CNN To Go MAGA, Just Like Practically Every Other Television News Outlet
Yep, it's just MSNOW, now.
Many of us have held out hope that we would only have to get through the next three years of Trumpism — maybe even looking, desperately, at the the cracks in MAGA, the way some of the bro-y podcasters have started to turn on him over the way ICE behaved in Minnesota, the fights between Candace Owens and TPUSA, and so forth. Thinking of all the people now spending more than half their paychecks on health insurance they probably can’t even use. Scouring the LeopardsAteMyFace subreddit for signs of defectors.
But that hope is a little harder to cling to right now with the news that Netflix suddenly backed out of its bid to buy Warner Brothers Discovery networks, ceding the media conglomerate to MAGA billionaires Larry Ellison, his son David, and their Paramount Skydance network. Under the Netflix deal, the streamer would have just acquired HBOMax and the Discovery networks, while CNN would have been made independent. But the Ellison’s deal includes the whole shebang, giving them an incredible amount of control over United States media.
Since taking over Paramount Skydance, the Ellisons have purged CBS News of any sordid liberal influence and even gone so far as to cancel The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. It’s probably going to go about the same with CNN, which has traditionally been a more moderate outlet.
It’s not good. Netflix was expected to counter Paramount Skydance’s latest bid ($31-per-share, up from Netflix’s proposed $30-per-share) , but on Thursday night, they announced that they’d given up.
The mood at CNN right now is “not good.” Journalists are not looking forward to their new MAGA overlords, or to potentially being under the thumb of Bari Weiss, who has turned CBS News into a straight up disaster.
This all comes on the heels of TikTok also being purchased by billionaire Trumpists (including the Ellisons), The Washington Post not only pivoting to the Right but also firing over 300 journalists (guess it’s hard to afford them when no one will subscribe to your paper due to the aforementioned pivot), which all came on the heels of Elon Musk buying Twitter and turning it into a hard right, white supremacist propaganda site.
It’s also all on top of the media apparatus the Right started out in control of — not just Fox News, but all of the podcasts and streams, all of the kooky 24/7 far right news channels like Newsmax, One America News Network and LindellTV that are now included in the White House press corps. We can laugh at the idea of a “news channel” run by the MyPillow guy, but it certainly wouldn’t kill us to have more of that ourselves, just without the lumpy pillows.
Right now, we really only have MSNow (and barely) for cable network news, Reddit, Bluesky and Threads for social media, a few remaining large-ish left-leaning for-profit media companies, some left-leaning news magazines, a few non-profit left-leaning media sites, a decent number of podcasts and streaming news and whole bunch of independent Substacks and other subscription newsletters.
Some of those, like us, employ several people, but a many (maybe most) are individual subscription newsletters from people who used to work at major or even medium-sized news outlets that have since either gone under or laid off most of their staff. As much as I get it and appreciate the fact that people have options now if they lose their jobs (especially since there is so little freelance to go around these days), I very much worry that this is not a sustainable model. Too much good media is behind a paywall, too much bad media is free, and the acquisition of CNN only adds to that.
We have lost so, so many great new media sites that have either disappeared — thanks to greed, to pivots to video that never paid off, to Peter Thiel, to other venture capitalists — or that are now shadows of what they once were, thanks to massive layoffs. Recently someone asked me about how to get into doing this for a living and for the first time in my life, I just did not have a lot of answers.
The thing is, when venture capitalists bought up so many left-wing sites, they did it in hopes of turning a huge profit or of getting journalists to promote their viewpoint, then killed them once it was clear that these things were not on the table. However, when billionaires on the Right buy media outlets or social media sites, they don’t care if they turn a profit or even if they lose money. That’s not the point. Because what they do get is power.
Indeed, Paramount Skydance is, like Warner Bros. Discovery, in a huge amount of debt. They lost $573 million in Q4, and it is unlikely that this deal is going to be any kind of big money maker for them. The fact is, right-wing news viewers already have everything they need and are not going to start turning to CNN (or CBS for that matter) for their information. HBOMax has some good shows, sure, but there are endless other options for streaming. Even if we were to assume no crossover, Paramount+ and HBOMax/Discovery+ still wouldn’t have as many subscribers as Netflix or even Amazon Prime. it’s not a very good deal at all, and yet they don’t care. Because what they’re after is, again, power. Running CNN into the ground would be worth it for them, alone.
It’s not that CNN, in and of itself, was some grand beacon of left-wing thought. We know it wasn’t and I don’t think anyone has ever expected it to be. It’s always been more moderate. But so was CBS News, and now they’re on the road to becoming FOX. The fact that we are losing even more moderate media networks to the extreme Right is deeply concerning. The goal is to make us disappear, to make it seem like we are a small minority, to have everything seen through a warped right-wing lens, to have our only representations in mainstream media be straw men invented by the kind of weirdos who think teachers are putting kitty litter boxes in their classrooms for students who believe they are cats (when really, they have them in case of mass shooters, a thing we have to live with because of Republicans).
It’s very much the Viktor Orbán model for suppressing free speech: You don’t need to eliminate formal press freedoms as long as you have some friendly oligarchs who’ll buy up the biggest media outlets and push your autocratic message, forcing other voices out to the margins.
The Right has always openly fought culture wars, has always openly said that they want control of the culture — which we would never dare to do, largely because that actually does sound pretty psychotic. But now they’re getting what they want and I fear we don’t have the infrastructure or the funds to fight them. Especially when we’ve got fuckers like Gavin Newsom out here talking (on CNN!) about how the left isn’t “culturally normal” (as opposed to the Right) because we won’t just start being shitty to trans people already.
But I don’t think it’s over just yet. I think that what happened in Minnesota has reminded us that we are actually very good at organizing. I also truly believe that part of what got people to start changing their minds about ICE so rapidly was seeing just how many Minnesotans were getting out there, in public, to loudly oppose them. Visibility like that has an effect, socialization has an effect.
For the most part, we don’t have billionaires buying us major news networks like the Right does. We’re probably not ever going to, given that most of us do not believe people should be billionaires in the first place. But we can be loud, we can organize, we can be visible and, hopefully, that will be enough.
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Stay strong American friends. Don't forget you have a LOT of support and good wishes coming from the rest of the world.
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