RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/cnn-grand-opening-grand-closing/

Many conservatives will be dancing on the grave of CNN+, and there’s no getting around the fact that CNN just didn’t put out a sufficiently appealing slate of programming to get enough people to shell out $59.99 per year. But as Discovery’s announcement implied, there was never much reason to pay an additional fee just to get additional CNN programming, when regular CNN was available on basic cable, and it gave you more or less the same thing.

Discovery streaming head J. B. Perrette said that, “In a complex streaming market, consumers want simplicity and an all-in service which provides a better experience and more value than stand-alone offerings, and, for the company, a more sustainable business model to drive our future investments in great journalism and storytelling.”

No, Chris Wallace is not popular enough, but it’s not clear that any news anchor or collection of hosts would get a sufficient number of people shelling out to make a streaming news network sustainable. (Fox Nation comes closest, in part because it has made a subscription to it feel like a tribal symbol — a statement about who you are and what you value. If someone tells you they subscribe to Fox Nation, you probably know how they feel about Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Joe Rogan, Elon Musk, Black Lives Matter, Blue Lives Matter, and Colin Kaepernick.)

In the end, CNN+ didn’t offer anything sufficiently unique. As I noted earlier this month, this streaming service didn’t have a programming equivalent of The Mandalorian or Stranger Things or Bridgerton — something really popular that couldn’t be seen anywhere else. It is hard to imagine what CNN could offer that would be akin to that. Maybe the work of Clarissa Ward in Afghanistan and Ukraine over the past year is the most compelling, jaw-dropping, must-watch television journalism that CNN has done in a while. But I’m still not sure people would subscribe to a separate streaming service just to watch it.

News is unlikely to ever sustain a streaming service, by itself. But it is likely that some form of CNN will appear on any streaming service that emerges from the merger of HBO Max and Discovery+.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/msnbcs-nicolle-wallace-compares-desantis-youngkin-parental-choice-bills-to-russian-war-tactics/

MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace, reacting to the fury in Florida over the recently codified Parental Rights in Education bill prohibiting sexuality instruction for kindergartners through third graders, compared such legislation to “Russian war tactics” of “dehumanization.”

Referring to the Republican governors who’ve spearheaded these measures, namely Glenn Youngkin and Ron DeSantis, Wallace lamented how effective their rhetoric and “politics of ‘parental choice’,” she said using scare quotes, have been at winning the ideological issue.

“The truth is dehumanization as a tactic for politics is from war. Russians get the soldiers to rape children by dehumanizing them,” she said.

Some conservatives have resorted to labeling those who oppose the Florida law, which empowers parents to decide when and how to teach their children about sexual orientation and gender identity, as “groomers,” an allegation of priming kids for pedophilia or sexual abuse. While the phrase has packed a lot of punch and sent many progressive proponents of sexualized K-12 curricula retreating, some conservatives argue that it’s counterproductive to the debate.

“It’s being deployed in our politics, and people like you and I sometimes lose the plot and admire its effectiveness, not its substance, but even the analysis of these tactics loses sight of what this speech brings us back to which is that dehumanization has a cost right now,” Wallace added.

“Kids will die,” she said, harkening back to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s claim from February that Florida’s new law, dubbed ‘Don’t Say Gay’ by progressives,” will drive up LGBT youth suicides.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/04/the_regime_medias_quandary_by_exposing_joe_biden_they_exonerate_donald_trump.html

The regime media (the amalgamation of the legacy media, elitist opinion writers, and the internet troika: Google/Facebook/Twitter) finds itself in a quandary of its own making.  As the nation descends into recession and societal turmoil, the candidate for whom they prostituted themselves, Joe Biden, reveals on a daily basis that he is not mentally or physically capable of being President.  Further, it has become increasingly more difficult to continuously obfuscate not only the ongoing revelations in Hunter Biden’s laptop but Joe’s life-long history of corruption and mendacity. 

By comparison, for four years, despite a lack of evidence coupled with numerous exculpatory investigations, this same cabal incessantly promoted the fictitious narrative that Donald Trump was a racist, a xenophobe, a demagogue, and the most corrupt person to ever serve as president of the United States. 

Accordingly, the regime media proclaimed that was in the nation’s vital interest to replace Trump with the “decent, honest, and honorable” Joe Biden.  As he has the “experience and character” to rescue the nation and restore “decency and honor” in the White House.

The quandary: how does the regime media avoid the exposure of Joe Biden’s lifelong corruption and failures without the public’s inevitable comparison of the two men, their families, and their accomplishments?   A comparison that would result in the effective exoneration and rehabilitation of Donald Trump, whom they relentlessly accused of being the most unscrupulous person on earth.  A cudgel they could no longer use if he decides to run for the presidency in 2024.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/04/the-cnn-catastrophe/

The funny thing about markets is that they need both supply and demand to work. CNN+, America’s newest streaming service, certainly has the supply part down. It has been heralded by a multi-million-dollar marketing campaign and pushed relentlessly on CNN’s cable channels, and it is available on the web, on iPhone and Android, on Apple TV, Roku, and Amazon Fire TV. What it doesn’t have, it seems, is the demand — the customers. Per CNBC, “fewer than 10,000 people are using CNN+ on a daily basis two weeks into its existence, according to people familiar with the matter.” And this is after CNN announced The Don Lemon Show would be featured on the service. What gives?

Wouldn’t you just have loved to been in the room when CNN’s leadership met with the enablers at McKinsey and told them that the network expected its new streaming service to have 15 to 18 million subscribers by 2026? What McKinsey’s consultants should have said in response to this — what McKinsey’s consultants would have said had they been doing their job — is, “Are you joking, you delusional lunatics?” Their reaction should have been shock and embarrassment, followed by a cacophony of derisive laughter, and at the end of it all, the delivery of some tough love. What they seem to have done, instead, is jumped up onto the table like Stephen Glass describing his fictional Jukt Micronics meeting and shouted, “Yes, yes — a thousand times, yes.”

In theory, at least, the role of an organization such as McKinsey is to ask, “Why?” Everyone wants to start a streaming service. Why does yours make sense? If CNN were run by thoughtful people, it might have taken the opportunity to ask some fundamental questions of itself before procuring a new toy: “Who are we?” “What do we do?” “Are we good at it?” “Why do our staff keep getting themselves embroiled in scandals?” “Has anyone heard Brianna Keilar utter a single sentence that might be termed useful?”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/04/maybe_they_will_call_it_cnn_minus.html

Have you received an offer to join CNN plus?   I saw one yesterday but I decided to pass.  Honestly, I’ve already got enough to see or listen to.  And I don’t watch CNN anyway. 

CNN plus is off to a rough start according to news reports:    

Fewer than 10,000 people are using CNN+ on a daily basis two weeks into its existence, according to people familiar with the matter.

The people spoke with CNBC on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss nonpublic data.

CNN+ launched on March 29. The subscription news streaming service, which charges $5.99 a month or $59.99 annually, only became available on Roku on Monday and still isn’t on Android TV. Still, the paltry audience casts doubt on the future of the application following the recently completed combination of Discovery and WarnerMedia into Warner Bros. Discovery.

To put that daily user number in perspective, CNN’s cable network suffered a sharp decline in viewership last year but still rang up an average of 773,000 total viewers a day.

“We continue to be happy with the launch and its progress after only two weeks,” a CNN spokesperson said.

CNN continues to be happy?  Well, at least the CNN spokesperson has a positive attitude.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/04/04/will-hunter-biden-scandal-further-erode-americans-trust-in-media-ii-tipp-poll/

First, the good news: Public opinion of both the Traditional Media and the Alternative Media rebounded slightly in March. Now the bad news: Despite the slight gain, the media failed to arrest their slide in public opinion over the last year, data from the March I&I/TIPP Poll show.

Even worse news for the media comes as both The New York Times and Washington Post admitted in recent days that they failed for two years to cover signs of possible influence peddling by President Biden’s son Hunter, as revealed on Hunter’s lost laptop. It’s a major PR disaster for both outlets and for the mainstream media in general.

Will the public be forgiving? Or will the media’s long decline in public trust resume after March’s uptick?

First, some numbers. Each month, I&I/TIPP asks Americans two questions about the major media:

One, “Generally speaking, how much trust do you have in the traditional or established news media (Example: Washington Post, New York Times, NPR, CBS News, etc.) to report the news accurately and fairly?”

And two, “Generally speaking, how much trust do you have in the alternative news media (Example: New York Post, Washington Times, NewsMax, The Daily Caller, RealClearPolitics, etc.) to report the news accurately and fairly?”