Tag: CNN

The Streaming Wars Could Force The Sale Of CNN


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

It seems almost inevitable at this point that NBC Universal will try to bulk up against Disney and buy Discovery Warner Brothers once it finally comes into existence. Since NBC Universal owns MSBNC, something would have to be done with CNN.

Who’s going to buy CNN?

The obvious candidate to buy CNN — which would cost, at a minimum, $1 billion — would be Amazon. But our favorite fascist nutjob Josh Hawley has already been very public about his opposition to such a thing.

So, it’s very possible that someone unexpected would have to buy CNN. Disney owns ABC, but it doesn’t own a cable news outlet, and neither does Paramount CBC. So, it seems as though either one of those two could be willing to shell out the vast sum of money necessary to buy CNN.

Though, if you wanted to think outside the box, The New York Times Company might be interested, as would MacKenzie Scott or Laurene Powell Jobs.

Anyway, the fate of CNN is something to keep in the back of your mind. I have long thought Turner Broadcasting had long outlived its purpose and should be folded into Warner Brothers as part of a massive corporate re-org. There’s no need to have any of CNN left in Atlanta. It should all be out of NYC.

What do I know. No one listens to me.

CNN Should Replace Chris Cuomo With Someone More Like Larry King


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Larry King was a hallmark of CNN for decades. And then he just vanished. It was kind of weird. And, even stranger, CNN has completely ignored that for a lot of long-term viewers like me, having a breezy, value free chat show on during CNN’s weekday primetime was a rather comfortable thing to see.

Chris Cuomo just doesn’t do it for me. He’s strangely off putting for some reason, nowhere near as affable as Larry King was in his prime. I struggle to think of who CNN could replace him with, however.

The first person who comes to mind is Joe Rogan. I think Rogan can be a real idiot at times, but he is affable and given his alt-Right lite credentials, I could see his presence on the network doing a lot to bridge the gap between CNN and the rabid, bonkers MAGA shitheads who hate it so much. (Yet, who am I kidding — MAGA hates CNN because it’s objective and they crave to be fed the party line. But, luz.)

I suppose someone like Jon Stewart might be able to do the type of show I’m looking for, but that just doesn’t seem very practical. Neither Stewart nor Rogan seem really all that interested in being on CNN for various reasons.

Now that I think about it, given how King was not a traditional journalist and, as such, you could even draw from an unexpected place: SNL. There are a number of SNL-connected people who would be great as a potential Larry King-like interviewer. Kenan Thompson or Tina Fey would be just the right mix of regular person and interviewer-with-an-interesting-personality to bring back the same vibe as Larry King.

But, who am I kidding. No one listens to me.

Trump’s Coming Second Term Purge of Late Night Hosts


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Form follows function, so it would make a lot of sense that once Trump brazenly steals a second term that one of the first things he’s going to do is purge late night of all the hosts he doesn’t like.

Remember, by this point, Trump will have crossed a number of Rubicons in his successful efforts to steal the 2020 election, so he’s going to do some pretty jawdropping things that even he might not have thought about doing before. There are two ways I could see him getting rid of late show hosts he didn’t like.

One would be direct — he tells the heads of the majors media companies to do it or else. He’ll take their broadcasting license or whatever. This probably will happen behind the scenes, but when the boom is dropped it will happen very rapidly. We’ll all find out what he did, but lulz, nothing matters.

There’s another way he might do it — he might convince “German Industrialists” to buy up stock in various media companies and get them to pressure media execs to get rid of the hosts that way.

Whenever this happens — and it WILL happen — there will be a lot of gnashing of teeth by media types. We’ll learn all about the Smothers Brothers and LBJ. There might be some isolated protests. Many a “successful” meme will be launched on social media that “destroys” Trump. (Ugh.) But, in the end, nothing will happen. Absolutely nothing. Trump will win and there will be a new crop of late night hosts. It could be a number of these new hosts will be women or minorities in a sop liberals. But, oddly, none of these new hosts will talk about politics at all.

Meanwhile, the purged late night hosts will get new deals on Netflix or Disney+. They will all start a number of successful podcasts.

But an era will be over.

Soon enough, a similar purge will take place in TV newsrooms across the country. It’s even possible that Rupert Murdoch will be encouraged to buy The New York Times and or CNN. By the time Trump ramps up his efforts to get a Constitutional Convention called up to “pass a balanced budget amendment” the media in the United States will be nothing more than a lap dog to House Trump.

I believe barring a pretty enormous self-own on the part of Trump himself (which is obviously always possible) this is our future. It’s an absolute law of nature at this point.

We Have To Take Trump’s CNN GIF Tweet Seriously

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

I am hearing some people say that Trump’s faux GIF of him beating up the CNN logo in a WWE match is something silly that we shouldn’t take seriously. I totally disagree. The point is that he’s the President of the United States and he’s signaling to his mouth breathing supporters that he not-so-tacitly advocates violence towards the press.

It is probably only a matter of time before something tragic happens to a news organization because of Trump’s anti-press Tweeting. Something really tragic and memorable may happen that we will all — including even Trump, maybe — may regret. I feel as though we’re hurdling towards something that in hindsight will seem very obvious.

We have to take this tweeting by the president seriously. There have to be, at last, consquences. Someone, somewhere, needs to stand up to the president in a meaningful manner. We are slip-sliding towards a classic fascist situation that may be difficult to snap out of.

Remember, the fascists of the 1930s did not start off by being the evil, sinister people that we think of them as now. They started off as a joke. They were comical and entertaining to the masses. It wasn’t until later that things grew dark. So, we need to collectively stand up NOW, while we still can.

This is something of a joke now, but it won’t be a joke when real lives are in danger — or worse.