If the decline and fall of the legacy media had a human face, it would probably be Brian Stelter.
Stelter was the woke-left media personified: a smirking, hyper-partisan hack whose bias was so blatant and undeniable that even his colleagues called him the “hall monitor”. He used his show as a platform for guests to compare Donald Trump to Stalin, Mao and Hitler, and call him a “neo-fascist sociopath”. Most embarassingly, perhaps, Stelter was a staunch champion of lawyer Michael Avenatti — until he was convicted of multiple financial crimes.
But CNN cynically relied on Stelter’s Trump derangement to keep its ratings from plunging into nothingness. It was so obvious that veteran journalist Ted Koppel laughed in Stelter’s face, on his own show: “You would be lost without Donald Trump… CNN’s ratings would be in the toilet without Donald Trump,” Koppel jeered.
Fast forward a few years, and, with Trump no longer in the White House, that’s exactly what happened. Stelter’s Reliable Sources show was cancelled last week, and he was booted from CNN. Stelter’s ratings collapsed without the Bad Orange Man to whip up the Two Minutes of Hate. He struggled to pull as many viewers as some YouTube news channels.
But Stelter’s departure doesn’t look like the end of the pain for CNN.
New CNN chairman and CEO Chris Licht did little to calm the nerves of highly partisan employees at the far-Left network this week after the cancelation of Brian Stelter’s show “Reliable Sources.”
Licht started to evaluate the hyper-partisan so-called “talent” at the network shortly after he joined CNN as he aimed to dial down the extreme partisanship that has plagued the network in recent years.
“I want to acknowledge that this is a time of significant change, and I know that many of you are unsettled,” Licht said, according to numerous people who attended Friday’s editorial meeting call. “There will be more changes, and you might not understand it or like it.”
Which sounds an awful lot like the new boss realising that getting woke and going broke isn’t exactly a winning formula. Streaming giant Netflix appeared to catch on recently, too, issuing a “Culture Memo” to its employees. “If you’d find it hard to support our content breadth, Netflix may not be the best place for you,” the memo said.
In other words, wokeists, when it comes to a choice between super-popular Dave Chappelle shows or some Millennial guy in a dress “literally shaking”, well, you know where the door is.
Deadline reported that billionaire investor John Malone — who is one of the largest investors in CNN’s parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery — said earlier in the year during an interview that he wanted CNN to “evolve back to the kind of journalism that it started with, and actually have journalists.”
Stelter whined in his newsletter at the time that Malone wanting unbiased reporting at the network “stoked fears that Discovery might stifle CNN journalists and steer away from calling out indecency and injustice.”
Daily Wire
Licht, on the other hand, is adamant that, “We will realign where it makes sense to best serve our people and the business.”
In the end, a media company is a business. If getting woke means going broke, well, harder heads will prevail sooner or later.
In the meantime, new, independent media companies like Daily Wire, Timcast, Rebel News and, of course, your very own The BFD are storming ahead.
