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CNN is in flux. It has a brand new proprietor, and a brand new boss, who guarantees to remake the information channel and has advised staff to be ready for “a time of change.”
Most of these modifications have but to manifest. However one of many first ones — canceling its long-running Dependable Sources present and pushing out anchor Brian Stelter — have already unsettled some CNN staff and viewers.
However the larger query floating over one of many world’s largest and most vital information organizations is why it’s altering. Is it as a result of the CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, its new proprietor, needs an overhaul? Or is it on the behest of a conservative billionaire investor within the firm who sits on its board?
That billionaire is John Malone, a legend within the cable TV enterprise and one who has deep and longstanding ties with David Zaslav, the CEO of WBD. Folks near each males insist that Zaslav is remaking CNN as a result of he needs to for each enterprise and editorial causes, and never as a result of Malone has advised him to.
However complicating that narrative is the truth that Malone has repeatedly wished, in public, for CNN to remake itself. And his prescription occurs to sync with the brand new CNN agenda: A plan to steer the channel away from what Malone and others name a liberal bias they are saying muddles opinion and information. And to shift it towards a supposedly centrist, just-the-facts bent.
In November 2021, Malone sat down for an hour-long interview with CNBC, the place he held forth on the state of the pay-TV enterprise — the place he made his $10 billion fortune — and loads of different matters.
One in every of them was CNN — on the time, owned by AT&T, however scheduled to grow to be a part of WBD, an organization that Malone would personal a chunk of together with a seat on its board. Malone waved away one little bit of recurring hypothesis — that WBD would wish to promote CNN — after which provided some programming recommendation for the brand new firm:
“I want to see CNN evolve again to the sort of journalism that it began with, and truly have journalists, which might be distinctive and refreshing,” he mentioned. Then he recommended a mannequin: “Fox Information, in my view, has adopted an attention-grabbing trajectory of attempting to have ‘information’ information, I imply some precise journalism, embedded in a program schedule of all opinions.”
Malone’s feedback didn’t resonate a lot past a few locations: At Fox News, which responded with glee, and inside CNN, the place they sounded alarm bells.
These bells began ringing once more final week when the corporate pushed CNN media reporter Brian Stelter out of his job. As I’ve reported, some people in and outside CNN believed there was a direct through line between Malone’s perspective on CNN and Stelter’s departure. The speculation: Stelter, a frequent critic of Fox Information, was let go both at Malone’s direct urging or by managers who wished to please the investor.
That principle is hotly contested by staff and executives at CNN, WBD, and Liberty Media, Malone’s holding firm. “It’s not consistent with John’s character or fashion that he could be doing that,” says Liberty CEO Greg Maffei.
There’s additionally a center floor between the 2 arguments: Malone meant what he mentioned however didn’t suppose he was meddling together with his soon-to-be property.
“I don’t suppose John would suppose it professional for him to present particular path on protection or personnel. However I don’t suppose he would restrain himself from saying what he thinks on general content material. And he most likely wouldn’t view his feedback as revealing a bias,” says former Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes, who’s identified Malone for the reason that late Seventies.
What we do know: Malone made his feedback in November. In February, Zaslav introduced he was hiring TV producer Chris Licht to run CNN after which the group promptly started messaging its plans to “push CNN again to laborious information, and away from red-hot liberal opining.” And now one of many faces most frequently critiqued by CNN’s right-wing competitor Fox Information is out of a job.
Malone is well-known within the pay TV world, the place in the course of the Eighties and Nineteen Nineties he held extra energy than arguably some other govt or investor. And for some time, some TV watchers knew who he was as nicely, when he turned a stand-in for all the pieces individuals hated about cable TV on the time. Al Gore memorably referred to as him “Darth Vader” on the Senate flooring.
However that was some time in the past, and until you’re paying lots of consideration to company media possession, it’s possible you’ll not know who he’s at this level. Let’s sketch it out.
Malone, who was raised in Connecticut and graduated from Yale with levels in economics and engineering, traveled west and made his fortune by getting in on the bottom flooring of the cable TV enterprise within the Seventies.
In its earliest years, cable was bought as a strategy to ship broadcast channels in areas the place regular TV antennas wouldn’t work, just like the Rocky Mountains. Malone constructed up his Denver-based firm Tele-Communications Inc. right into a cable Goliath by rolling up a sequence of small mom-and-pop operators utilizing debt financing. Alongside the way in which, he used his energy as a distributor to extract possession stakes in cable TV programmers like Fox Information and QVC. He cashed out by selling to AT&T for $48 billion in 1999.
Since then, Malone has purchased and bought and swapped corporations and stakes in corporations time and again, at all times with a watch on conserving his taxes as little as attainable. He now owns a portfolio that features significant possession in all the pieces from satellite tv for pc music service SiriusXM to baseball’s Atlanta Braves to Stay Nation, the ticketing and live performance big. And till final 12 months, he was the main pressure behind Discovery, the cable programmer greatest identified for actuality TV reveals like Deadliest Catch. He plucked NBC govt David Zaslav to run Discovery in 2006.
That relationship has given Zaslav a strong mentor. It has additionally made Zaslav very rich, via a series of giant stock-based compensation packages. The 2 males have been in fixed contact through telephone calls and walk-and-talks through the years.
“Anyone who underestimates the quantity of area that [Malone] occupies in David’s strategic thoughts and emotional bandwidth has simply not adopted the final decade,” says one in all Zaslav’s buddies. “He’s in awe of John,” says one other Zaslav pal.
The 2 males do have very completely different politics: Zaslav has been a constant donor to Democrats; Malone is conservative/libertarian whose bona fides embrace a former board seat on the Cato Institute, the libertarian suppose tank, and a $250,000 donation to Donald Trump’s 2017 inaugural committee. (Two years later, Malone had pivoted: He advised CNBC that Trump generated an excessive amount of chaos and shouldn’t have a second time period. “Look, I feel lots of the issues Trump has tried to do — figuring out issues and attempting to resolve them — has been nice. I simply don’t suppose he’s the correct man to do it,” he mentioned.)
Malone has additionally mentioned he admires Rupert Murdoch as a enterprise frenemy and shares a political viewpoint with the Fox Information proprietor: “Rupert is form of like I’m. He’s a libertarian, however he thinks we should always have a robust army,” he advised the Financial Times in 2017.
However in contrast to Murdoch, who loves each proudly owning information retailers and getting his arms soiled working them, there’s no report of Malone entering into the effective particulars of the properties he owns.
Which brings us again to the weird nature of his pronouncements about CNN final fall. Whereas Malone has beforehand talked about his affection for Fox Information — the US “wants Fox Information or one thing prefer it. As a result of in any other case, all the pieces’s leftist,” he advised FT — it’s uncommon for him to opine about programming selections in his personal portfolio of properties. You’ll be hard-pressed, as an illustration, to seek out him commenting on the music acts Stay Nation books for its venues.
And that’s why some individuals who know Zaslav are satisfied Malone has advised Zaslav his theories concerning the path he’d like CNN to go. And that given their relationship, Zaslav could be all ears. Below that principle, Malone — who now owns a small sliver of Warner Brothers Discovery as a substitute of a lot of Discovery — wouldn’t have to explicitly inform Zaslav easy methods to run CNN. He would simply broadly lay out his view of the world, which Zaslav put into place by hiring Licht, who had produced Morning Joe on MSNBC, the CBS Morning Information, and most lately The Late Present With Steven Colbert.
That argument raises actual hackles at numerous corners of the WBD, the place defenders of each Zaslav and Licht say the 2 males aren’t taking marching orders from Malone — it’s simply that all of them agree.
Largely agree, that’s: Licht’s supporters acknowledge that Malone’s feedback holding up Fox Information as a paragon of journalism could be searing for CNN staff, as an illustration. However they’re aligned on the concept a CNN that occupies a center floor between Fox and MSNBC is sweet for American democracy in addition to WBD’s enterprise prospects as a result of then CNN can seize an viewers that doesn’t need partisan information from the left or proper.
The concept Fox Information is a journalism outlet, versus cynical pandering within the type of a information channel that often stories information, isn’t value debating right here. However if you happen to wanted convincing, you could possibly, say, learn Jane Mayer’s piece about the channel’s complete immersion with the Trump White House.
Or, extra pointedly, you could possibly ask Chris Wallace, the longtime Fox anchor who left for CNN final 12 months, saying that he might now not abide the channel’s protection — significantly the way in which it handled Trump’s 2020 election lies and the January 6 riots. Working as a journalist at Fox had grow to be “increasingly unsustainable,” Wallace mentioned.
Malone, who declined an interview request for this story, seems to have been stung by the furor that erupted in media circles when Stelter was let go final week. In an e-mail to the New York Times, he mentioned he had nothing to do with Stelter’s departure, including that whereas he wished “the ‘information’ portion of CNN to be extra centrist…I’m not in management or immediately concerned.”
Malone doubled down on that argument in one other Times story a few days later, complaining that CNN had melded opinion and information, and holding up “Fox Information host Bret Baier… [as] a reliably centrist newscaster.”
Which, once more, echoes what new CNN boss Chris Licht has been telling staff he needs to do together with his community — to take away the notion, which he thinks is correct, that CNN has a liberal bias, and that an excessive amount of of its programming has grow to be “outrage porn.”
I’m with Licht, by the way in which, in relation to critiquing CNN’s reliance on breathlessness on the whole. And an early resolution he made to tamp down its use of “breaking information” branding for nearly each merchandise it talks about is a effective thought.
However arguing that CNN misplaced its approach in the course of the Trump period looks like a misguided critique, on condition that CNN, like each different information outlet, was coping with an unprecedented circumstance — People had elected a president who routinely lied about all the pieces and whose destruction of democratic norms had been capped off by an effort to overturn a free election.
I feel it’s additionally vital to know how 24-hour cable TV information operates: Viewership spikes when there’s a real information occasion, however past these uncommon moments, information channels battle to retain viewers. Which is why all of them gin up pretend urgency about no matter they suppose their viewers will reply to.
Pre-Trump, CNN’s resolution was to concentrate on jaw-dropping however not terribly vital occasions and discuss them incessantly — see, as an illustration, its round-the-clock coverage of the “Poop Cruise,” which concerned a Carnival cruise ship and…poop. Or the mysterious disappearance of a Malaysian airliner, which prompted CNN anchor Don Lemon to ask if a black hole might be the culprit.
So if you happen to had been cynical sufficient — like me — you could possibly merely describe Trump as a unending poop cruise, assured to create new content material every day.
And I don’t know the way Licht can remedy that systemic drawback, with or with out Trump. And whilst he guarantees to function extra reporting over bloviating, CNN already boasts a robust and well-supported newsroom, which is why it could actually do glorious protection in Washington and around the world. I additionally don’t suppose that Licht is ever going to persuade a Fox Information fan — whether or not it’s Malone or anybody else — that CNN is now a centrist information outlet, irrespective of who he hires or fires. However no matter modifications he does make could also be significant, particularly because the US heads right into a charged election cycle.
It’s attainable, by the way in which, that none of it will matter a lot to CNN’s proprietor in the long term. Some business sources I’ve talked to argue that although CNN makes round a billion {dollars} a 12 months in revenue, it gained’t imply a lot to the long-term way forward for Warner Bros. Discovery.
That’s as a result of WBD has a lot larger issues. For starters, like each large media firm that makes most of its cash from conventional TV, its viewers are departing every day without spending a dime and paid digital choices. And WBD has particular challenges. Like a inventory value that values the mixed firm at $33 billion — lower than half of what Time Warner alone was value in 2016 when it bought to AT&T. It additionally has an enormous pile of debt to service, which is without doubt one of the causes Zaslav is reducing initiatives and workers.
Malone has constantly argued that large media corporations have to consolidate with the intention to attain the size they’ll have to compete globally — and by merging his Discovery with Warner Media, he’s already made a step in that path.
Nevertheless it’s attainable to see one other transaction down the street, the place WBD picks up one other asset, and Malone’s energy will get much more restricted. Or perhaps it merely sells itself to a much bigger participant, and Malone will get out of the enterprise altogether.
At that time, it wouldn’t matter what he thinks of CNN. However no matter CNN has grow to be by then might be essential for the remainder of us.