Founded in 1980, it was once the go-to TV channel for news, eventually cutting its teeth reporting, not on, but from the Persian Gulf War, which morphed into Desert Storm..Raising the bar in news coverage, it telecast live nightly from a Baghdad hotel, showing viewers the attacks by the United Nation’s war coalition on the Iraq capital. The kind of coverage the world has seen from Ukraine..Those were the good years for the Cable News Network (CNN) with audience numbers soaring even higher when Donald J. Trump announced he was running for president and during the four years of Trump’s presidency..It was the end of CNN as a reliable 24-hour news organization..During those six years of the ‘Era of Trump’, CNN went from being a 24-hour news organization, devolving politically into the voice of the far left, openly and unabashedly becoming a propaganda arm of the Democratic Party in the US..It became a 24-hour barrage of anti-Trump, anti-Republican Party commentary. .The network’s big names — Don Lemon, Chris Cuomo, Brian Stelter, Jeffery Toobin, Jim Acosta — became cheerleaders for the woke and BLM movements, abandoning any premise of being news reporters..CNN took its audience for granted, something no news media outlet should ever do. When Trump left the White House, a large number of viewers left CNN..The turning point of its audience questioning CNN’s legitimacy probably came in August 2020, when CNN ran a caption under a video showing unruly crowds and burning buildings in Kenosha, Wis. that read, “Fiery But Mostly Peaceful Protests After Police Shooting.” .By June of 2022, the CNN audience in the key 25 to 54 demographic plummeted 63% from the year before. .Prior to those ratings being released, CNN was sold to the Warners Discovery conglomerate, with a promise changes were coming, quickly..And quick they were. Cuomo, Stelter, Toobin and Acosta were fired. Lemon has been demoted from his evening primetime show to a new morning show that started this week.. Chris CuomoChris Cuomo .More changes are coming..CNN’s new boss, Chris Licht, made it known he's committed to making the once-important news network a functional news organization again in a letter last week to CNN staff..”I have spent the last six months meeting so many of you and diving deep into every corner of the company to understand how we’re structured and defining our top priorities. I have also spent much of that time doing formal business reviews with senior staff to identify areas where we should make changes, investments, and reductions to match our future priorities.”.“We have already begun working toward CNN’s future, implementing a strategy that puts our journalism first and grows our digital stronghold. We combined our news gathering operations across linear and digital to ensure we can bring our full reporting firepower to any platform we are on. We are beginning to reimagine our morning and primetime lineups, officially launching our new morning show (this) week.” .“There is a lot more to be done. I am writing to you today to say over the next several weeks, work will accelerate. There is widespread concern over the global economic outlook, and we must factor that risk into our long-term planning. All this together will mean noticeable change to this organization. That, by definition, is unsettling. These changes will not be easy because they will affect people, budgets, and projects.”.“Our aim is to have most of these decisions made by the end of the year so we can start 2023 feeling settled and prepared for the future, we will send updates as I have them, and I plan to hold town hall meetings in both November and December.” .“When we emerge on the other side, CNN will be a stronger, more nimble organization, ready to weather whatever the global economy throws at us and to grow into the future.”. Chris Licht Chris Licht .In other words, just as Elon Musk has addressed staff issues since his takeover of Twitter, lots of redundant procedures and staff at CNN will not be part of the network by Christmas..The first change, and the most obvious, is the launch of CNN This Morning, anchored by Poppy Harlow, Kaitlan Collins and Lemon..Licht, who took the CNN reins after a successful run at CBS, where he turned around the network’s morning news program and Stephen Colbert’s late-night show, said, in alluding to the new program, it has the dual task of improving the ratings in a competitive time period while attacking the network’s image problem.
