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 adjustments have but to manifest. But one of many first ones — canceling its long-running Reliable Sources present and pushing out anchor Brian Stelter — has already unsettled some CNN staff and viewers.
But the larger query floating over one of many world’s largest and most essential 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 business and one who has deep and longstanding ties with David Zaslav, the CEO of WBD. People near each males insist that Zaslav is remaking CNN as a result of he needs to for each business and editorial causes, and never as a result of Malone has advised him to.
But 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.
“I would like to see CNN evolve”
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 business — the place he made his $10 billion fortune — and loads of different matters.
One of them was CNN — on the time, owned by AT&T, however scheduled to turn out to be a part of WBD, an organization that Malone would personal a bit of together with a seat on its board. Malone waved away one little bit of recurring hypothesis — that WBD would need to promote CNN — after which provided some programming recommendation for the brand new firm:
“I would like to see CNN evolve back to the kind of journalism that it started with, and actually have journalists, which would be unique and refreshing,” he stated. Then he steered a mannequin: “Fox News, in my opinion, has followed an interesting trajectory of trying to have ‘news’ news, I mean some actual 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.
Those 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 folks in and outdoors CNN believed there was a direct by way of line between Malone’s perspective on CNN and Stelter’s departure. The principle: Stelter, a frequent critic of Fox News, was let go both at Malone’s direct urging or by managers who needed 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 in keeping with John’s character or style that he would be doing that,” says Liberty CEO Greg Maffei.
There’s additionally a center floor between the 2 arguments: Malone meant what he stated however didn’t suppose he was meddling together with his soon-to-be property.
“I don’t think John would think it legitimate for him to give specific direction on coverage or personnel. But I don’t think he would restrain himself from saying what he thinks on overall content. And he probably wouldn’t view his comments as revealing a bias,” says former Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes, who’s identified Malone for the reason that late Nineteen 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 organization promptly started messaging its plans to “push CNN back to hard news, and away from red-hot liberal opining.” And now one of many faces most frequently critiqued by CNN’s right-wing competitor Fox News is out of a job.
“He’s in awe of John”
Malone is well-known within the pay TV world, the place throughout the Nineteen Eighties and Nineteen Nineties he held extra energy than arguably some other government or investor. And for some time, some TV watchers knew who he was as effectively, when he turned a stand-in for every little thing folks hated about cable TV on the time. Al Gore memorably known as him “Darth Vader” on the Senate ground.
But that was some time in the past, and until you’re paying a whole lot of consideration to company media possession, chances are 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 ground of the cable TV business within the Nineteen Seventies.
In its earliest years, cable was offered as a solution 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. Along the way in which, he used his energy as a distributor to extract possession stakes in cable TV programmers like Fox News and QVC. He cashed out by promoting to AT&T for $48 billion in 1999.
Since then, Malone has purchased and offered and swapped firms and stakes in firms time and again, all the time with a watch on maintaining his taxes as little as potential. He now owns a portfolio that features significant possession in every little thing from satellite tv for pc music service SiriusXM to baseball’s Atlanta Braves to Live Nation, the ticketing and live performance large. And till final 12 months, he was the main power behind Discovery, the cable programmer finest identified for actuality TV reveals like Deadliest Catch. He plucked NBC government David Zaslav to run Discovery in 2006.
That relationship has given Zaslav a strong mentor. It has additionally made Zaslav very rich, by way of a sequence of large stock-based compensation packages. The two males have been in fixed contact by way of cellphone calls and walk-and-talks over the years.
“Anybody who underestimates the amount of space that [Malone] occupies in David’s strategic mind and emotional bandwidth has just not followed the last decade,” says considered one of Zaslav’s mates. “He’s in awe of John,” says one other Zaslav pal.
The two males do have very totally different politics: Zaslav has been a constant donor to Democrats; Malone is conservative/libertarian whose bona fides embody 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 think a lot of the things Trump has tried to do — identifying problems and trying to solve them — has been great. I just don’t think he’s the right guy to do it,” he stated.)
Malone has additionally stated he admires Rupert Murdoch as a business frenemy and shares a political viewpoint with the Fox News proprietor: “Rupert is sort of like I am. He’s a libertarian, but he thinks we should have a strong military,” he advised the Financial Times in 2017.
But in contrast to Murdoch, who loves each proudly owning information retailers and getting his fingers soiled operating them, there’s no document of Malone entering into the superb particulars of the properties he owns.
Which brings us again to the bizarre nature of his pronouncements about CNN final fall. While Malone has beforehand talked about his affection for Fox News — the US “needs Fox News or something like it. Because otherwise, everything’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 example, to search out him commenting on the music acts Live 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 can be all ears. Under that principle, Malone — who now owns a small sliver of Warner Brothers Discovery as a substitute of a lot of Discovery — wouldn’t must explicitly inform Zaslav 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 News, and most just lately The Late Show With Steven Colbert.
“I am not in control or directly involved”
That argument raises actual hackles at varied 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.
Mostly agree, that’s: Licht’s supporters acknowledge that Malone’s feedback holding up Fox News as a paragon of journalism can be searing for CNN staff, as an example. But they’re aligned on the concept a CNN that occupies a center floor between Fox and MSNBC is nice for American democracy in addition to WBD’s business prospects as a result of then CNN can seize an viewers that doesn’t need partisan information from the left or proper.
The concept that Fox News is a journalism outlet, versus cynical pandering within the type of a information channel that sometimes experiences information, isn’t price debating right here. But when you wanted convincing, you possibly can, say, learn Jane Mayer’s piece concerning the channel’s full immersion with the Trump White House.
Or, extra pointedly, you possibly can 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 turn out to be “increasingly unsustainable,” Wallace stated.
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 stated he had nothing to do with Stelter’s departure, including that whereas he needed “the ‘news’ portion of CNN to be more centrist … I am not in control or directly involved.”
Malone doubled down on that argument in one other Times story just a few days later, complaining that CNN had melded opinion and information, and holding up “Fox News 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 turn out to be “outrage porn.”
I’m with Licht, by the way in which, with regards to critiquing CNN’s reliance on breathlessness generally. And an early determination he made to tamp down its use of “breaking news” branding for almost each merchandise it talks about is a superb thought.
But arguing that CNN misplaced its method throughout the Trump period looks like a misguided critique, on condition that CNN, like each different information outlet, was coping with an unprecedented circumstance: Americans had elected a president who routinely lied about every little thing and whose destruction of democratic norms was capped off by an effort to overturn a free election.
I believe it’s additionally essential 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 wrestle 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 deal with jaw-dropping however not terribly essential occasions and discuss them incessantly — see, as an example, its round the clock protection 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 gap could be the wrongdoer.
So when you have been cynical sufficient — like me — you possibly can merely describe Trump as a endless poop cruise, assured to create new content material day by day.
And I don’t understand how Licht can resolve that systemic drawback, with or with out Trump. And at the same time as he guarantees to characteristic extra reporting over bloviating, CNN already boasts a powerful and well-supported newsroom, which is why it could possibly do glorious protection in Washington and around the globe. I additionally don’t suppose that Licht is ever going to persuade a Fox News fan — whether or not it’s Malone or anybody else — that CNN is now a centrist information outlet, regardless of who he hires or fires. But no matter adjustments he does make could also be significant, particularly because the US heads right into a charged election cycle.
It’s potential, by the way in which, that none of this can matter a lot to CNN’s proprietor in the long term. Some business sources I’ve talked to argue that regardless that 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 huge media firm that makes most of its money from conventional TV, its viewers are departing day by 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 price in 2016 when it offered to AT&T. It additionally has an enormous pile of debt to service, which is without doubt one of the causes Zaslav is slicing tasks and employees.
Malone has persistently argued that huge media firms must consolidate with the intention to attain the dimensions they’ll must compete globally — and by merging his Discovery with Warner Media, he’s already made a step in that path.
But it’s potential 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 possibly it merely sells itself to an even bigger participant and Malone will get out of the business altogether.
At that time, it wouldn’t matter what he thinks of CNN. But no matter CNN has turn out to be by then will likely be essential for the remainder of us.
