is no easy fix.
Parent company Warner Bros. Discovery might be best suited to sell this thing before it becomes a severe financial drain.
