CNN Falls Apart

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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CNN Falls Apart

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Forget Don Lemon’s sexist comments to presidential candidate Nikki Haley. Something much worse is happening. CNN’s ratings are falling apart.

Lemon’s AM show, “CNN This Morning,” has the lowest ratings of any morning show in CNN’s history. This has to have undermined the new CNN chair and CEO Chris Licht’s reputation with his boss Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav. Zaslav has made brutal cuts across the company to save his reputation. Poor financial results and heavy debt have made Warner Bros. Discovery the most troubled big media public corporation. (These are the companies with the worst reputations in America.)

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Licht has engineered Zaslav’s cutting at CNN. Now, the question is whether Licht cuts faster than the top-line falls.

CNN’s problem extends much beyond the morning. During President Joe Biden’s State of the Union, CNN drew fewer viewers than Fox, ABC, CBS, NBC, and MSNBC.

Fox News, hardly CNN’s best friend, recently reported, “CNN had a dismal 2022 from a viewership perspective, hitting all-time lows in various categories despite a busy year that saw everything from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to crucial midterm elections.”

Rating disasters of this magnitude cannot be fixed in short order. The problem runs from the early morning programs to those later than prime time. TVNewser’s data proves that the trouble has spread that widely.

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Can CNN be fixed? It cannot be anytime soon because of how far it is behind the competition. (These are America’s highest-paying companies.)

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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