As a broadcast journalist, my goal was always to get my accurate story on the air first. Beating the other networks by even just a minute was a major victory when covering breaking news. It drove ratings and ratings are everything. So, let me give you an advantage in your political discussion group. Here is the headline for January 1, 2022: The old CNN is dead!

The cause of death is not the forced departure of Chris Cuomo or Rachel Maddow’s act becoming so old she is moving to a weekly show. Nor is it that CNN’s jaundiced journalists conspired to be completely wrong about Kyle Rittenhouse, the false Russia collusion claim, Hunter Biden’s laptop, Jessie Smollett, Border Patrol whippings, and countless other “important” news stories. The reason is good old-fashioned free-market economics combined with Americans’ limited tolerance of CNN’s ultra-liberal BS (Bovine Secretions).

Two decades ago, CNN was the news juggernaut. But since then, its viewership dropped faster than Joe Biden’s approval ratings. Media mogul John Malone just bought the sinking news ship in a fire sale and he will waste no time in cutting out the cancerous cause for CNN’s liberal-laced decline.

To understand why Malone must drastically reshape CNN, you must understand who really decides what you watch on a news program. When watching CNN, MSNBC, or the three major entertainment networks, it is easy to blame the news anchor for the seriously slanted left-leaning coverage.

Today’s talking heads, though, are not the main cause of the problem. They just blindly read whatever the show producers dump into their teleprompters. In their carefully clipped, dulcet tones, complete with properly concerned expressions, they read the words written by far-left young men and women who think the world revolves around them and their favorite Manhattan pan-Mongolian vegetarian restaurant.

There was a time when it was different. Walter Cronkite, Tom Brokaw and, particularly, Peter Jennings were real journalists. First and foremost, they were reporters. They understood their job was to observe what was happening, condense it into a minute-and-a-half of easily understandable facts, and then report those facts to their viewers.

Walter Cronkite was a self-admitted liberal, but he worked very hard to report the news with no discernible political slant. He frequently told friends that if he received an equal amount of hate mail from people on both sides of an issue, he knew he had gotten it about right.

Although the slogan, “We Report, You Decide” is now a trademark only at Fox News, it was once the watchword of all news broadcasts in the days when news anchors were called “The Evening Stars.”

Jennings’s passing was the death knell of reality-based reporting. The young, oh-so-hip graduates of the oh-so-expensive journalism schools decided the real purpose of the evening news was to promote their left-wing political beliefs. When the networks started promoting anchors with no real reporting experience, simply because they were “perky,” it was the last gasp of real broadcast journalism in the Mainstream Media.

Image: Gravestone image from Piqsels. Edited by Andrea Widburg.

Facts were no longer important. It was all about emotion. The tear-filled tight shot filling TV screens became critically important. So-called “video journalists” were encouraged to push their cameras as close as possible into the faces of relatives gathering at the airport expecting to meet an airplane that had just crashed. If the news that her husband just died in the remains of a flaming airplane was not enough to create the emotion the editors wanted, some stranger pushing his camera within two feet of the weeping widow was certain to unleash a torrent of tears.

The idiocy grew. Fifty years ago, we all pitied the Village Idiot. Twenty years ago, he was featured as the “colorful character” in news reports. Now he has his own weekly show on MSNBC.

And of course, television loved to cover any aspiring left-wing politician who could give the perfect eight-second soundbite. After all, these politicians promised to end all the viewers’ pain, feed the hungry, eradicate hurricanes, pay off your mortgage and cure most dread diseases, if only the voters would put them into office. Republicans were stuck with the increasingly rare concept called “reality.”

Television network and cable news drifted, or should I say galloped, further into foolishness every year as bosses hired more empty-headed reporters. My real-world favorites include the New York City news anchor who, in gushing her adoration of Pope John Paul II, asked her co-anchor if the Pope ever had any children. The same lady stood on the green-painted Fifth Avenue and told her live shot viewers that St. Patrick’s Day was not just a celebration there in Manhattan, but in fact, it was a day of joy for German people everywhere!

When covering political news, young journalists saw themselves advancing their professors’ views of a one-world utopia. They believed it was their solemn duty to tell the rest of us what to think.

But then three elements began to use their megaphones to tell Americans about the other side of the news. Rush Limbaugh, FOX News, and Donald Trump gave new voice to reality. Viewers repeatedly told the all-important ratings services, “I hated Limbaugh/ FOX/Trump, until one day I accidentally listened to them. I was hooked from that day forward. They speak for me.”

It’s the results of those rating services that really drive what viewers watch. Please understand that truth or public benefit are not the purposes of broadcast news. Broadcast news has but one goal. The only objective is to make money for the people who own the television stations. Ratings are everything. Nothing else counts. Period.

So as viewers began to resist the leftist brainwashing, the MSM, especially CNN, had a disastrous decline in ethics and ratings. The people who really control things in TV, “The Suits” (the bean counters’ bosses) did not like the results. Again, remember the real purpose of TV news: TV ratings equate with profits on a one-to-one basis. The more viewers, the more profit.

It took time, but when CNN’s number of viewers dropped below the number of people listening to taxicab dispatchers in Hoboken, CNN’s owners knew it was time to cut their losses. They were lucky to unload that turkey around Thanksgiving. Had the sale closed after CNN lost its number one star, Cuomo, the price would have dropped into the dime-on-a-dollar range.

New owner John Malone is not a rock-solid conservative, but his political beliefs will not be what drives the new CNN. Malone is a proven broadcasting businessman. He knows that, to improve ratings and thereby protect and expand his investment, he must convert the liberal crybaby Cable News Network back to a source of actual news. When questioned about his plans for CNN, Malone confirmed the network needed to get back to actual news reporting, as opposed to broadcasting biased opinions. That was the writing on the wall or, in today’s electronic age, on the teleprompter.

Do not expect a radical change overnight. But, if Malone keeps his promise, the new direction of CNN will be firmly carved into the tombstone of the old. The Suits at ABC, CBS, and NBC are well advised to watch closely.

Ed Sherdlu is the pen name of a former CBS television network reporter.  He uses a pen name because his mother would be so embarrassed to know that Ed's 12-Step Journalism Recovery Program had been a failure.

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