The Uber-conservative who was head of programming at CNN was fired after the Trump ~~campaign promotion~~ townhall. I don't think it's related to CNN at all. Just a bunch of rich, white CEOs all thinking they need to own a media corporation to complete their dreams of world domination.
this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2023
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Some context on why I included CNN:
But the bigger question floating over one of the world’s largest and most important news organizations is why it’s changing. Is it because the CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, its new owner, wants an overhaul? Or is it at the behest of a conservative billionaire investor in the company who sits on its board? ...
That billionaire is John Malone, a legend in the cable TV business and one who has deep and longstanding ties with David Zaslav, the CEO of WBD. People close to both men insist that Zaslav is remaking CNN because he wants to for both business and editorial reasons, and not because Malone has told him to.
But complicating that narrative is the fact that Malone has repeatedly wished, in public, for CNN to remake itself. And his prescription happens to sync with the new CNN agenda: a plan to steer the channel away from what Malone and others call a liberal bias they say muddles opinion and news. And to shift it toward a supposedly centrist, just-the-facts bent.
and...
Malone is conservative/libertarian whose bona fides include a former board seat at the Cato Institute, the libertarian think tank, and a $250,000 donation to Donald Trump’s 2017 inaugural committee. (Two years later, Malone had pivoted: He told CNBC that Trump generated too much chaos and shouldn’t have a second term. “Look, I think a lot of the things Trump has tried to do — identifying problems and trying to solve them — has been great. I just don’t think he’s the right guy to do it,” he said.)
Malone has also said he admires Rupert Murdoch as a business frenemy and shares a political viewpoint with the Fox News owner: “Rupert is sort of like I am. He’s a libertarian, but he thinks we should have a strong military,” he told the Financial Times in 2017.
@Arotrios I don't like watching cable news of either persuasion for any period of time, whether it's Newsmax, Fox News, CNN, MSNBC or whatever. It's all engineered to manipulate viewers for the benefits of megacorps.
@Arotrios My sense is that there is not a direct correlation. However, the suits at CBS hired Mick Mulvaney to try to take market share from Fox. CNN changed and went authoritarian after they were bought by a conservative billionaire. Elon is a billionaire chaos agent working to promote disinformation and white nationalism. Spez is a clueless moron wannabe billionaire- he’s allowed Russian and Chinese disinformation and disruption to fester, even though he got rid of the Donald subreddit because they kept calling him a pedo (he moderated the “Jailbait” subreddit. And of course the conservative billionaire Murdoch hired Roger Ailes from the Nixon administration to create Fox News and also bought the Wall Street Journal. Don’t forget Sinclair media it’s the same deal. So I think this trend of the billionaire class buying up media buying up platforms and outlets in order to generate misinformation and solidify their political base will continue and intensify for 2024. Hopefully people see through their bullshit.