Less Advocacy, More Journalism. Changes at CNN, New York Times May Signal Push To The Center
- The Guardian, April 24, 2022. - Cable company’s demise comes a month after launching as mainstream media tackle bleed-through of opinion into news.'
The highest echelons of the US media were once again in the spotlight this week, after CNN this week abandoned a newly launched streaming service and the New York Times appointed a prominent Bostonian to lead it. CNN+ will shut down on 30 April, about a month after it was launched with a $300m investment. The new owner of the network, Warner Bros Discovery – itself the product of a $43bn merger between AT&T and the Discovery Network – decided a subscription-based streaming service was unfeasible. Only 100,000 users had signed up.
The new chairman and chief executive of CNN, Chris Licht, said the decision to dump CNN+ was the product of a uniquely bad situation. “We have to own what happened, even though it’s not a result of what we did,” Licht told employees at a town hall meeting. The shelving of the service leaves in the lurch high-profile hires including the veteran Fox News journalist Chris Wallace and Kasie Hunt, formerly of NBC News and MSNBC. It is also the end of a project that encouraged top CNN reporters toward less news-focused fare such as Jake Tapper’s Book Club and Parental Guidance With Anderson Cooper.
At an Oprah Winfrey-hosted company meeting on the Warner Bros lot in Burbank, California last week, David Zaslav, chief executive and president of CNN’s corporate parent, reportedly said he wanted CNN to focus on the facts and set itself apart from a cable-news industry monopolised by “advocacy networks”. “If we get that, we can have a civilized society,” Zaslav reportedly said. “And without it, if it all becomes advocacy, we don’t have a civilized society.”
A board member, John Malone, has also spoken on the subject of media bias. “I would like to see CNN evolve back to the kind of journalism that it started with and actually have journalists, which would be unique and refreshing,” Malone told CNBC in November. CNN is not alone in signaling that it is abandoning a kind of reporting that arguably came to pass in an effort to counter Fox News, the far more profitable rightwing outlet known for intense audience loyalty. Addressing the bleed-through of opinion into news has also been on the menu at the New York Times, though less overtly so given the gift that would present to the paper’s enemies. This week, the controlling Sulzberger family tapped Joe Kahn, a former China correspondent, to be the new executive editor...
- More, https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/apr/24/cnn-new-york-times-us-media
= new reply since forum marked as read
So they admit at least in principle somewhere that what they have been jokingly referring to as a news service is really just BS? 
It will be a cold 🥶 day in hell before I bother with either of them again. There are simply too many sources for news and information available to worry about the likes of either of these providers of noise.