The Most Trusted Name in News™. The official slogan of The Washington Post, “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” as hilarious as it is in reference to WaPo, ain’t got nothin’ on CNN’s ROFL ridiculous claim.
I mean, just think about it: (erstwhile) Chris Cuomo. Don Lemon. Jim Acosta. Brian Stelter. Alisyn Camerota. Jake Tapper. Anderson Cooper. Fareed Zakaria. The list goes on; the bench is deep.
Yet, with all that “special” talent, CNN bottomed out bigly in 2021.
How far has the network that revolutionized round-the-clock news coverage when launched on June 1, 1980, fallen? For the week of December 6, CNN averaged just 585,000 total viewers in primetime, sending the hood ornament of “fake news” down to a pathetic 17th place among all basic cable networks.
Worse, CNN’s 120,000 viewers in the key primetime demographic were only good enough for a disastrous 31st place among cable stations. Yet? The song remains the same at The Most Trusted Name in News™.
I’m no cable news executive but I am a staunch adherent of a few basic truths of life. Principle among them in this case, when you’re in a hole, stop digging, and, if you’re banging your head against the wall and it hurts? Stop banging your head against the wall.
Yet. CNN, in all of its lapdog liberal media “brilliance,” continues to double-down — digging faster and banging its “fake news” head against that wall even harder. Smugly and arrogantly so. This... is CNN.
So what happened?
2020 was a yuuge year for cable news. The COVID pandemic, which CNN incessantly hyped and milked the ever-loving hell out of. Donald Trump, whom Stage 4 TDS-riddled CNN obsessed over, 24-x7. And “all of the above” capped by Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the election. Then came January 6 and it was nirvana for CNN. The bottom line: Jeff Zucker’s network could not have handcrafted a better “CNN year.”
Then what happened? One word: Biden.
The disastrous Biden presidency — shamelessly and embarrassingly defended by CNN — and all things associated with it has been largely responsible for CNN’s precipitous fall. Toss in “highlights” like Jeffrey Toobin’s “moment of pleasure” during a Zoom meeting, the arrogant disaster named Chris Cuomo, hapless Don Lemon and a host of others, and a couple of sex scandals, and CNN’s ship headed to the bottom.
Yahoo summed it up thusly:
Despite starting the year as the most-watched cable news network, CNN finished 2021 with only one program in the top-25 of cable news options: the network’s 9 p.m. ET slot that had, until recently, been anchored by Chris Cuomo.
John Malone, chairman of Liberty Media, which owns SiriusXM, and a leading shareholder of Discovery Inc., which earlier this year announced a merger with CNN’s parent company WarnerMedia, recently contrasted CNN with Fox News, as transcribed by Yahoo.
“Fox News, in my opinion, has followed an interesting trajectory of trying to have news, I mean some actual journalism, embedded in a program schedule of all opinions. And I think they’ve been relatively successful with a service like Bret Baier, and Brit Hume before him, that try to distinguish news from opinion.”
And CNN?
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… I do believe good journalism could have a role in this future portfolio that Discovery-TimeWarner’s going to represent.
While Malone was right, there is no way CNN could produce “good journalism” with its current cast of leftist misfits. “Sadly,” Stelter, Acosta, Lemon, & Co. would need to be shown the door. But alas, what on earth would we do without CNN to kick around? (MSNBC was unavailable for comment.)
Incidentally, after Chis Wallace announced he was leaving Fox News and “shockingly” abruptly hooked up with CNN, The Babylon Bee — the best satire site in the history of the universe — broke some “news” of its own about Wallace’s jump to CNN.
Via The Bee:
ATLANTA, GA—Desperate to recoup their viewers lost since the end of the 2020 election, CNN has hired news anchor Chris Wallace from Fox News. Experts have estimated that a move this big could actually double their audience to a grand total of 4 people.
“Look, now that the election is over, airports no longer air CNN, and all of our other anchors are getting fired—we gotta do something to save our ratings,” said Gale Kaegel, a spokesperson for CNN. “So that’s why we’ll take anyone right now, even Chris Wallace.”
[…]
Not everyone has been as optimistic about his hiring, though. Brian Stelter has reportedly lost both of his viewers to Chris Wallace and has yet to congratulate his new coworker. Stelter was unavailable for comment but could be distinctly heard crying inside his dressing room.
Meanwhile, we’ll continue to enjoy and take advantage of CNN’s efforts to provide content to RedState and other conservative sites on a daily basis. Heck, we might even miss ’em after that final swirl down the toilet.