One thing that I haven't seen discussed is that the average age of a CNN viewer is 64. Building a streaming service around an elderly audience seems like it'd be tricky. That doesn't mean that it is impossible -- Fox News has done it reasonably well with Fox Nation and Fox News viewers have an average age of 68 (just like MSNBC).
But was this programming built for their elderly audience, or was it supposed to be an attempt at picking up a new, younger audience? Who was this for?
You watch a program like CBS Sunday Morning and it's clear they know who their audience is. Each week, they feature who passed away. They feature anniversaries of things like the Godfather and other stuff that their audience will like to reminisce about. A comedian talking about aging gracefully. Etc. But I don't think CNN did any of that with CNN+.
Great analysis, thanks. A question is: Do the younger audience rely on streaming platforms/news channels to get their news? Anecdotally, everyone I know in the young age group relies on social-media or web-based portals for their news.
"Elder Millennial" checking in. Since moving out on my own (quite a while ago, at this point) I've never had cable at all. Nor have any of my friends, who span from about my age down to the oldest edge of Gen Z. Nearly all my news is radio in the car (NPR—ugh, but at least sometimes they rebroadcast BBC News and that's decent) or from web sites. Practically all video news I watch is either raw footage, or (similarly) C-SPAN. John Oliver on HBO Max if it's late and I've had a few and I'm bored—that's about it for actual "news programs", if that even counts.
[EDIT] I take back part of that—I think one guy has cable. He's into football. He's also the only right-winger in my circle. Maybe a coincidence? Wouldn't be surprised if a fair bit of his "vaccine hesitancy" (to put it in mild, friendly NPR terms) came from watching Fox News, now that I think about it.
Something about most podcasts make them really hard to listen to, for me. Not sure why. Among all media I find them uniquely difficult to follow. My attention wanders and I end up missing most of it. Radio-news-style programs are fine, for some reason. All I can figure is it's got something to do with the pace, and the way the hosts speak. I can even tune into weird religious talk programs on the radio, and mostly be OK, but podcasts as a medium just rarely work for me. Which bums me out, because I'm assured there are tons of good ones, but I just can't handle them. Similar formats with video are fine (on e.g. Youtube).
I used to feel similarly about audio but have figured out the right settings for acceleration (1.2-1.4x) and silence trimming in pocketcasts to increase the informational content and keep it interesting - it works for me now. (that and finding the most interesting content for me)
Fox News is pretty pro-vaccine. I just looked through their website and couldn't find any stories against vaccines themselves. Several stories saying they're safe and effective.
The only "news" I get from modern streaming is the Youtubes of Seth Meyers and Stephen Colbert and Last Week Tonight on HBO/Crave, I get the rest of my news from Twitter (where I follow various local journos and CBC).
Which I know isn't ideal and I should pay for a proper news source but the state of "print" journalism in Canada is really, really bad right now since all the non-government-run services are being bought up by ideological conservatives.
I secind late night shows to get news. They have a bias that is totally clear (and one I share, most of the time), are well curayed and researched (so I don't to have news all day) and are presented in a non-so-serious way (making digestion easier).
In additiok to that we have dogital subscriptions to NYT, WP and physical ones for Wired and our local newspaper. Anytheing else is the non-subscription stuff from reliable news papers. I did reduce news consumption a lot so since the Ukraine war started.
This is kind of crazy. I always think of CNN (at least in its recent form), MSNBC, and Fox as the most unhinged, sensationalist, rabidly partisan of the mainstream networks. I didn't realize they also had quite old audiences--I wonder if this is just a coincidence or if there's some generational or age-related reason?
EDIT: To all the people saying that younger people get their "unhinged" through social media and other platforms, that makes a lot of sense. Thanks for the explanation.
I wonder which is worse being uninformed or misinformed. I feel like both are pretty bad, but somehow the misinformed seem worse because people are often unable to reject or form a new idea once they latch onto something.
I agree, very rarely do I actually need to know so-called “news” when you turn off the TV, the sky is no longer falling and the world is (mostly) fine.
Everyone has a bias and skews stories, also, creating fear probably increases viewership. If the media always said everything is fine, less people would watch IMO.
Most news is local. If it doesn't impact YOU, then it's always fine, the world is fine. I'm sure that if you are in Ukraine, turning off the TV doesn't mean that the world is fine when you look outside and see bombs falling on the building next door.
I understand the sentiment, and I'm also careful about how much news I consume, but there's a fine line between this and being privileged to be able to afford to skip news because those suffering aren't your family.
In a less extreme example, if a big project came into your neighborhood to destroy all the houses on your street to build a highway, I'm sure that suddenly this news would make you want to get involved politically to advocate against the destruction of it. But when that happened in the other neighborhood and you didn't care to even write an email to your local politician to oppose it because you didn't know about it, other families suffered.
It's a fine line.. I've seen my parents watch news 3 times a day (lunch, dinner, and late-evening news) and it was definitely not healthy and did not make them better citizen either. I don't have a perfect answer.
> I understand the sentiment, and I'm also careful about how much news I consume, but there's a fine line between this and being privileged to be able to afford to skip news because those suffering aren't your family.
I don't think there's any obligation to keep up with events on the other side of the world (or the other side of your country) if you're not also able and willing to do something about it. I dunno about applying the "privilege" label to that—in fact, the fewer resources you have, the less point there is in it.
> I don't think there's any obligation to keep up with events on the other side of the world
Things that happen across the world affect us here too. Maybe your friends have family in Ukraine or are from there. I have students who are Ukrainian. Currently Ukrainians are leaving their homeland as refugees and resettling all around the world. They could be moving in down the street and will be your neighbors! Knowing what's happening around the world allows one to be empathetic to the situations of others.
How much time does one need to spend on distant news to know enough of it for that purpose, though? If you've got a whole lot of refugees heading to your city, local news will cover it. Otherwise, knowing the basics seems like plenty to me, unless you're just interested in it for entertainment's sake.
I feel that is so privileged of you to say that. You have a duty to know what is happening on the other side of the world when you're American, because the federal politicians you elect decide policy affecting the whole globe, and have done so unopposed by any equal force for over 30 years.
Being an American is like being a Roman citizen; you have to run the whole empire.
How much time do you need to do that, though? Is keeping up with all the minutia, checking in on how Ukraine's doing every single day (even multiple times), really helping anyone? I do keep up with the news, and especially international news, but I'm under no illusion that it's a valuable use of time. Past very low-levels of engagement, it's a hobby, or a pastime. Like knitting or watching soap operas.
Again, I think that end would also be better served if a high proportion of news media consumption were shifted to citizenship-relevant books (and maybe very high-quality, low-frequency periodicals), probably starting with textbooks and classics in political science, history, and economics (I doubt anyone who's mined those well already, needs any help picking their next high-value read).
>You have a duty to know what is happening on the other side of the world when you're American, because the federal politicians you elect decide policy affecting the whole globe
Nope, not my duty. My duty is to elect politicians who enact policy affecting me. If a politician enriches my country at the expense of another, it is my duty to vote for him, for the sake of myself and my family. No one is a citizen of the world.
> there's a fine line between this and being privileged to be able to afford to skip news because those suffering aren't your family.
Hence why I said most. I definitely agree that being exposed to outside events can be important for sympathizing with those affected (and possible helping them), but at the same time, one does not need to be aware of everything going on in the world.
If you never follow news (or haven’t for a decade or longer), it’s difficult to get a read on what is going on in the world or in your country, politically. That isn’t necessarily wrong, but it means you don’t really understand the environment you live in. Getting a better understanding is my main motivation for following the news. Mind you, I’m not in the US and for the most part don’t follow US news outlets.
I don't watch or read news, and I feel pretty knowledgeable about my environment. I feel that if I actually engage in my community I am much more plugged in to my environment than if I try to read about it on the news.
By “environment” I don’t mean the local community, but the general social, political and economic mechanics on the nation scale and planet scale. I.e. how the human world you’re living in works and evolves, which in turn has local repercussions.
> By “environment” I don’t mean the local community
Neither do I.
If you think you're learning about social, political, and economic mechanics on a global scale from the news, then I implore you to keep consuming. I've never learned anything from the news that I couldn't have learned talking to someone else who watched it instead.
The benefit of living in a non-democracy is that you don't need to be informed. You can spend all your time on making money and spending money, and that's your life. No worries.
But if you live in a democracy, you have to spend some of your time being informed about things so you know how to vote. Think of it as a democracy tax. If you didn't live in a democracy, you wouldn't have this tax on your time. Freedom isn't free, eh?
Of course, this democracy tax is totally voluntary. You're only obligated by your own morality. You may choose to opt out of democracy entirely. Not voting or being informed is your choice, if you wish to live your life off the backs of others. No one will make you feel guilty about it at all. Right? ;)
> But if you live in a democracy, you have to spend some of your time being informed about things so you know how to vote.
I don’t think you fairly addressed his question at all in this comment, and the reason lies right in that vague word: “things”.
People who live anywhere will always take an interest in information which directly affects them, or that they can profit off of, or which might cause them to incur losses. Generally there are multiple means of attaining this information and the “news” in the mass media sense is just one of them. I don’t for example pay close attention to all legal news, so when I need legal advice which tends to be situational in nature I hire people who do rather than proceeding on my own partially-informed opinions from what I gleaned out of a newspaper which probably missed important details and which is usually written from a biased perspective. This is true for any number of domains I don’t specialize in (almost all of them), and in seeking counsel I gain information along the way that can shape my future actions.
So lets come back to that word, “things”, which things should people be informed of that you get from the news media but are unlikely to receive from anywhere else?
That's my point. The "news" is now Maddow or Hannity or Tucker or some other equally wrong talking head. I've stopped watching news altogether and noticed I don't feel like I've missed out on anything.
People who watch no news score better than those who watch Fox News - people who watched literally any other source of news, including the Daily Show were more informed than the 'no news' people.
The interesting thing about the data in the study is that people who identify as Republicans scored higher than people who identified as Democrats, while at the same time, people who watched Fox news scored lower.
Nearly everyone would be a better citizen if they swapped 95% of the time the spend on the news for reading classics and textbooks in political science, economics, and history. Even the days of the morning paper and evening TV news program were probably a bit much, as far as non-local news goes anyway, let alone today's constant torrent of news, between the horrible 24/7 news channels and the Internet.
> Nearly everyone would be a better citizen if they swapped 95% of the time the spend on the news for reading classics and textbooks in political science, economics, and history.
I hear that said a lot, but I doubt it, at least not with those proportions. Those things offer important perspective, but to put it bluntly: George Washington isn't running for president anymore and slavery has been abolished for more than a century. The past is the past and this is the present: there are some commonalities but also a lot of important differences.
To be a "better citizen," you need pretty deep knowledge of current events. That takes a lot of time, because a lot is going on and it's often more informative to follow a story than just read a summary once it's over. Think of it this way: an investor will lose his shirt if he spends 95% of his time reading classic investment books and only 5% actually researching businesses. Being a citizen is similar.
Also, one of the nice things about the news is it exposes you more to the rough edges and uncertainty of the present, rather than smoothing that over with theory and narratives (that can be thoroughly curve-fitted to the past, so as not to jar you with their wrongness).
Your post is based on the hypothesis that more information is better. We've done the experiment, and it's false. People's perspectives are not deepened by more information, but made more shallow. In large part this is because the information they get is mostly second order, information about other people's reactions, or even reactions to reactions. This reaction information is used to preempt and override people's own reactions, often with something extreme, which drives engagement, which represents value for the corporation.
The modern "news" environment takes the worst of our justice system, the unethical, dishonest, manipulative lawyers who consider it their duty to use every rhetorical tool to achieve their goals, and has mainstreamed it. The news, and politics, are dominated by attorneys. But most of us aren't, and most of us don't use those same techniques in our lives, or are even familiar with the techniques, and so we're left vulnerable to them.
> Your post is based on the hypothesis that more information is better. We've done the experiment, and it's false.
No, it's based on the hypothesis that sufficient up-to-date information is required.
> People's perspectives are not deepened by more information, but made more shallow. In large part this is because the information they get is mostly second order, information about other people's reactions, or even reactions to reactions. This reaction information is used to preempt and override people's own reactions, often with something extreme, which drives engagement, which represents value for the corporation.
That's a twisted cartoon of the news. If that's how you've actually experienced it, you probably need to pick better sources or get better at separating the wheat from the chaff.
> The modern "news" environment takes the worst of our justice system, the unethical, dishonest, manipulative lawyers who consider it their duty to use every rhetorical tool to achieve their goals, and has mainstreamed it. The news, and politics, are dominated by attorneys. But most of us aren't, and most of us don't use those same techniques in our lives, or are even familiar with the techniques, and so we're left vulnerable to them.
That's another twisted cartoon, but I'll say one of the best ways to avoid being manipulated is to actually be familiar with the facts.
It's actually kind of refreshing for someone to defend the news. But I don't think we are agreeing on what news is so it's not an argument that can really go anywhere. I mean if you want to define news as only the Good News and not the bad news then yes the news is good.
> But I don't think we are agreeing on what news is so it's not an argument that can really go anywhere. I mean if you want to define news as only the Good News and not the bad news then yes the news is good.
Quite possibly. You're usage of Good News/bad news there is about the most confused thing possible. There are much clearer ways of saying what I think you might be saying.
> I hear that said a lot, but I doubt it, at least not with those proportions. Those things offer important perspective, but to put it bluntly: George Washington isn't running for president anymore and slavery has been abolished for more than a century. The past is the past and this is the present: there are some commonalities but also a lot of important differences.
Sure, but I doubt someone with a deep grounding in political science, economics, and history, but who'd never heard of either candidate, would need more than an hour or so on Google to decide between Trump and Biden, for instance. Our choices are, as voters, for better or worse, pretty limited.
Frankly, I often make decisions about local candidates or ballot initiatives based on like 5 minutes of research. I doubt any of those choices would change if I closely followed all those candidates and issues and spent 50x more time on them—what might change them is if I'd read fewer, or different, books. (meanwhile, if I wanted to make any actual difference in the world, I'm aware that what I ought to do is get involved with one of the big two political parties, at the local level)
> Sure, but I doubt someone with a deep grounding in political science, economics, and history, but who'd never heard of either candidate, would need more than an hour or so on Google to decide between Trump and Biden, for instance.
That's a bad example, because Trump was such an oaf. A better recent example might have been choosing between McCain and Obama, if you're focused on presidential races.
The bigger issue isn't so much picking candidates, but understanding current situation and problems, and having opinions about those things to inform your choices.
Haha, that's fair. I still think spending more than an hour or two on the news per week has rapidly diminishing returns, in terms of societal benefit, and most of that should be local news or very focused, deep coverage, for maximum benefit.
> A better recent example might have been choosing between McCain and Obama, if you're focused on presidential races.
I'd love to see some blank-slate person try to judge them just by their own websites. God, those were so different.
>George Washington isn't running for president anymore and slavery has been abolished for more than a century. The past is the past and this is the present: there are some commonalities but also a lot of important differences.
I think the policies from the 60s and 70s have way more impact today than people realize and without understanding that context, "deep knowledge of current events" gets you nowhere. The seeds for an event like 9/11 were planted almost 50 years earlier and without understanding that it's easy for people to get swept up in takes like "they hate us for our freedom".
A good point with a bad example. 9/11 really was plotted by Islamists who do actually hate us for our freedoms, since to them our freedom amounts to a rejection of God's law, the soul of heresy, for which the punishment is death. There are no "civilians" in a holy war, since every man, woman and child of the heretical nation are living in defiance of God's law.
Of course, this view is shared by every fanatic everywhere, of every faith, such that the jingo "They hate us for our freedom" applies to them, too.
Japan is even farther from Islamic culture than the United States but they didn't have a 9/11. Why? Because jingoism is subordinate to things that actually matter, like justifying or resenting 50 years of sometimes violent American involvement in the middle east. We shouldn't allow ourselves to be fooled by internally-targeted propaganda from other countries, in a way that's even more embarrassing than being fooled by our own propaganda.
>9/11 really was plotted by Islamists who do actually hate us for our freedoms, since to them our freedom amounts to a rejection of God's law, the soul of heresy, for which the punishment is death.
Osama Bin Laden's own motivations for 9/11 had more to do with American imperialism in the Middle East and less to do with "rejection of God's Law". This isn't speculation, but from the horse's mouth. The "hate us for our freedom" was propaganda by Bush, and anyone who only looks at that, without studying the history of American imperialism in the middle east, starting from the coup of Iran, ends up in the backwards conclusion that Islam is a violent religion (or at least any more violent than any other Abrahamic religion).
Please bear in mind that "rejection of God's law, the soul of heresy, for which the punishment is death" is also a major tenet in all Abrahamic religions. Secondly, there are plenty of Americans who are pining for nuclear war with Russia over Ukrainians; but somehow the blowback of nearly 50 years of foreign intervention by the CIA wouldn't be a motivation for anti-American sentiment in the middle east and instead "they just hate us for our freedom".
Not sure how to respond here. Are you implying that people don't kill civilians for geopolitical goals? Like how Putin is doing now? Or that suicide bombers are a religious thing? Kamikaze Fighters? The assassination of Alexander II?
I'm not saying religion isn't a tool for executing these goals, but the orchestrators have always been acting under geopolitical goals.
Your comment is a combination of strawmanning and shifting the goal posts, and doesn't deserve a serious response. It does merit a question.
What motivates you to resist the simple truth that Islamists hate and wish to kill Westerners for breaking their holy law (the same behaviors we call "freedom"), admire martyrs who suicide themselves into civilians for this purpose? Do you think an Islamist would disagree with any of that? If so, why?
I believe GP and you are talking about two different actors; the individual committing the final act, and the individual rallying others to the cause.
The soldier does not have a larger strategy in mind; he kills for simple and extreme reasons. The government however is rarely so naive, and initiates their wars with much larger goals in mind. Even with a dictator, they represent the filtered understanding of many advisors, and balance the many goals of the group (so almost by definition, they cannot sustain a singular goal with singular purpose for long). The individual just needs one reason to do what he does, which might be as simple as “his boss told him to”.
>What motivates you to resist the simple truth that Islamists hate and wish to kill Westerners for breaking their holy law
Because it's a ridiculous premise that you would not apply to any other religion. It's not even a consistent view of Islam; you don't have Islamists in Malaysia (60% islamic) or Turkey (99% Islam) holding the same sort of contempt with to West.
Consider it this way, if a Russian came to you and said "the Ukrainians hate Russians because they are full of Nazis and they hate how Stalin purged Germany of Nazis" you would quickly realize that is ridiculous notion - Ukrainians are currently being bombed by Russian soldiers which fuels their animosity.
The West has largely done the same in the middle east, and not understanding this history leads you down to conclusion that they must hate the West because of Islam. I don't know how you could look at an entire group of people who have been practically waging a war for sovereignty against a incredibly more powerful adversary for almost _60 years_ and come away that their wish to kill westerners comes from breaking their holy law. Yeah, you can pretend Islam is a tiny part of it, but I think a larger part of that hate is having their government overthrown and then having their children blown up in an air strike.
>Because it's a ridiculous premise that you would not apply to any other religion.
I explicitly said in my initial comment that the slogan "They hate us for our freedom" applies to any fanatic of any religion. You are misrepresenting me, and are drifting further away from a specific point around what motivated the 9/11 attackers. Perhaps you are confused by the difference between Islam[0] and Islamism[1]?
I’m not misrepresenting you. You are just continually ignoring the history in these regions. I don’t think any religion supports your point. “Religious fanatics” are a convenient boogeyman to justify war and aggression. These terrorists don’t exist because of some holy war, they exist because they were caught in the middle of a proxy war between two super powers and witnessed their schools blow up.
People today are vehemently anti-China because of censorship in video games, but somehow it’s a leap of faith that people can be anti-West after their home is targeted in an air raid and we must turn to “religious fanatics”. If China dropped a bomb on your parents home over some mineral rights, don’t you think you would become a little anti-Chinese? What would you think if those Chinese turned around and called you fundamentalist Christian when you voiced those complaints?
If you buy that fact that the Middle East sustained aggression for over 50 years because of “religious fanactism” then you must also believe Putin’s line of reasoning that Zelensky is a nazi because it’s the same kind of propaganda
The "They hate us for our freedom" line was merely a hamfisted attempt on G. W. Bush's part to pander to disciples of 'American exceptionalism' while his search for WMD had foundered & we faced the disgust of the world. I'm not sure that the phrase is even in opposition to God's Law since Bush surely believed that America was subject to God's Law (albeit a different one), yet surely didn't think that American Freedom would suffer for (being subject to His Law). Indeed, while the American Right now enjoys a resurgence nationally and works to roll back LGBTQ and abortion rights in favor of what they deem God would proscribe, they surely won't think that we are any less 'free'. And that is the largest point -- that freedom needs quotes, since its purely subjective.
Let me be clear: I agree that the US has acted purely in its geopolitical (energy) interests in the Middle East, to the great detriment of the well-being of the people living there, including civilians. I also agree that being treated like this can engender hatred and feelings of vengeance. I also understand that leaders habitually manipulate people with whatever tools are handy, faith being a traditional favorite, such that an individual may think they're doing God's will, when they're actually doing their political leader's will.
I believe all of that, yet "they hate us for our freedom" remains an accurate description of the fanatic. It is, essentially, definitional.
>If China dropped a bomb on your parents home over some mineral rights, don’t you think you would become a little anti-Chinese?
You seem to interpret what I'm saying as bigoted against Muslims (it's not, BTW), so I'm surprised you'd make this argument. Furthermore, it's ambiguous what you mean: do you mean anti-China, or anti-Chinese? Yes, I would certainly feel the former, but not the latter. Individuals aren't nations, never were, never will be.
The reality is that post world war 2 soviet containment is the most relevant starting point for explaining Islamic terrorism in the west. Yes, religious rhetoric was used by bin Laden and al-Qaeda to justify their actions, but they only took these actions because western powers (US, Soviets) were playing proxy war in the region for decades.
>> George Washington isn't running for president anymore and slavery has been abolished for more than a century. The past is the past and this is the present: there are some commonalities but also a lot of important differences.
> I think the policies from the 60s and 70s have way more impact today than people realize and without understanding that context, "deep knowledge of current events" gets you nowhere.
I'm not arguing for an extreme opposite position (e.g. all current events, no history). If you thought I was, you misunderstood me. I'm just saying it's not being a "good citizen" to bury yourself in the past and neglect the present day.
However, I will say understanding current events probably takes more effort, because history can be digested and presented more efficiently (e.g. for the Civil War: 4+ years of 19th century newspapers vs. a 500 page history).
I recently learned that slavery was abolished in response to pearl harbour[0], which isn't quite a century away.
The vestiges of the later slavery are still around too, well, I guess the slavery is too, but now you have to buy their labour from the government, and the government keeps ownership of the slave. Actually, I don't know how that goes for private prisons?
But pressuring people to plea guilty to crime, perceptions of black people as violent criminals, the large US prison population, the police, etc. Those are legacies and continuations of practices from slavery.
A but more reading on history puts today's problems in better context
The point of the news is to promote a narrative. They choose what to cover, and what to not cover. There is no way to do news that is free from ideological bias. And in large, corporatized media, the ideological focus is often driven by a single person, or very few people.
The purported Twain quote, "If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed; if you do, you're misinformed," applies here.
People love to do comparisons to this or that news organization, "Fox News viewers are most likely to have a Beanie Baby collection," or "MSNBC viewers are most likely to believe that Elvis was an alien," or whatever. It doesn't mean much. They are all entertainment platforms that sell ads.
I’ve found the best sources of news tend to be finance/business focused because the readership generally wants to know what actually happened so they can make business decisions and they can’t make those decisions if the news is heavily biased one way or the other.
There is still bias, of course - The Economist makes it clear they are pro-free market, for example - but they tend to give a decent overview of the most salient facts and they write for a global audience.
misinformed is worse, if only because in many cases those who are misinformed WANT to be that way, and ergo don't care about facts or reality, just their normative preferences.
uninformed is passively annoying, misinformed is aggressively annoying.
I’m a software engineer, and one chestnut I’ve heard (and subscribe to) is “Missing documentation is better than incorrect documentation, because the latter can lead you astray in serious ways.” I think this same logic applies to news as well, for the reason you describe.
Added to which, the news is a business model which increasingly earns its living off manufacturing outrage (not by making its viewers more informed and worldly). The same can’t be said of history books, which is why I agree with one of my sibling commenters here, who recommends swapping most news with reading history.
It's just different age groups get unhinged on different platforms. LoL. Even though TVs are for older audiences, they do use unhinged content from platforms for younger people.
I imagine many millennials and younger realize they don't get much benefit out of watching the news, especially as other media channels (Facebook, Twitter trending, Reddit r/popular) can get them actual breaking news when it happens. If people do want to see more traditional news, having an news app instead of watching it gives them the freedom to read the news when they have the time for it.
Fox isn’t surprising—old people have always been the core demographic for Limbaugh, etc.
CNN’s turn, I think, is all about Trump. Old democrats like my dad are the exact audience for unhinged 24/7 anti-Trump content like CNN has become. These are the folks who built “our institutions” and have the deepest faith in them. Trump’s disregard for those institutions drives them nuts, much more so than any policy.
Younger democrats, I think, are more cynical about everything. They might hate Trump because of his stances on immigration or policing, but not necessarily any more than they hate any other Republican who has the same views. And it’s not going to get them to watch an anti-Trump rant on loop.
I suspect that’s why CNN’s ratings have collapsed since Trump left office. The non-Trump left wing stuff isn’t compelling to my dad. He thinks parents should decide what kids learn in schools, the police should be fully funded, we should thoroughly vet afghan refugees, etc. CNN also lost the Trump-hating institutionalist conservatives they had picked up. My wife was obsessed with Trump-gate while it was happening, but she’s been reading National Review since high school and isn’t going to tune in to hear why government spending isn’t what’s causing inflation.
CNN and the other elder networks drive viewership by telling retirees what to be angry about, providing them with the illusion of being engaged with society. It gives them something to talk about next time they’re leaning on the fence chatting to the neighbor. It’s a far cry from what CNN was in the 90s. But that core audience is now in their 70s.
> CNN [...], MSNBC, and Fox as [...] of the mainstream networks
What other mainstream news networks are there? Are you including non-cable news? Because the only other cable network I can even think of is OAN, which is much less mainstream. I'm not arguing whether any of those are/aren't partisan, just that I don't know what you're comparing them to.
FWIW: Fox Nation is much smaller in scope. It's basically a bunch of opinion shows (barely more than podcasts, honestly) designed to feed into a cyclic link sharing ecosystem that already exists and is somewhat starved for "legitimate" content. Basically these are links that people who are being fed Breitbart and InfoWars stories click on, because they're "serious news" they can't otherwise get on the internet.
(Also, IIRC most of their revenue is still advertising from freely distributed content, not subscriber fees.)
CNN+ was instead trying to do all this from the ground up, while competing with a much more robust existing ecosystem. Centrists and lefties already have Slate and Vox and Politico and of course all the existing "print" media sites to fill their "legitimate" news needs. What was CNN going to give them that they didn't already have?
Because in order to be 64, you first have to be 63. It's not like you wake up one day and say, "Well, looks like I have to watch news all the time". These habits accrue over time.
Especially as you get older and you get more involved and have less to do.
I'm a solid middle generation GenX. I rarely watch cable news anymore. When I was younger and had actual cable, I'd channel surf and often end up on one of the news stations if nothing else was on. I still have access to the same channels through YoutubeTV but it's far less conducive to channel surfing, so now if there's nothing on I want to watch, I turn off the TV or pop over to Netflix or whatever.
I pull up a few news sites twice a day and read a few articles, but I don't watch anything and I rarely listen to anything either. The written articles are usually more informative and contain less partisan stupidity. I can't do podcasts, because I'll inevitably tune them out, hear something important to the presentation, and then spend my afternoon rewinding. Also, the need to be sensationalist is vastly stronger for podcast creators than it is for major media orgs whose networks have cable contracts.
Regardless of what you do, you're not only a sample size of one, but it doesn't mean they're not going to try.
The person I responded to was musing that CNN was doing this to try and crack into a younger audience. And it's like: no shit. They want to either find ways to integrate into more youthful demographics or get more youthful demographics to integrate them into their habits.
Somehow the article fails to mention the weak subscriber numbers and lack of customer demand. Or full CNN's ratings, which would make a logical executive wonder how many people would pay for CNN when it can barely attract viewers for free.
~~~"...Inside CNN, executives saw the launch as a success. As of Tuesday, CNN+ had roughly 150,000 subscribers...."~~~ ups, sorry. As the sibling states this is in the other CNN+ related article
Subscriber counts are the #1 most important metric for any streaming service. Did you see what happened to Netflix the other day? Axios buried CNN+ subscriber counts in paragraph 14 of the earlier article and doesn't mention them at all in this one. The entire series is an attempt to blame corporate mergers and lack of executive leadership rather than the fact that CNN has terrible viewership and brand equity. You need to learn to be a more critical news reader.
Precisely spot on and succinct. Couldn't have put it better myself.
You can clearly see what's going on when you read the viewing figures of other media and streaming services out there and figure out why they're starting to shut down and restructure in the first place. Instead with this article, they continue to dodge those metrics and blame it on something else, or even on something totally un-related.
It is another form of deflection and denial to try to salvage anything useful to learn from this failure. Expect that there is nothing to learn from this since, it is the sequel to another repeated mainstream media product failure since Quibi and they haven't learned anything since that collective failure even in a global lockdown.
It is quite silly to see any defence in any prospect of this service quite frankly.
This seems like it would happen a lot at corporations that deal in propaganda. Once you abandon truth as a value, how do you stop the culture in your content creation from infecting your business decisions?
I guess Fox News has figured it out. I'd be curious to see more examples of both success and failure.
I led a team that did very early work designing iPad apps for Discovery. We are talking iPad gen2.
Back then the entire project was designed to appear like it was a serious look at investing in digital for the channel when the goal was actually to slow down the shift from linear cable subs to apps.
It was bizarre then but today it looks like the bread and butter of traditional media company politics.
This whole thing just makes no sense from a business perspective. Who would want this? Who would pay money for this? It just seems like it's an idea that some executive got, and no one was willing to tell them that it sounds like a horrible idea until it went too far and it collapsed. Did they do any marketing research or even a gut check? This seems pretty normal for the type of companies that just hire McKinssey for strategy and neglect and sanity checks.
The average age of CNN watchers is over 60 years old, not exactly a prime streaming demographic. But who would want to pay for the news monthly for a streaming service? Newspapers have enough trouble getting people to pay a bit for text. CNN needs to compete with other streaming services, and all of the free streams out there and podcasts (which are typically higher quality than CNN ).
> Who would want this? Who would pay money for this?
Who?! Why, all those countless streaming service customers, of course! I mean, have you seen how much Netflix and all these others are bringing in?! Surely if we launch some sort of streaming service they'll throw that money at us too! Right? Right?
There was someone I saw on Twitter (which I can't find now) who kept a tally of all the sites that asked them to subscribe when they visited them. The total amount they'd need to spend to subscribe to everything they saw was something crazy like $350/mo.
> The average age of CNN watchers is over 60 years old, not exactly a prime streaming demographic. But who would want to pay for the news monthly for a streaming service? Newspapers have enough trouble getting people to pay a bit for text. CNN needs to compete with other streaming services, and all of the free streams out there and podcasts (which are typically higher quality than CNN ).
> It's all baffling.
Not really. If they thought cable is in long-term (perhaps terminal) decline, they've really only have two choices: let the business wind down or try to pivot into something that's perceived as not dying. Starting a streaming service seems like an attempt at the latter. A lot of newspapers (especially ones owned by private equity) are doing the former.
Reminds me vaguely of some of the collapses the existing media giants experienced when first dipping their toes into the Internet in the mid to late 90s, thinking it was a new medium they could just flow info.
CNN's arc has been interesting to say the least. Widely lampooned as 'Chicken Noodle News' when it launched in 1980 as a lightweight 24 hour cable channel in the style of the broadsheet 'USA Today' newspaper it gradually became more and more top heavy with pompous oped bloviators, pretentious 'situation room' shows.
A minor part of inexpensive cable packages in 1980 alongside MTV, it somehow became very expensive to buy despite running endless ads. CNN's current Neilsen numbers are abysmal, it's hard to imagine why they thought people would pay even more for 'plus' content, especially given their predominantly retirement age+ demographic. Meanwhile Joe Rogan is averaging 11m views per podcast with Tucker Carlsen and his script writers a very distant second at around 3.2m. (CNN got .8m fpr their most viewed primetime show Q3 2021)
The making of CNN was Desert Storm. They covered it better than anyone else. There and then they hooked the 30-40 demographic of the time and exploded. They've lived off that reputation for decades at this point.
Doesn't CNN still have more reporters world wide than any other US based news org? I imagine the BBC has the most when comparing news orgs around the world.
I think this is why CNN still gives better news coverage than other stations, but the opinion shows drown a lot of that out.
CNN had reporters hanging out a hotel window reporting live, and then basically did the absolute funniest con at the door while one of the reporters hid in the bathroom. I remember watching it at my friends during the first night of the bombing. They were the only network with any clue. As a 20ish year old those were reporters I could respect.
@toyg so true, they were 'young', fresh and growing in credibility in that era compared to the crusty old network free terrestrial TV news anchor shows.
They sold shock and awe really well for the MiC.
https://youtu.be/oPNHYi0x2Mk
Zucker's decision to axe CNN Airport was yet another bluster on his part. It was used not only for live CNN and HLN but it syndicated content from Turner's other networks like Cartoon Network and TBS. His decision kept Discovery from adding its content to the rotation.
Zucker rationalized the decision by blaming streaming services and other mobile media but I don't buy that because Airport was still invasive - i.e., people look up from their devices and could still be seeing CNN, etc. today. And, from a business perspective, it required very few internal technical resources (a single master control system and operator) so the costs were almost certainly exclusive to whatever fees CNN paid to airports to install their receivers and displays.
(Full disclosure: I'm a former operations-level CNN employee, half speculating from my time at CNN WHQ)
Trump kept CNN in the public eye, too, with all his outbursts against Jim Acosta and near constant mentions of 'fake news CNN'. Thereafter, anyone who opposed Trumpian tyranny would seek out CNN.
Bloggers and Vloggers would be absolutely lost without mainstream media. 99% of what they do is comment on news stories broken by real reporters and digest it with a heavy layer of opinion.
CNN is bland news. That's one reason why it does so poorly. Fox News is entertainment and it is entertaining. Rupert Murdoch wanted to indoctrinate Americans and he knew just how he'd do it when creating Fox News in the early 90s. An unending line of leggy blondes and unbridled, brash male hosts that would make you want to watch it. And voila, you have today's Fox News, where you can barely get notice of that scandalous Kevin McCarthy audio versus their coverage of his defense against the story itself. Does truth matter when getting entertained feels so good?
If I read the article right, with a merger in the offing, they realized that the entire project was likely to be cancelled before launch when the reconstituted executive team performed a thorough review of every line of business.
It's quite common for ventures like this to be put on hold while a review is conducted, and even if the venture is sound, such things often wind up dying because of infighting over the review or loss of momentum. The article suggests that the team, anticipating this outcome, rushed the launch to make it more difficult to cancel the service.
As it happened, the launch fizzled. But if I'm reading it right, the service was doomed from the moment the merger was finalized. Perhaps if the launch was a surprise success, it might have survived the merger.
So perhaps the rushed launch was a "Hail Mary," and while it seems embarrassing, it's no more embarrassing than launching a Hail Mary pass in the dying seconds of an American football game and seeing it picked off and run back for a touchdown.
Such things are of no real consequence, because the game was already lost.
It's not only that, Jeff Zucker, who ran CNN was forced out in February, so the big executive sponsor of this project disappeared. That's quite likely to have had a big impact too.
I got the impression that Zucker was advocating for the streaming service in part to pad his own resume and gain a tactical position at the merged company.
I was speaking to why they rushed the launch. CNN+ being intrinsically bad as a service and/or a terrible fit for their built-in market can also be true, and the two reinforce each other:
This is 100% unadulterated speculation on my part, but if the executives still in charge of CNN+ thought it had problems, they'd be doubly fearful of the axe coming down when the business was reviewed, so they may have been motivated to get it launched whether they were ready to launch or not.
If they had no fear of a business review and possible cancellation, they might have decided to delay the launch and try to fix the content/market problems.
Sure, but the main contributing factor remains that nobody used it. And the widespread schadenfreude I suspect is mostly due to how blatantly obvious it should have been that nobody would pay for CNN+.
I've just read that live CNN wasn't even available on CNN+. That's idiotic. I can't get CNN without a full fledged cable subscription, but if this was cheap and offered a CNN livestream I'd think about it, but not even offering the live feed is just absurd.
The only reason CNN still exists is because it's bundled with cable and everyone gets (and pays for) CNN on a basic cable tier. The brutal truth? Almost nobody watches CNN unless something very significant happens. On the flip side, almost everybody with cable pays for CNN.
I do the same. I used to load cnn.com because it was easy to tell if I was getting a cached page. The current time was displayed and rendered by the server.
I thought cnn was already free to stream on networks such as plutotv. (https://pluto.tv/en/live-tv/cnn). I don’t know if it is a full stream or highlights though, since I never actually watched it. I use Pluto mostly for Bloomberg.
Of course nobody used it; it was marketed poorly, and funding for marketing was cut early on, as indicated in the article.
I have no idea if the service would have succeeded under different circumstances, but as OP stated, this was the rushed pet project of outgoing executives during a merger. Any outcome other than DOA was highly unlikely.
Good riddance, CNN is horrible and deserves to fail. CNN's false equivalency, "both sides" reporting a la CrossFire has done untold damage to our country and greatly contributed to political polarization. I want objective news--not something that's just giving air time to lobbyists from two different political factions to give their spin. CNN always hired laughably awful people like John Bolton Andrew Cuomo. Jeff Zucker really destroyed credible news programming and hurt America.
I actually was planning to get CNN+, but only after cancelling my basic cable subscription. CNN was one of the holes in the channels I occasionally watch but could not find good streaming options for
And that’s what really confuses me. Why not just start with a simulcast and maybe some extra programming available. That would’ve been so much cheaper. Then grow that into what they wanted it to become.
> About 350 of the 700 people that work for CNN+ will be laid off with pay and benefits for the next 90 days. After that, any employee that doesn't find a new role with the network will be granted at least six months' severance.
That sounds pretty good.
At least the people who are most affected by the poor leadership and decision-making are getting a decent chance to land on their feet.
9 months of pay to find a new job? That’s a little more than “decent chance” to me. That sounds more like 6 months PTO then 3 months of actual job searching.
I think what they are saying is the incentive structure makes it advantageous to not find a job. If they tell you "90 days of severance and if you don't find a job by then, here's an additional 6 months of severance", there's suddenly a huge incentive for you to not find a new job in the initial 90 days.
This is a wild collapse…but probably still not as big of a flop as Quibi.
Or at least, they seemed to have burned through slightly less money, and may be able to renegotiate some of the contracts to get the talent onto the main CNN service. And it’s not a totally bonkers idea to try to move the CNN brand into streaming as cable becomes less and less dominant…whereas Quibi was just madness, through and through.
I enjoy Alison Romans content on YouTube, was always disappointed that the Times’ canned her. Her recipes and techniques are great, and IDGAF attitude was refreshing. She seemed like she could at some point carry on with what Bourdain was doing, but with her own flair (and tbh she’s a real cook).
It seemed like she was transitioning to CNN+ so I may have subscribed for that reason alone.
But I guess it will be back to YouTube (for now)!
I don't know who did it but someone killed CNN a long time ago when they started "reporting" on what was trending on Twitter. I remember the day many years ago and thinking "what the hell are they doing and why would someone sign off on that?" A single person on YouTube could just do this - no need for an organization like CNN. All such "news" sites are dead to me!
Not sure how it could even pass the financial planning stage. More people watch Food Network than CNN on any given night, yet they expected people to pay for more CNN?
This sort of confirms my suspicion that the major news corporations in the United States are not really in business to make money, any more than state-funded news outlets in China or Russia are. Their purpose is to control the narrative being fed to the general population, in the Orwellian sense. Think about it for a moment - even if unprofitable, would they be allowed to go out of business? Some other entity would step in and buy them up, solely so they could use them to promote their own business/state propaganda agenda.
See Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post as a leading example. Does Bezos care at all if the Washington Post turns a profit or not, as long as they can be counted on to spin their news coverage in the direction Bezos prefers, and not cover stories like the nature of AWS contracts with various federal agencies, etc.?
Most people are aware of this dynamic at some level and very few would now actually shell out their own money to be fed more of this state-corporate propaganda, which is why a paid subscription service like CNN+ rapidly went belly-up.
Probably the only way to fix it over the long run is to bring anti-trust efforts to bear on the corporate media conglomerates and their affiliates (i.e. Youtube/Google directs all news inquiry searches to these 'legitimate outlets' like CNN, FOX, MSNBC, blocking any access to a wide variety of independent shows being run by non-affiliated news & opinion content generators, regardless of their popularity).
There may be a paywall but it's one of the cheapest paywalls of any daily newspaper in the US. There are constant, renewable deals for WaPo subscriptions such that anyone paying more than $4 a month is grossly overpaying.
In contrast the two daily newspapers closest to me charge $10 a month and $4 a week for online access.
> This sort of confirms my suspicion that the major news corporations in the United States are not really in business to make money, any more than state-funded news outlets in China or Russia are.
When big-time investors, ultra wealthy or large institutions, purchase corporate stock it often isn't done as any sort of "long term retirement investment" like small time individual investors do.
They purchase the stock because they want control over that company for some purpose. Usually it is tied into other investments they own.
So one company pay purchase another in order to intentionally run it into the ground. They can leverage it, liquidate it, eliminate competition, etc. Like what is suspected motivation the parent company of Bass Pro purchasing Cabela.
In the case of major media corporations like CNN the value these companies represent isn't necessary the operational revenue they receive from advertisements or subscriptions. These companies may be attractive because of the influence they have over the American public.
So that would help to explain why CNN did weird things like fire people criticizing the government's position in the lead up to the Iraq wars. It could be that CNN ownership had some stake in other companies that had the potential to profit significantly from the war.
> Probably the only way to fix it over the long run is to bring anti-trust efforts to bear on the corporate media conglomerates and their affiliates
Well that then brings up the second problem and third problems.
I worked in an extremely "captured" industries in the past. For example, voting machines.
These corporations were regulated to such an extent that it was impossible for any new corporation to be created to compete with them.
In effect the 3 or 4 major corporations providing voting machines were the only voting machine companies that could ever possibly exist. It simply wasn't financially feasible for anybody else to make voting machines and be profitable.
The multi-years-long certification process, close governmental relationships, the constant lawsuits, and threats of lawsuits made any sort of major investment in the area financial suicide.
Because they are so regulated they are effectively above the law. The government can't afford to see them go out of business. It's cheaper and easier to keep them profitable then it would be to go back and change all the voting machine regulations in order to allow real competition.
And because of that these companies have real influence and power. It is bizarre and counter intuitive, but it's also how it works out in real life.
I experienced this first-hand. And I know that the same problems exist in other highly regulated industries such as pharmaceuticals.
This is why all the generic companies are now owned by all the name brand companies. The government changed the rules in the 2000's to make creating new generic companies infeasible financially. This then allowed all the bigger pharma companies to buy up all the smaller ones.
Which means that the laws and relationships that these companies have with the Federal government to constrain them actually end up increasing their power and influence.
There is a lot more to it then I mentioned here, but some visual reinforcement of how this ends up working is:
Thanks for posting this. It's quite informative. The venn-diagram website is worth the price of admission alone.
Question, if a conglomerate owns both a major corporate news company and a major federal defense company doesn't that represent a conflict of interest since the news giant can effectively promote information, such as a war in Iraq or Ukraine, that encourages federal defense spending that, then, directly benefits the the defense company?
The only time people have ever paid for news before the Internet are newspapers and trade periodicals. When radio and TV were invented, people weren't paying for news from those outlets. There was some notion of public service regarding TV and radio broadcasting that kept things more "civil" for a while, but tended to erode over time.
So you could break up the media conglomerates, but it isn't going to make people pay directly for news and unless you want government-funded news, that would be the only thing that could prevent the advertiser hold over news, which is responsible for the dynamic of today more than anything else.
The majority of people don't want pure news or information as a whole though, because most people aren't rich.
The life of non-rich people is more stressful and people in that class will always tend to seek things with narratives and emotional resonance over critical-thinking-skill-needing information when they aren't working or otherwise trying to survive.
I am going to post an alternative take to the general sentiment that saw this coming from a mile away. I think it is awesome that an organization as old as TimeWarner was able to launch a bold new product. Yes, it may have failed, but they tried.
Launching new products is insanely difficult, if not impossible, in large organizations - even in the most esteemed tech companies. And yet that is how many companies die, because they cannot overcome the internal inertia to launch something new.
What a rare and interesting view. Most products fail anyway, yes, so that this one originates from a huge conglomerate doesn't do much to change the odds. I'm bearish on legacy media and CNN in particular for other reasons, but other examples would be how Yamaha, Sony, Nintendo, have all launched fresh products that grew from within a legacy org structure. Nice to have my own schadenfreude broken by a thoughtful insight.
I'd wonder whether the natural evolution of a succesful large org ends as a ventures group.
After the announcement that CNN+ was shutting down I went on their Twitter account (@CNNplus) to get a feel for what sort of content they produced.
Maybe it's because I'm from a younger generation, but it all comes off as overproduced and inauthentic media-speak.
It's obvious that their demographic is old people, since all of their media personalities are old people.
Ben Stiller talking about making new friends in old-age thanks to Twitter. Discussing parenting tips with Anderson Cooper. A bunch of washed-up media personalities with nothing new or interesting to say.
The refusal to pass the torch onto a younger generation while clinging to their positions of power becomes a generational plague. CNN is a walking corpse which will pass away with its audience.
CNN went from being the premier news gathering/dispensing agency to their present state of a news reporting agency by making the decision to replace their own field reporters with information given them by other agencies.
For me, it was as simple as "I already have access to FREE news sources without commercials that are higher quality than CNN"
My Roku has channels like SkyNews and Al Jazeera where I can watch both live and pre-recorded stories at no charge. No commercials either. They of course, have their own bias problems, but since I know what those are, I can take any stories on affected topics with an appropriate grain of salt.
I don't know why CNN thinks I would pay them when better is available free.
> What's next: Discovery wants to build one scaled, subscription streaming app based around HBO Max's branding that includes a cheaper, ad-supported tier. It will eventually combine discovery+ with the HBO Max app after initially offering them as a bundle. Much of the CNN+ programming will be reallocated to other platforms. Some features like CNN's "Interview Club" will likely live on CNN's free, ad-supported app. Other shows may be included in HBO Max.
Makes sense, but it's astonishing how bad HBO Max's app continues to be, given its strategic importance. The catalog is generally excellent, but the UX and reliability of the app and platform are terrible. I wonder if the new executive team will lop of heads responsible for the current state of the product, or whether they're insulated enough that the dysfunction will continue.
I wish there were a channel that highlighted, in revolving fashion, subtitled news broadcasts from major media outlets around the world. Having lived in South Korea for many years and finally learning passable Korean, I was amazed at the quality and depth of reporting on the evening (8 p.m.) news there, essentially 50 minutes of in-depth coverage of topical issues, with no commercial breaks. The sheer amount of quality reporting on the economy, politics, and global events puts the US thin gruel efforts at journalism to shame. Doubtless there are other examples around the globe of excellent news coverage, and it would be a wake-up call to Americans to see how mediocre our own fare is.
182 comments
[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 241 ms ] threadBut was this programming built for their elderly audience, or was it supposed to be an attempt at picking up a new, younger audience? Who was this for?
You watch a program like CBS Sunday Morning and it's clear they know who their audience is. Each week, they feature who passed away. They feature anniversaries of things like the Godfather and other stuff that their audience will like to reminisce about. A comedian talking about aging gracefully. Etc. But I don't think CNN did any of that with CNN+.
(Source for age claims: https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2021/05/24/msnbc-rashid... )
[EDIT] I take back part of that—I think one guy has cable. He's into football. He's also the only right-winger in my circle. Maybe a coincidence? Wouldn't be surprised if a fair bit of his "vaccine hesitancy" (to put it in mild, friendly NPR terms) came from watching Fox News, now that I think about it.
https://www.foxnews.com/health/us-covid-19-vaccine-boosters-...
https://www.foxnews.com/health/pfizer-covid-19-vaccine-more-...
https://www.foxnews.com/health/covid-19-vaccination-kids-sev...
If it's huge news, I'll hear about it (you can't avoid it) and if it is not huge news, why do I care?
Which I know isn't ideal and I should pay for a proper news source but the state of "print" journalism in Canada is really, really bad right now since all the non-government-run services are being bought up by ideological conservatives.
In additiok to that we have dogital subscriptions to NYT, WP and physical ones for Wired and our local newspaper. Anytheing else is the non-subscription stuff from reliable news papers. I did reduce news consumption a lot so since the Ukraine war started.
Oh, and not to forget: HN.
EDIT: To all the people saying that younger people get their "unhinged" through social media and other platforms, that makes a lot of sense. Thanks for the explanation.
Everyone has a bias and skews stories, also, creating fear probably increases viewership. If the media always said everything is fine, less people would watch IMO.
I understand the sentiment, and I'm also careful about how much news I consume, but there's a fine line between this and being privileged to be able to afford to skip news because those suffering aren't your family.
In a less extreme example, if a big project came into your neighborhood to destroy all the houses on your street to build a highway, I'm sure that suddenly this news would make you want to get involved politically to advocate against the destruction of it. But when that happened in the other neighborhood and you didn't care to even write an email to your local politician to oppose it because you didn't know about it, other families suffered.
It's a fine line.. I've seen my parents watch news 3 times a day (lunch, dinner, and late-evening news) and it was definitely not healthy and did not make them better citizen either. I don't have a perfect answer.
I don't think there's any obligation to keep up with events on the other side of the world (or the other side of your country) if you're not also able and willing to do something about it. I dunno about applying the "privilege" label to that—in fact, the fewer resources you have, the less point there is in it.
Things that happen across the world affect us here too. Maybe your friends have family in Ukraine or are from there. I have students who are Ukrainian. Currently Ukrainians are leaving their homeland as refugees and resettling all around the world. They could be moving in down the street and will be your neighbors! Knowing what's happening around the world allows one to be empathetic to the situations of others.
Being an American is like being a Roman citizen; you have to run the whole empire.
Again, I think that end would also be better served if a high proportion of news media consumption were shifted to citizenship-relevant books (and maybe very high-quality, low-frequency periodicals), probably starting with textbooks and classics in political science, history, and economics (I doubt anyone who's mined those well already, needs any help picking their next high-value read).
Nope, not my duty. My duty is to elect politicians who enact policy affecting me. If a politician enriches my country at the expense of another, it is my duty to vote for him, for the sake of myself and my family. No one is a citizen of the world.
Watching the news is not helping these people.
Hence why I said most. I definitely agree that being exposed to outside events can be important for sympathizing with those affected (and possible helping them), but at the same time, one does not need to be aware of everything going on in the world.
Neither do I.
If you think you're learning about social, political, and economic mechanics on a global scale from the news, then I implore you to keep consuming. I've never learned anything from the news that I couldn't have learned talking to someone else who watched it instead.
But if you live in a democracy, you have to spend some of your time being informed about things so you know how to vote. Think of it as a democracy tax. If you didn't live in a democracy, you wouldn't have this tax on your time. Freedom isn't free, eh?
Of course, this democracy tax is totally voluntary. You're only obligated by your own morality. You may choose to opt out of democracy entirely. Not voting or being informed is your choice, if you wish to live your life off the backs of others. No one will make you feel guilty about it at all. Right? ;)
I don’t think you fairly addressed his question at all in this comment, and the reason lies right in that vague word: “things”.
People who live anywhere will always take an interest in information which directly affects them, or that they can profit off of, or which might cause them to incur losses. Generally there are multiple means of attaining this information and the “news” in the mass media sense is just one of them. I don’t for example pay close attention to all legal news, so when I need legal advice which tends to be situational in nature I hire people who do rather than proceeding on my own partially-informed opinions from what I gleaned out of a newspaper which probably missed important details and which is usually written from a biased perspective. This is true for any number of domains I don’t specialize in (almost all of them), and in seeking counsel I gain information along the way that can shape my future actions.
So lets come back to that word, “things”, which things should people be informed of that you get from the news media but are unlikely to receive from anywhere else?
https://www.businessinsider.com/study-watching-fox-news-make...
[1] http://publicmind.fdu.edu/2012/confirmed/
I was actually referring to exactly this.
I hear that said a lot, but I doubt it, at least not with those proportions. Those things offer important perspective, but to put it bluntly: George Washington isn't running for president anymore and slavery has been abolished for more than a century. The past is the past and this is the present: there are some commonalities but also a lot of important differences.
To be a "better citizen," you need pretty deep knowledge of current events. That takes a lot of time, because a lot is going on and it's often more informative to follow a story than just read a summary once it's over. Think of it this way: an investor will lose his shirt if he spends 95% of his time reading classic investment books and only 5% actually researching businesses. Being a citizen is similar.
Also, one of the nice things about the news is it exposes you more to the rough edges and uncertainty of the present, rather than smoothing that over with theory and narratives (that can be thoroughly curve-fitted to the past, so as not to jar you with their wrongness).
The modern "news" environment takes the worst of our justice system, the unethical, dishonest, manipulative lawyers who consider it their duty to use every rhetorical tool to achieve their goals, and has mainstreamed it. The news, and politics, are dominated by attorneys. But most of us aren't, and most of us don't use those same techniques in our lives, or are even familiar with the techniques, and so we're left vulnerable to them.
No, it's based on the hypothesis that sufficient up-to-date information is required.
> People's perspectives are not deepened by more information, but made more shallow. In large part this is because the information they get is mostly second order, information about other people's reactions, or even reactions to reactions. This reaction information is used to preempt and override people's own reactions, often with something extreme, which drives engagement, which represents value for the corporation.
That's a twisted cartoon of the news. If that's how you've actually experienced it, you probably need to pick better sources or get better at separating the wheat from the chaff.
> The modern "news" environment takes the worst of our justice system, the unethical, dishonest, manipulative lawyers who consider it their duty to use every rhetorical tool to achieve their goals, and has mainstreamed it. The news, and politics, are dominated by attorneys. But most of us aren't, and most of us don't use those same techniques in our lives, or are even familiar with the techniques, and so we're left vulnerable to them.
That's another twisted cartoon, but I'll say one of the best ways to avoid being manipulated is to actually be familiar with the facts.
Quite possibly. You're usage of Good News/bad news there is about the most confused thing possible. There are much clearer ways of saying what I think you might be saying.
Sure, but I doubt someone with a deep grounding in political science, economics, and history, but who'd never heard of either candidate, would need more than an hour or so on Google to decide between Trump and Biden, for instance. Our choices are, as voters, for better or worse, pretty limited.
Frankly, I often make decisions about local candidates or ballot initiatives based on like 5 minutes of research. I doubt any of those choices would change if I closely followed all those candidates and issues and spent 50x more time on them—what might change them is if I'd read fewer, or different, books. (meanwhile, if I wanted to make any actual difference in the world, I'm aware that what I ought to do is get involved with one of the big two political parties, at the local level)
That's a bad example, because Trump was such an oaf. A better recent example might have been choosing between McCain and Obama, if you're focused on presidential races.
The bigger issue isn't so much picking candidates, but understanding current situation and problems, and having opinions about those things to inform your choices.
> A better recent example might have been choosing between McCain and Obama, if you're focused on presidential races.
I'd love to see some blank-slate person try to judge them just by their own websites. God, those were so different.
I think the policies from the 60s and 70s have way more impact today than people realize and without understanding that context, "deep knowledge of current events" gets you nowhere. The seeds for an event like 9/11 were planted almost 50 years earlier and without understanding that it's easy for people to get swept up in takes like "they hate us for our freedom".
Of course, this view is shared by every fanatic everywhere, of every faith, such that the jingo "They hate us for our freedom" applies to them, too.
Osama Bin Laden's own motivations for 9/11 had more to do with American imperialism in the Middle East and less to do with "rejection of God's Law". This isn't speculation, but from the horse's mouth. The "hate us for our freedom" was propaganda by Bush, and anyone who only looks at that, without studying the history of American imperialism in the middle east, starting from the coup of Iran, ends up in the backwards conclusion that Islam is a violent religion (or at least any more violent than any other Abrahamic religion).
Please bear in mind that "rejection of God's law, the soul of heresy, for which the punishment is death" is also a major tenet in all Abrahamic religions. Secondly, there are plenty of Americans who are pining for nuclear war with Russia over Ukrainians; but somehow the blowback of nearly 50 years of foreign intervention by the CIA wouldn't be a motivation for anti-American sentiment in the middle east and instead "they just hate us for our freedom".
I'm not saying religion isn't a tool for executing these goals, but the orchestrators have always been acting under geopolitical goals.
What motivates you to resist the simple truth that Islamists hate and wish to kill Westerners for breaking their holy law (the same behaviors we call "freedom"), admire martyrs who suicide themselves into civilians for this purpose? Do you think an Islamist would disagree with any of that? If so, why?
The soldier does not have a larger strategy in mind; he kills for simple and extreme reasons. The government however is rarely so naive, and initiates their wars with much larger goals in mind. Even with a dictator, they represent the filtered understanding of many advisors, and balance the many goals of the group (so almost by definition, they cannot sustain a singular goal with singular purpose for long). The individual just needs one reason to do what he does, which might be as simple as “his boss told him to”.
Because it's a ridiculous premise that you would not apply to any other religion. It's not even a consistent view of Islam; you don't have Islamists in Malaysia (60% islamic) or Turkey (99% Islam) holding the same sort of contempt with to West.
Consider it this way, if a Russian came to you and said "the Ukrainians hate Russians because they are full of Nazis and they hate how Stalin purged Germany of Nazis" you would quickly realize that is ridiculous notion - Ukrainians are currently being bombed by Russian soldiers which fuels their animosity.
The West has largely done the same in the middle east, and not understanding this history leads you down to conclusion that they must hate the West because of Islam. I don't know how you could look at an entire group of people who have been practically waging a war for sovereignty against a incredibly more powerful adversary for almost _60 years_ and come away that their wish to kill westerners comes from breaking their holy law. Yeah, you can pretend Islam is a tiny part of it, but I think a larger part of that hate is having their government overthrown and then having their children blown up in an air strike.
I explicitly said in my initial comment that the slogan "They hate us for our freedom" applies to any fanatic of any religion. You are misrepresenting me, and are drifting further away from a specific point around what motivated the 9/11 attackers. Perhaps you are confused by the difference between Islam[0] and Islamism[1]?
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamism
People today are vehemently anti-China because of censorship in video games, but somehow it’s a leap of faith that people can be anti-West after their home is targeted in an air raid and we must turn to “religious fanatics”. If China dropped a bomb on your parents home over some mineral rights, don’t you think you would become a little anti-Chinese? What would you think if those Chinese turned around and called you fundamentalist Christian when you voiced those complaints?
If you buy that fact that the Middle East sustained aggression for over 50 years because of “religious fanactism” then you must also believe Putin’s line of reasoning that Zelensky is a nazi because it’s the same kind of propaganda
I believe all of that, yet "they hate us for our freedom" remains an accurate description of the fanatic. It is, essentially, definitional.
>If China dropped a bomb on your parents home over some mineral rights, don’t you think you would become a little anti-Chinese?
You seem to interpret what I'm saying as bigoted against Muslims (it's not, BTW), so I'm surprised you'd make this argument. Furthermore, it's ambiguous what you mean: do you mean anti-China, or anti-Chinese? Yes, I would certainly feel the former, but not the latter. Individuals aren't nations, never were, never will be.
The reality is that post world war 2 soviet containment is the most relevant starting point for explaining Islamic terrorism in the west. Yes, religious rhetoric was used by bin Laden and al-Qaeda to justify their actions, but they only took these actions because western powers (US, Soviets) were playing proxy war in the region for decades.
> I think the policies from the 60s and 70s have way more impact today than people realize and without understanding that context, "deep knowledge of current events" gets you nowhere.
I'm not arguing for an extreme opposite position (e.g. all current events, no history). If you thought I was, you misunderstood me. I'm just saying it's not being a "good citizen" to bury yourself in the past and neglect the present day.
However, I will say understanding current events probably takes more effort, because history can be digested and presented more efficiently (e.g. for the Civil War: 4+ years of 19th century newspapers vs. a 500 page history).
The vestiges of the later slavery are still around too, well, I guess the slavery is too, but now you have to buy their labour from the government, and the government keeps ownership of the slave. Actually, I don't know how that goes for private prisons?
But pressuring people to plea guilty to crime, perceptions of black people as violent criminals, the large US prison population, the police, etc. Those are legacies and continuations of practices from slavery.
A but more reading on history puts today's problems in better context
[0]: https://weeklysift.com/2014/03/31/slavery-lasted-until-pearl...
The purported Twain quote, "If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed; if you do, you're misinformed," applies here.
People love to do comparisons to this or that news organization, "Fox News viewers are most likely to have a Beanie Baby collection," or "MSNBC viewers are most likely to believe that Elvis was an alien," or whatever. It doesn't mean much. They are all entertainment platforms that sell ads.
There is still bias, of course - The Economist makes it clear they are pro-free market, for example - but they tend to give a decent overview of the most salient facts and they write for a global audience.
uninformed is passively annoying, misinformed is aggressively annoying.
Added to which, the news is a business model which increasingly earns its living off manufacturing outrage (not by making its viewers more informed and worldly). The same can’t be said of history books, which is why I agree with one of my sibling commenters here, who recommends swapping most news with reading history.
CNN’s turn, I think, is all about Trump. Old democrats like my dad are the exact audience for unhinged 24/7 anti-Trump content like CNN has become. These are the folks who built “our institutions” and have the deepest faith in them. Trump’s disregard for those institutions drives them nuts, much more so than any policy.
Younger democrats, I think, are more cynical about everything. They might hate Trump because of his stances on immigration or policing, but not necessarily any more than they hate any other Republican who has the same views. And it’s not going to get them to watch an anti-Trump rant on loop.
I suspect that’s why CNN’s ratings have collapsed since Trump left office. The non-Trump left wing stuff isn’t compelling to my dad. He thinks parents should decide what kids learn in schools, the police should be fully funded, we should thoroughly vet afghan refugees, etc. CNN also lost the Trump-hating institutionalist conservatives they had picked up. My wife was obsessed with Trump-gate while it was happening, but she’s been reading National Review since high school and isn’t going to tune in to hear why government spending isn’t what’s causing inflation.
I don’t think I know a single person under 50 that routinely sits down to watch TV.
Well that's part of the problem, there is an older generation that probably still thinks of CNN as the sober, trustworthy cable news network.
What other mainstream news networks are there? Are you including non-cable news? Because the only other cable network I can even think of is OAN, which is much less mainstream. I'm not arguing whether any of those are/aren't partisan, just that I don't know what you're comparing them to.
(Also, IIRC most of their revenue is still advertising from freely distributed content, not subscriber fees.)
CNN+ was instead trying to do all this from the ground up, while competing with a much more robust existing ecosystem. Centrists and lefties already have Slate and Vox and Politico and of course all the existing "print" media sites to fill their "legitimate" news needs. What was CNN going to give them that they didn't already have?
Because in order to be 64, you first have to be 63. It's not like you wake up one day and say, "Well, looks like I have to watch news all the time". These habits accrue over time.
Especially as you get older and you get more involved and have less to do.
The old habits are pretty much gone.
The person I responded to was musing that CNN was doing this to try and crack into a younger audience. And it's like: no shit. They want to either find ways to integrate into more youthful demographics or get more youthful demographics to integrate them into their habits.
Joe Camel wasn't made to appeal to adult smokers.
And the previous article buried subscriber counts in paragraph 14, and never mentions CNN's ratings or viewership, or CNN+'s viewership per show.
Instead, both this article and the previous one is an attempt to obfuscate the reality of awful viewership as just a victim of executive realignment:
It's being shuttered due to a strategic misalignment between Discovery executives and CNN executives.
and
The service was shut down because CNN and its new parent disagreed over whether the investment made sense long-term.
But not, "CNN shut down the service when it became obvious virtually nobody was willing to pay a non-promotional price for the product."
You can clearly see what's going on when you read the viewing figures of other media and streaming services out there and figure out why they're starting to shut down and restructure in the first place. Instead with this article, they continue to dodge those metrics and blame it on something else, or even on something totally un-related.
It is another form of deflection and denial to try to salvage anything useful to learn from this failure. Expect that there is nothing to learn from this since, it is the sequel to another repeated mainstream media product failure since Quibi and they haven't learned anything since that collective failure even in a global lockdown.
It is quite silly to see any defence in any prospect of this service quite frankly.
Sorry, that's pretty funny. It seems like everyone outside of CNN could see that CNN+ was doomed to fail, but the Kool Aid was flowing freely inside.
I guess Fox News has figured it out. I'd be curious to see more examples of both success and failure.
Back then the entire project was designed to appear like it was a serious look at investing in digital for the channel when the goal was actually to slow down the shift from linear cable subs to apps.
It was bizarre then but today it looks like the bread and butter of traditional media company politics.
"Yeah, I'm Disney positive. I was Apple positive, but got over it in February. Don't hardly know anyone with CNN positive."
The average age of CNN watchers is over 60 years old, not exactly a prime streaming demographic. But who would want to pay for the news monthly for a streaming service? Newspapers have enough trouble getting people to pay a bit for text. CNN needs to compete with other streaming services, and all of the free streams out there and podcasts (which are typically higher quality than CNN ).
It's all baffling.
Who?! Why, all those countless streaming service customers, of course! I mean, have you seen how much Netflix and all these others are bringing in?! Surely if we launch some sort of streaming service they'll throw that money at us too! Right? Right?
Not that I buy it, but that had to be the idea: not to reach CNN viewers, but new viewers.
> It's all baffling.
Not really. If they thought cable is in long-term (perhaps terminal) decline, they've really only have two choices: let the business wind down or try to pivot into something that's perceived as not dying. Starting a streaming service seems like an attempt at the latter. A lot of newspapers (especially ones owned by private equity) are doing the former.
I figured I would get CNN light for $3 a month vs Sling for $30 (which I only use for CNN now).
>The average age of CNN watchers is over 60 years old, not exactly a prime streaming demographic.
Isnt it? Every 60 year old I know has some kind of streaming device and social media accounts.
A minor part of inexpensive cable packages in 1980 alongside MTV, it somehow became very expensive to buy despite running endless ads. CNN's current Neilsen numbers are abysmal, it's hard to imagine why they thought people would pay even more for 'plus' content, especially given their predominantly retirement age+ demographic. Meanwhile Joe Rogan is averaging 11m views per podcast with Tucker Carlsen and his script writers a very distant second at around 3.2m. (CNN got .8m fpr their most viewed primetime show Q3 2021)
Doesn't CNN still have more reporters world wide than any other US based news org? I imagine the BBC has the most when comparing news orgs around the world.
I think this is why CNN still gives better news coverage than other stations, but the opinion shows drown a lot of that out.
Like that time they interviewed Osama bin Laden right before the 1998 Embassy bombings to make sure the public knew who he was: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orawG7vt68o
Don't forget about the captive audience in airports, too. That kept CNN artificially in the public eye.
Zucker rationalized the decision by blaming streaming services and other mobile media but I don't buy that because Airport was still invasive - i.e., people look up from their devices and could still be seeing CNN, etc. today. And, from a business perspective, it required very few internal technical resources (a single master control system and operator) so the costs were almost certainly exclusive to whatever fees CNN paid to airports to install their receivers and displays.
(Full disclosure: I'm a former operations-level CNN employee, half speculating from my time at CNN WHQ)
It's quite common for ventures like this to be put on hold while a review is conducted, and even if the venture is sound, such things often wind up dying because of infighting over the review or loss of momentum. The article suggests that the team, anticipating this outcome, rushed the launch to make it more difficult to cancel the service.
As it happened, the launch fizzled. But if I'm reading it right, the service was doomed from the moment the merger was finalized. Perhaps if the launch was a surprise success, it might have survived the merger.
So perhaps the rushed launch was a "Hail Mary," and while it seems embarrassing, it's no more embarrassing than launching a Hail Mary pass in the dying seconds of an American football game and seeing it picked off and run back for a touchdown.
Such things are of no real consequence, because the game was already lost.
This is 100% unadulterated speculation on my part, but if the executives still in charge of CNN+ thought it had problems, they'd be doubly fearful of the axe coming down when the business was reviewed, so they may have been motivated to get it launched whether they were ready to launch or not.
If they had no fear of a business review and possible cancellation, they might have decided to delay the launch and try to fix the content/market problems.
… and I am in a much more desirable demo …
I have no idea if the service would have succeeded under different circumstances, but as OP stated, this was the rushed pet project of outgoing executives during a merger. Any outcome other than DOA was highly unlikely.
That sounds pretty good.
At least the people who are most affected by the poor leadership and decision-making are getting a decent chance to land on their feet.
Or at least, they seemed to have burned through slightly less money, and may be able to renegotiate some of the contracts to get the talent onto the main CNN service. And it’s not a totally bonkers idea to try to move the CNN brand into streaming as cable becomes less and less dominant…whereas Quibi was just madness, through and through.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/22/21528404/quibi-shut-down...
See Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post as a leading example. Does Bezos care at all if the Washington Post turns a profit or not, as long as they can be counted on to spin their news coverage in the direction Bezos prefers, and not cover stories like the nature of AWS contracts with various federal agencies, etc.?
Most people are aware of this dynamic at some level and very few would now actually shell out their own money to be fed more of this state-corporate propaganda, which is why a paid subscription service like CNN+ rapidly went belly-up.
Probably the only way to fix it over the long run is to bring anti-trust efforts to bear on the corporate media conglomerates and their affiliates (i.e. Youtube/Google directs all news inquiry searches to these 'legitimate outlets' like CNN, FOX, MSNBC, blocking any access to a wide variety of independent shows being run by non-affiliated news & opinion content generators, regardless of their popularity).
In contrast the two daily newspapers closest to me charge $10 a month and $4 a week for online access.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/i/interlocking-directorat...
When big-time investors, ultra wealthy or large institutions, purchase corporate stock it often isn't done as any sort of "long term retirement investment" like small time individual investors do.
They purchase the stock because they want control over that company for some purpose. Usually it is tied into other investments they own.
So one company pay purchase another in order to intentionally run it into the ground. They can leverage it, liquidate it, eliminate competition, etc. Like what is suspected motivation the parent company of Bass Pro purchasing Cabela.
In the case of major media corporations like CNN the value these companies represent isn't necessary the operational revenue they receive from advertisements or subscriptions. These companies may be attractive because of the influence they have over the American public.
So that would help to explain why CNN did weird things like fire people criticizing the government's position in the lead up to the Iraq wars. It could be that CNN ownership had some stake in other companies that had the potential to profit significantly from the war.
> Probably the only way to fix it over the long run is to bring anti-trust efforts to bear on the corporate media conglomerates and their affiliates
Well that then brings up the second problem and third problems.
Second problem: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/regulatory-capture.asp
I worked in an extremely "captured" industries in the past. For example, voting machines.
These corporations were regulated to such an extent that it was impossible for any new corporation to be created to compete with them.
In effect the 3 or 4 major corporations providing voting machines were the only voting machine companies that could ever possibly exist. It simply wasn't financially feasible for anybody else to make voting machines and be profitable.
The multi-years-long certification process, close governmental relationships, the constant lawsuits, and threats of lawsuits made any sort of major investment in the area financial suicide.
Because they are so regulated they are effectively above the law. The government can't afford to see them go out of business. It's cheaper and easier to keep them profitable then it would be to go back and change all the voting machine regulations in order to allow real competition.
And because of that these companies have real influence and power. It is bizarre and counter intuitive, but it's also how it works out in real life.
I experienced this first-hand. And I know that the same problems exist in other highly regulated industries such as pharmaceuticals.
This is why all the generic companies are now owned by all the name brand companies. The government changed the rules in the 2000's to make creating new generic companies infeasible financially. This then allowed all the bigger pharma companies to buy up all the smaller ones.
Which means that the laws and relationships that these companies have with the Federal government to constrain them actually end up increasing their power and influence.
There is a lot more to it then I mentioned here, but some visual reinforcement of how this ends up working is:
https://www.geke.us/VennDiagrams.html
> conglomerates and their affiliates
Conglomerates exist because of anti-trust and anti-monopoly laws. They don&#x...
Question, if a conglomerate owns both a major corporate news company and a major federal defense company doesn't that represent a conflict of interest since the news giant can effectively promote information, such as a war in Iraq or Ukraine, that encourages federal defense spending that, then, directly benefits the the defense company?
So you could break up the media conglomerates, but it isn't going to make people pay directly for news and unless you want government-funded news, that would be the only thing that could prevent the advertiser hold over news, which is responsible for the dynamic of today more than anything else.
The majority of people don't want pure news or information as a whole though, because most people aren't rich. The life of non-rich people is more stressful and people in that class will always tend to seek things with narratives and emotional resonance over critical-thinking-skill-needing information when they aren't working or otherwise trying to survive.
I'd call it doing business.
Launching new products is insanely difficult, if not impossible, in large organizations - even in the most esteemed tech companies. And yet that is how many companies die, because they cannot overcome the internal inertia to launch something new.
I'd wonder whether the natural evolution of a succesful large org ends as a ventures group.
Maybe it's because I'm from a younger generation, but it all comes off as overproduced and inauthentic media-speak.
It's obvious that their demographic is old people, since all of their media personalities are old people.
Ben Stiller talking about making new friends in old-age thanks to Twitter. Discussing parenting tips with Anderson Cooper. A bunch of washed-up media personalities with nothing new or interesting to say.
The refusal to pass the torch onto a younger generation while clinging to their positions of power becomes a generational plague. CNN is a walking corpse which will pass away with its audience.
My take, anyway.
My Roku has channels like SkyNews and Al Jazeera where I can watch both live and pre-recorded stories at no charge. No commercials either. They of course, have their own bias problems, but since I know what those are, I can take any stories on affected topics with an appropriate grain of salt.
I don't know why CNN thinks I would pay them when better is available free.
Makes sense, but it's astonishing how bad HBO Max's app continues to be, given its strategic importance. The catalog is generally excellent, but the UX and reliability of the app and platform are terrible. I wonder if the new executive team will lop of heads responsible for the current state of the product, or whether they're insulated enough that the dysfunction will continue.
CNN+ streaming service is shutting down a month after launching - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31111276 - April 2022 (316 comments)