CNN Leadership Has Destroyed The Network

CNN wants to become more “neutral,” but the network might be too far gone to save itself. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

CNN wants to become more neutral, but the network might be too far gone to save itself. Where in the hell is that little Zucker guy that ruined it? I remember, I remember being in a room with, I mean, you know, anyway, he, I, I just, just remember thinking this Zucker guy started out as a producer. I mean, he was, did, you know, he did produced a couple of big shows on CNN and all of a sudden they put him in charge of this. And then he says my goal, he builds it around his preference.

Yeah.

Hell with the shareholders. Hell with the, the, the, the network that's been a responsible network for so many years and he makes it into something that's not even recognizable. I mean, pick it up from there.

Yeah. He, what Zucker did was he came in and he said, y'all need to start throwing out more opinions.

Yeah.

You know, get, get a little more fiery. He wanted that crossfire type atmosphere of yell at each other, be bombastic, you know, give your opinion on things instead of saying, look, we're a news outlet. Let's talk about the news.

Right.

And the network look, Fox news had the formula and it worked for them. And Zucker came in and said, well, what if we do that?

Try it on the left.

But then you got people that really didn't stand for anything. They didn't have real opinions that anybody cared about unlike what Fox has on the right. So it was a total flop. So they bring in new guy, Chris Licht and Licht is, you know, getting rid of people left and right. Some who absolutely should have been let go years ago.

Oh my God. I mean, look, I look at this Stelter.

I mean, Toobin should have been,

Oh, Toobin. Can you imagine fondling himself on live, on the air and, and they, they keep him around? First of all, he's, he's, he's, he's really a very marginal lawyer where it comes to giving opinions. He, he's one of these, he's ivory tower lawyer. You know, he can talk about the intricacies of the constitution, but where it comes to really everyday advice, he was awful. Brian Stelter, they should have understood immediately that this guy was on some kind of jihad that was alienating everybody that was in the middle. If you weren't, if it wasn't extreme left, this guy had no appeal. But that kind of became the whole Zucker plan. Zucker destroyed this network. That's what I'm trying to say.

Yeah.

I looked it, I looked up the other day to trying to find where the hell is this little guy. I mean, is he gonna move on? Are they gonna, somebody else gonna hire him in the media to destroy their network? It's, it's a weird situation when you, when you get into this system, this system that exists in, I don't even call it news anymore. It's cause news entertainment. But it, the way it perpetuates itself until the very point of destruction, and that's what happened with CNN.

Right. And it is interesting now because you have a lot of people at the network who think, oh no, we're going to the right. And you know, people who say, oh no, it's going more to the left. The network doesn't know where it's going because they're already too late to fill either one of those niches. You've got MSNBC that's got the left. Fox and Newsmax now that have the right. CNN no longer fits in. You've got CNBC and Fox Business for the business side. CNN, even though they originated this, they got nowhere left to go.

Yeah. Okay.

Who are we?

Okay. That's right. Who, who are we? Now a long time ago, you and I, we, we used to work at something called Air America. I mean, I, it was, it was me and Bobby Kennedy had a show. It was Janeane Garofalo. It was, what was it, anyway a whole lot.

Al Franken

Al Franken, a whole lineup of people. And we knew then, I mean, we were, all we were, were progressive. We, that's all we talked about was progressive. And we understood then, we saw it within a period of two years, that it wasn't sustainable.