The Institutional Failure of CNN and Brian Stelter

Mike Grillo

Mike Grillo is a writer who, when not writing, is working in finance and surviving the wilds of being a New Jersey resident. He does not tweet.

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12 Responses

  1. CJColucci says:

    The show sucked under Stelter. But it always sucked. (I worked with Howie Kurtz on a college newspaper decades ago. His performance was no surprise to me.) These kinds of shows are bound to suck. And if they didn’t suck by nature, people would declare that they sucked if their pet stories didn’t get enough play.Report

  2. Pinky says:

    OT regulars know that I’m a fan of The Daily Wire. I like a lot of their opinion and coverage. But two things are relevant here. One, they acknowledge their conservatism. Two, they have a regular show where the hosts often argue with each other (Daily Wire Backstage). They don’t get personal but they definitely have disagreements. It helps keep things honest.

    Ombudsing is tough. It’s probably impossible for a co-equal unit (program, column, whatever).Report

  3. Jaybird says:

    One point of contention I’ve seen argued over is the whole question of ratings.

    “It’s because ratings were down. If the ratings were high (or even merely higher than they were), they’d keep him in the slot!”
    “It’s not because ratings were down! Stelter was doing important work! It’s because the new boss has it out for him!”

    It strikes me that the question of “ratings” is where the rubber meets the road… from the linked article:

    The Sunday morning show has had its lowest-rated year since 2015 — two years after Stelter took over as host — and has lost 26% of its total audience compared to last year. Among the key news demo of viewers 25-54, the show has lost about 34% of its viewers.

    Whether it was “really” because of ratings or because the new guy has it out for Stelter might be something we will never know… but it strikes me that if ratings had not gone down, we wouldn’t be having this discussion at all.

    Stelter was probably the perfect guy to sit in that chair when Trump was president. Now that he’s not? There’s no use for him anymore.

    It kinda reminds me of the whole ESPN kerfuffle from way back when they say that they were going to go back to focus on sports. Everybody that I know who was offended by ESPN doing that didn’t seem to watch ESPN. As for the people I knew who watch ESPN… well, I don’t know any.

    (But neither do I know anyone who watched Stelter.)

    Do we have any Stelter-heads in the audience here? What did you like about his show?Report

  4. DavidTC says:

    It is not journalism or reporting to ask Verizon, “Why do you allow your customers to watch these channels?”

    …why not?

    It’s exactly the same sort of stuff that passes for news everywhere in the news media: Ask questions and then report non-answers.

    You think I’m being sarcastic or putting that behavior down, but…not really. Sometimes that is simply how the news works. It just keeps asking questions.

    And asking why a publicly-owned company is providing misinformation to viewers in the guise of news, that literally lead to an attempted coup, seems like a much more legitimate question than a _lot_ of those imaginary questions. That actually does seem like an important question: Do you have any comment that your business decisions have resulted in _this_?

    It’s worth reminding people that the realization that those companies carried that channel and what was on that channel lead to OAN being dropped from all of them.

    It seems exceptionally surreal to argue ‘Thing that caused public outrage when the public learned about it, to the extent of ending it’ is not ‘news’, in whatever sense ‘news’ can be defined. Telling people about the behavior of outrageous behavior of companies that is directly causing harm is kinda explicitly the news’ job.Report

    • Jaybird in reply to DavidTC says:

      Why does CNN allow you to watch Brian Stelter?

      Wait, someone just brought me a post…Report

      • DavidTC in reply to Jaybird says:

        Because people aren’t outraged at CNN, because Brian Stelter isn’t repeating massive amount of misinformation in an attempt to overturn democratic elections?

        And before anyone say ‘The right is outraged at CNN’, no, there are actually different levels of outrage that can possibly exist in the world, and we find certain things more outrageous than others. People are generally fine with their cable providing running CNN, or Fox News, or whatever. That’s not the same as ‘entirely made-up channel that has never tried to actually do news and literally exists just to be a propaganda outlet’.

        It’s actually funny how this very post compares MSNBC and CNN to Fox News, and then tries to quickly change the subject by talking about what happened to OAN. Fox News is not OAN, and that might be the nicest thing I’ve ever said about Fox News. Fox News at least stopped before going over the insurrection cliff, if only because they are a real public corporation that actually has to deal with stockholders and legal liability and whatnot. (Whereas AT&T didn’t actually want to do that, so got _someone else_ to found OAN, a billionaire dilettante.)Report

  5. DavidTC says:

    The idea that Brian Stelter wasn’t very good at his job might have made more sense if Discovery wasn’t a complete lunatic that hadn’t axed like 2/3rds of what it owned.

    Like, even without knowledge of who the new CEO’s political beliefs: Anyone who thinks Discovery is making good decisions _generally_ with their new purchase is kinda not paying attention.

    What is happening at Discovery is almost textbook vulture capitalism. A mostly successful company bought and _gutted_ to make the stock price bounce 10% because ‘profits go up’ and total morons don’t understand what is going on and that the company has been entirely non-functional…or maybe they jsut think they can buy it before it fails.

    I have no idea if what is happening at CNN is just _part_ of the looting, or if it’s because David Zaslav is conservative, or if it’s because CNN actually was run poorly, but considering there are at least _two other_ options there, I would hesitate to consider it is the third.Report

    • Pinky in reply to DavidTC says:

      What are his beliefs? He seems outspoken about hate groups, and the largest political contribution I found from him was $100k to the Pelosi Victory Fund.Report

      • Philip H in reply to Pinky says:

        Yeah I wouldn’t call Zaslav a conservative. Such people don’t win Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Ripple of Hope Award which he did in 2018.Report

      • DavidTC in reply to Pinky says:

        I honestly have no idea where he stands politically. I heard it was to the right, but that was entirely heresy. Doing some quick checks, I think maybe he’s not. So I withdraw that.

        Although he’s not on the left, either. ‘Right and left’ are often fairly meaningless for billionaires. Almost all billionaires are, first and foremost, corporatists that donate to whoever they think will make them more money, and are completely disconnected from anything us peons would understand as the political axis.

        But we sorta already have a perfectly good explanation of what is going on, one that fits the _rest_ of what is happening: He’s a person who thinks destroying the corporations he heads is entirely reasonable behavior if it means it boasts the current stock price so that rubes will buy stock from the current stockholders.

        And also he’s an idiot(1) who thinks his own personal taste is relevant to what a company should do, and thus has completely decided to throw away any animation…I remind people that Warner Brothers created Bugs Bunny and was literally the first large competitor to Disney in animation. And when I say ‘throw away’ I might mean that literally…a lot of their cartoons have been removed from streaming services with no warning, not even to the producers of it, no one’s sure what is going on.

        Speaking of that, Discovery’s claimed attempt to save 3 billion dollars has…resulted in their market cap dropping almost 3 billion dollars as investors flee in droves.

        I guess I wasn’t entirely right about him manipulating the stock price…or, rather, he has failed _utterly_ at it.

        Like, seriously, The WB Discovery merger is going to go down in history as one of the most astonishing mismanagements of a company in history, right up there with Sears, except Zaslav is speedrunning it in like two months.

        So…I don’t really see the need to explain ‘What is happening at CNN’ independently of that. Yes, CNN is probably going to crash and burn along with everything else…although I feel I should point out that _Disney_ doesn’t own a news network, if anyone feels like selling. (And they’ll probably just go ahead and buy Bugs Bunny too.)

        CNN is like the radio that won’t change channels in the car that is currently on fire tumbling down a hill…it might have the least amount of things wrong with it right now.

        1) The amount of CEOs that are actually complete idiots is actually amazing, but only until you realize that a good chunk of them are just incestuous college buddies that got handed jobs by each other.Report