More Doom & Gloom for CNN

The heat is on for CNN, criticism coming from every corner of the blogosphere after news of April's epic ratings fail. Maybe a total shakeup, starting at the top, will happen and finally fix what once was the industry standard for cable news? We can only hope.


This first 'what's wrong with CNN' article was written by Lewis Lazare and posted at Reel Chicago. Here's his opening few paragraphs. Please read the entire article as he makes some valid points about Piers, Wolf and Cooper.

The news was hardly shocking. To us anyway. Late yesterday, it was revealed — once again — that top executives at cable news channel CNN are wringing their hands in desperation because ratings continue to plummet.

Based on the April national Nieslen ratings report, CNN has sunk to third place among national news channels — behind perennial frontrunner Fox News and second-place finisher, MSNBC.

In fact, April brought CNN’s worst ratings in a decade.

CNN parent Time Warner, according to the New York Times, is said to be demanding something be done immediately about this slide.

Apparently these same Time Warner folk are oblivious to the fact CNN brass, such as they are, have been fiddling to no avail with the news channel’s prime time lineup for the past couple of years.

If anything, the programming has gotten worse.

We can speak with authority on this matter because — we must admit — we love to observe a train wreck in progress. Almost every weekday night, we watch with utter amazement at how bad the CNN product is.

Viewers SHOULD be abandoning the news channel. No one deserves to have such TV torture inflicted on them.

So what’s wrong with CNN? Full article.

The stunner for today is HuffPo's analysis of CNN's woes. Here's their opening few paragraphs:

CNN is terrible. A God-awful, wall-to-wall, epic mess. And now, they have, in their hands, the clearest sign yet of how bad things have actually gotten. This past April, CNN posted its lowest ratings in 10 years. The New York Times' Brian Stelter recently noted the slim upside, writing, "people tune in to CNN, the same way they hurry to a hospital when they think they are having a heart attack." But what news channel does CNN have to tune in to, to learn the gory details of its own longrunning, sad disaster? Good news: we are that news channel.

CNN, of course, has a proud legacy to fall back on, as it is the entity that kicked off the tradition of 24 hour cable news channels in the first place, and its coverage of the first Gulf War demonstrated that it had minted real newsgathering mettle. CNN founder Ted Turner, in a meta-theatrical appearance on Piers Morgan's show last night, noted that he "wanted CNN to be the New York Times for the news business." Instead, the network has fallen lower in esteem than the New York Mets, who people actually still watch, on the teevee.

Cue the handwringing! How did this happen, and what's to be done next? Well, if you listen to the people who run CNN, you will learn that they think April's ratings low "isn't much of a problem," and what needs to happen now is that management needs "to come up with a plan to restore momentum."

Shut up, people who run CNN! We have been watching CNN for a long time, because there is a television set in our midst that is constantly tuned to it, out of pity. And we've been noticing for a long time that all of the various innovations and "momentum-builders," combined with the very strange decisions made when it comes to coverage, invariably conspire and combine to make CNN steadily worse. Full article

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