Fox News vs CNN | CNN’s Rough Year | 5

0:07I'm David Brown and this is Business Wars.

0:30Remember when people would call and say, turn on your TV whenever there was a major bit of breaking news, a presidential announcement, some shocking tragedy, a political scandal? Cable news channels were large and in charge. Of course, today, that's not quite the case. When news breaks, we might scan the notification on our phone, head over to social media, or search the headlines on Google. Because if someone did tell you to turn on your TV, well, what would you even watch? In 2024, the cords have been cut. Fewer than half of Americans still have a traditional cable subscription. Streamers are the new normal, and cable networks are scrambling to stay relevant.

1:10Whether they're succeeding, however, is another story. With rampant layoffs, buyouts, and leadership shakeups, it looks like the legacy networks are on life support. Joining us to talk about the state of linear television is Elaine Lowe, a reporter at the entertainment trade publication The Ankler. Elaine's been closely following the updates on the network side and will help us examine the future of TV in a post-cable world. But first, we're zooming in on the state of cable news with Dylan Byers, founding partner and senior correspondent with the digital news site Puck. We're revisiting the news organization that, well, can't seem to catch a break.

1:46CNN has had a turbulent couple of years. Former CEO Jeff Zucker got the boot and was replaced by late-night executive producer Chris Licht. After several failed attempts to reestablish the network as the most trusted voice in TV news, Licht was out after just over a year. And CNN still isn't quite out of the woods either. Dylan covered media and politics for CNN in the mid-2010s, and he's been following the company closely for Puck. He's sharing more on the challenges CNN is facing and how their competition is responding. All that is coming up.

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4:07Dylan Byers, welcome to Business Wars. Thank you for having me. You've been described as something of a workaholic when it comes to your coverage of media and politics. What is it about this beat that keeps you burning the midnight oil, or is that just sort of the nature of the news industry these days? The cycle just never stops. Well, the cycle never stops. And particularly in the media industry now, the people who tell the story have increasingly become the story. And what I would say is no matter what level you're looking at the industry, whether you're talking down on the ground floor of the newsroom or all the way up to the sort of big corporate parent companies, many of them based out in Hollywood, there's just an incredible amount of seismic change that's happening right now and it's happening not just by you know you're not you're not just having old players being supplanted by new players you are having tectonic shifts in technology consumer behavior the entire business model that media at large and then news media more specifically has been built on let's zero in on that news side of things.

5:20When you joined CNN in 2015, I know some journalists were describing CNN's focus on digital over broadcast as a smart move. Did you feel like the company was on the right track at the time? Yeah, I do. I think the impetus to invest in digital, and at that point, it was not so dramatic as what is taking place at CNN now. It was not a sort of acknowledgement that the linear television format was in steep decline and there was going to be a full throttle pivot to digital. It was more digital matters. It's incredibly significant. It's a meaningful revenue source and it's obviously the future. So let's invest in digital.

6:02Let's employ journalists and we can teach those digital journalists how to also go on television and feed what remains and what was certainly then the core business. Now, that sort of happened in fits and starts. And then I think even NBC and MSNBC sort of followed suit and that happened in fits and starts. But it's unquestionably the right idea and it's the right theory of the case. The challenging thing, as always, of course, is the execution itself. Right. And for the past few years, I think a lot of people see CNN as having a bit of an identity crisis. I mean, where do you think the company sits now on their approach to news coverage?

6:43Do they have a unique CNN POV at this point? Or can you describe what's been going on with the company's direction as you've seen it unfold? Yeah, I can. I would say at a very high level, you can sort of break it down into three or four different iterations over the course of the past decade or so. There's the historic understanding of what CNN should be, which is more or less what Ted Turner envisioned, which is a down-the-middle, nonpartisan, reporting-led, fact-first, sort of first draft of history. Not much analysis in those early days, too, right? Not a lot of analysis, not a lot of personality.

7:27and something that we would think of as being a little more akin to the BBC or even PBS. And the challenge there is that when there is not news, when world events do not sort of play to your favor and drive audiences, how do you maintain the audience and therefore maintain the business? So I think if you go back to about 2013, when Jeff Zucker came in and took over as president of CNN, he tried to solve that problem by making CNN more interesting on a nightly basis. And the original thesis was, we're going to go really, really big on one story. And it can be a missing airline. It can be a cruise ship that's stranded out at sea.

8:16You know, Timmy fell down the well, whatever it is, we're going to go really big on one story. It's like the serialization of that that can play out night after night after night. Exactly. And you can see how you can not only take the story itself, but then you can build a sort of familiar cast of characters around it in terms of the panelists, the people who are sitting there, the correspondents. And you can sort of, it's an idea that we're seeing play out across media organizations today, build those sort of people into their own brands. And when it comes to politics, maybe there's a guy on one side of the panel who you love.

8:49Maybe there's someone on the other side of the panel who you hate, but that is how entertainment works. That is what drives world wrestling. So that was the thesis and it was controversial. And then of course, Donald Trump comes along and that story, that one big story that CNN invests in becomes not a two or three week story or a month long story, but rather a story that we still live with to this day. And in the process, CNN did something that historically it had never been comfortable doing, which was it became pretty firmly aligned with one side of the political spectrum and against the other.

9:34It became pretty, they would say they were facts first and pro-truth, but the way it shook out in the culture, and maybe this was inevitable, was that they appeared to be anti-Trump and anti-Republican. And this created a dynamic where other people in the industry thought, well, is that really CNN's value proposition? Now, the Zucker approach in the Trump era drove CNN to its highest ratings and its highest revenues ever. So on the one hand, It was unquestionably the right thesis. On the other hand, that question of are you sacrificing the sort of long term value proposition of CNN as a nonpartisan, you know, arbiter of the truth?

10:27A place viewers can go to get the straight scoop when something big happens. And will not feel as though they are being it won't feel polarizing. It won't feel like it's participating in the polarization of America. It is just providing, again, that sort of first draft of history. So when Jeff Zucker gets ousted from CNN. This is when David Zaslav took over as CEO of Warner Discovery. Exactly. And Warner Brothers Discovery takes over. They press ahead with that thesis. Let's make this straight again. Let's make this palatable for Democrats and Republicans. Let's not be so personality driven and so outspoken.

11:10And let's go back to more of a news digest of news around the world. This is when David Zaslav appoints Chris Licht as a sort of former morning show and late night executive producer as CEO of the network. And the thesis doesn't work. I think a lot of people still scratching their heads over how did he go from late night to running CNN? I mean, why was this the guy? It's a great question. And unfortunately, so many of the both the successes, but certainly the mistakes that get made in the media industry just come down to to leadership and personal relationships and just frankly, human error. And in this case, David Zaslav took over CNN and he needed a new leader.

12:05Zucker had been pushed out. There was certainly a lot of suspicion among the sort of, you know, old guard, the Zucker guard about whether or not Zaslav sort of wanted him out of the way anyway. But he didn't conduct a thorough formal search. He didn't sort of think about necessarily the question, who is the leader best positioned to sort of both stem the decline of linear and also build a robust digital business while being editorially sound. He took a guy who had been sort of celebrated in the industry, who was a sort of friend of his or acquaintance of his. and he and you know he said well look he chris licked had been seen as successful in the rise of morning joe he had been seen as doing a better job at the cbs morning show than his than anyone else had and stephen colbert's late night show which chris licked also executive produced uh was doing really well relative to to its competitors and so he chose him but chris licked He had never run a global 24-7 news organization with a staff of what used to be as many as 5 ,000 people.

13:22And he sort of tasked him with this job and threw him into it. And in the process said, not only do you need to come in as the successor to one of the most revered and respected media executives who was Jeff Zucker, who was very beloved by his staff. And there was a great deal of trauma when Zucker left the organization. On top of that, you've got to learn on the fly. why you need to pivot this network to something that it has not been for a long time. And by the way, I'm going to ask you to lay off a lot of people and make a lot of cuts. So you can imagine if you're Chris Licht, you enter this position, I think, with probably a pretty heightened sense of self and your own potential, but you start the position underwater and then it's just downward.

14:06So Chris Licht continues to make a number of sort of really ill-advised decisions, and the network suffers along with him. And the hit to the ratings and to the business, as well as the hit to the sort of morale of the newsroom and the company over the course of those 13 months that Chris Licht was in charge was severe. And the jury is out on whether or not it was irreparable. You know, you talk about the morale and there was this galvanizing moment that sort of brought in all of this. I'm sure you know what I'm going to. We're talking May of 2023. Licht organized a town hall with former President Donald Trump and Caitlin Collins, one of their anchors, that didn't quite go as planned.

14:50Here, Trump interrupts Collins as she's asking him why he didn't hand over classified documents after being subpoenaed. Are you ready? Can I talk? Yeah, what's the answer? Can you mind? I would like for you to answer the question. OK, it's very simple to answer. That's why I asked it. It's very simple. You're a nasty person, I'll tell you. What was the expectation versus the reality here? I mean, how was this in Licht's mind, do you think? How was this supposed to go? Well, how it was supposed to go, I mean, remember, the sort of mandate was let's get CNN back to a place where we've got both Democrats and Republicans coming on the air, where we are no longer viewed as the anti-Trump network, but we're still taken seriously as journalists.

15:32So we will ask the hard questions. I think the motivating factor in his mind was, this is a massive get. I'm going to get great ratings. And this is going to be a historic night in television. What happens instead is sort of a disaster in which the network ends up getting criticized by a lot of people. And the sort of star talent that Chris Licht has invested in, who is Caitlin Collins, who weathers it sort of as best she can, is sort of thrown into this without any sort of adequate preparation or training in a way that you would historically see under previous presidents or CEOs. Look, Trump is a wild card.

16:09I mean, it is not as though it is easy to program that. And any Monday morning quarterback who comes in and says, well, if you'd just done X, Y, and Z differently, this would have gone off without a hitch and everyone would be celebrating CNN. Now, again, no clear playbook for success with Trump on any network. But a lot of unforced errors there that I think left the network really vulnerable and helped sort of advance the idea that maybe Chris Licht was out of his depth. And so you get to the point where Licht is fired after, what is it, just over a year on the job. This comes just, what, five days after the Atlantic releases this very, how shall we characterize it, candid profile on Licht that featured months of in-depth interviews about him trying to restore CNN's reputation for serious journalism.

17:02Do you remember seeing that profile? Oh, of course. I remember that profile was a long time coming. And I think I reported months before its publication that it was in the works. Chris Lick's expectations for that profile leading up to it, at least in the early stages of his interviews with the journalist Tim Alberta, was this, again, is going to glorify me. This is going to show me as this incredible new leader of CNN. And I don't want to demean the guy's achieved a lot in his life, but most television news executives spend a lot of time in the background and they spend a lot of time pushing their talent out and getting their talent in the news and getting their talent on late night, getting their talent in the magazine spread.

17:46Chris Lick spent a lot of time getting himself in those things. And the reality is that he was taught in a thousand different ways over the course of those 13 months. Getting the job is the point at which you begin to prove yourself. And if you prove yourself over years and you highlight, you elevate your talent and you elevate your staff and you actually do a good job with the Trump town hall, you win ratings, you restore the credibility of the network. then maybe you can go out and get your profile in the you know in the sunday new york times that's it's absolutely fascinating we're going to take a short break my guest is dylan byers founding partner and senior correspondent at puck more on the state of cable tv news when business wars returns black friday is right around the corner you know what that means right It's the perfect time to score huge deals on all things home at Wayfair's Black Friday sale.

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21:06Welcome back to Business Wars. Dylan Byers is a senior correspondent at Puck specializing on the intersection of media, business, and politics. Dylan, how does everything that went down at CNN last year reflect the state of cable news as a whole? Well, look, the hard truth and the elephant in the room here is that Chris Lichter know the cable news industry is in decline. And I mean, it's just the nature of the business and consumer behavior and all the new modes of outlets and news sources and social media, everything that's available to the consumer. You know, I even recall while I was at CNN, Jeff Zucker sort of during the heat of the 2016 campaign telling staff, you know, this is not going to save the industry.

21:53This is we are going to see a rise and then it is going to go away. And he was right. But you certainly didn't need to hasten it quite so much. And one of the things that's happening here is that Fox News looks really powerful right now in the cable news landscape because it is not just the number one news network in terms of ratings. It is often the number one channel on television or at least on cable television, period. And it remains, after the death of Roger Ailes, despite everything, it remains an incredibly powerful and potent force in conservative politics. But Fox News, too, is on the decline.

22:38It is also losing ratings. You know, it's going to have to make cuts, too. And so the thing that I think I find so disheartening about what happened at CNN under Chris Ligt is CNN is the one network that for a decade now has been thinking, how do we move this to digital? How can we be effective moving to digital? And there were good ideas and there were bad ideas. There were a lot of bad ideas. There were things like CNN Plus, which got killed in the crib. How long did that last? Like a week or two? It felt very short. A week, yes. But there has always, at least in the Zucker era and now again in the Mark Thompson area, There have been these questions of how can we make sure that CNN has the sort of brand awareness and market share in the digital landscape that it did in the linear landscape, even if that is not necessarily quite as lucrative of a business.

23:36they've been thinking about that in ways that NBC and certainly Fox News have never thought about. And the tragedy here in Chris Ligt hastening the decline of the network, in driving the ratings down and truly pushing away the core viewer, is that you have made it so much harder to stand up a new digital iteration, digital first iteration of CNN, because increasingly audiences are no longer thinking about CNN as the place they go for their news. Well, now you talk about how Fox has been so dominant in its position, even as cable has been on the decline. But I think a lot of people wonder whether or not the follies at CNN have contributed in some way to the popularity of Fox News.

24:22And, you know, we've seen some of these other upstarts, Newsmax comes to mind, these more ultra-conservative networks and what that may say about this down-the-middle approach. Do you think CNN ultimately has been its own worst enemy in a sense making Fox what it is, or do you think that Fox's success has largely been because of stuff that it got right? Well, I think both things are true. One, I think it is far easier, especially in cable television, which is a medium that cable news appeals far more to an older audience, it is far easier to program partisanship. It is much easier to get some talking heads around the table and push really hard against the left or against the right, pro-conservative, pro-liberal, and build a sort of audience based on that than it is to program down the middle, particularly when there's not news.

25:22because it's not always January 6th. There's not always a Russian invasion of Ukraine. There's a great line from my former colleague, Brian Stelter, way back in the day when he wrote for the New York Times where he says that CNN's challenge is that it's like the ER. You go there when there's a crisis, but you never stay longer than you have to. And so the question is, how do you keep those audiences and how do you program? And so you say, okay, so did Fox do things right? Right. Of course. Look, set aside what you make of the politics of Fox News and the editorial bent of Fox News. Have they succeeded in making compelling programming for their audience?

26:03Their audience. I think the ratings would suggest absolutely, demonstrably. Did CNN always have a tougher challenge because it was so reliant on the news cycle and because it is harder to program from the middle, especially when, to your point, people are pursuing not just Fox or MSNBC, but a bevy of hyper-conservative or hyper-liberal options. Of course it's harder. But could you have done a better job with a better programmer in charge, with a better leader in charge? I think Jeff Zucker demonstrated that, yes, you could have. Someone who knows news, maybe a little bit more. Someone who knows news, but someone who knows television.

26:43We can never... You know, one thing is that, you know, you go back, I listened to the first episode you guys did of this CNN versus Fox News show, and you talk about Ted Turner's sort of instincts with the guy in the chicken suit. Yeah, the entertainment minded. Yeah, right. So this is fundamentally, it is news. And the value proposition is that it is going to be honest and accurate and that there is integrity, but it is also entertainment. And you have to give people a reason to come back night after night after night when there is news and when there isn't news. And how to do that with personality and voice but without alienating a certain segment of the audience is an incredibly difficult challenge.

27:29And so, look, Murdoch, Roger Ailes were geniuses in terms of what they saw as the opening and placating their audience. But it was so much harder for CNN and it continues to be harder for CNN. Yeah. You know, it reminds me, though, I wonder how many listeners remember when Jon Stewart got on a pretty high horse back in the early 2000s and he took on a program called Crossfire, which was one of CNN's early ratings getters. And you had a right wing, you had a left wing, you had these characters, you know, Pat Buchanan on the right and Paul Begala on the left. and Stewart had had enough and he just, he let both sides have it and was basically saying, you guys are gamifying the news.

28:15Here's just what I wanted to tell you guys. Yeah. Stop. Stop, stop, stop, stop hurting America. Okay. I'm wondering if in a way that wasn't incredibly prescient, that it really got started way before Trump. It was that pursuit of ratings. Today, you'd say the pursuit of survival. But I think back then it was this idea that news could be something more than news. Yes, that's absolutely right. And it's not just the business or the industry or the challenges of the entertainment industry. It's also the politics. It is Trump and the broader MAGA movement becoming so aggressively anti-establishment, anti-media that is very, you know, you can't, it's much easier.

29:09You can imagine CNN being, being able to sort of pitch the ball down the middle, right over the plate in a sort of Romney Obama era type thing, you know? And I think if you go back to the Zucker folks, the sort of Zucker era CNN, what they would say is what else could we have done, but taken on Trump? How can you be a journalistic institution if you're not taking on Trump? This challenge was always here. The Jon Stewart thing was prescient. I mean, it's notable that Jon Stewart came back, you know, in this election cycle, back to The Daily Show. And that for, I think for a lot of people who've grown sort of disenchanted with cable news, you know, sort of turned to Jon Stewart and were like, well, that's actually the most rewarding way to get my news and political commentary on a, it used to be a nightly, now a weekly basis.