CNN - CNN+ = 0

CNN+ is dead.

CNN's subscription streaming service went off the Internet two days ago after only a month online.  Its end marks the biggest failure in streaming to date and probably one of the biggest flops in all of television - broadcast, cable, streaming - of all time.

What went wrong?  It all boils down to bad timing, a bad business model, and a change of strategy after the merger of  WarnerMedia, which owned CNN, and Discovery, Inc. to become Warner Brothers-Discovery.  CNN+ gained about 150,000 subscribers in its short lifespan, a respectable start for a new streaming service but not enough, considering projected trends of growth, to make it profitable in the foreseeable future.  And as the pandemic recedes - "recedes," not "ends" - fewer people see a need to stream things all the time . . . which is why Netflix actually lost subscribers in the first quarter of 2022.  Also, the new management of the newly formed company is mostly made up of Discovery Inc. veterans who had nothing to do with CNN.  CNN+ wasn't their project, and they had no connection or attachment to it.  So CNN+'s days were numbered and the number was very small.

I sort of had a feeling that CNN+ was going to fail when I saw samples of its programming.  For example, as previously noted on this blog, foreign policy expert Fareed Zakaria interviewed celebrities on CNN+ - not unlike Dan Rather's celebrity interviews on AXS TV, so the novelty of a serious newsman talking to pop stars and the like wasn't exactly fresh.  (How far back do you want to go?  Edward R. Murrow pioneered the "hard-newsman-interviewing-celebs" concept with "Person To Person.")  One of Zakaria's subjects was Billy Joel, whose latest album is, last time I checked, 29 years old as of this writing.  (Zakaria showed an excerpt of his interview with Joel on his Sunday cable show, in which Joel talked about how he originally wrote "Movin' Out" to a melody that turned out to have been from Neil Sedaka's "Laughter In the Rain."  Yeah, I knew about that.  Hardly anything fascinatingly revealing.)   

Other CNN+ programs included a show about parenting with Anderson Cooper, a book-review show hosted by Jake Tapper, and a show hosted by Eva Longoria about discovering the wonders of Mexico.  (Only anti-Hispanic prejudice could explain why her show wasn't a companion on CNN to Stanley Tucci's very similar series about discovering the wonders of Italy.)  The biggest draws of exclusive talent for CNN+ were MSNBC refugee Kasie Hunt and Fox News outcast Chris Wallace hosting their own news programs.  I can just imagine CNN brass saying, "Now there's an idea that can't miss!"  (Well, George Lucas probably said the same thing about a Star Wars TV special for the 1978 Christmas season.)

Folks like Hunt and Wallace will probably get their own shows on CNN, with Wallace rumored to be under consideration for the 9 PM Eastern slot currently occupied by an expansion of Anderson Cooper's prime-time broadcast.  (AC has also been on in the afternoon covering the war in Ukraine, likely because CNN has decided that what we need is more of Anderson Cooper.)  Hopefully, they'll move Eva Longoria's series to the cable channel.  The enormous sums of money to promote and broadcast CNN+, however, prove that while you may have a solid product, it doesn't guarantee success for a new product that's merely a variation of the existing one.

Ask anyone who ever owned a Pinto-based Ford Mustang II.  

Losing the Game

Remember the "game changers" of the past?  Remember how the Renaissance Center was supposed to enliven downtown Detroit?  How grunge was going to rescue rock and roll?  How Christian Pulisic was going to make the U.S. men's soccer team a potent squad?  

Ah, game changers.  Well, here's something to consider as you drive through the Motor City's desolate streets listening to the latest Lil Nas X record on the radio while wondering whom to root for if the U.S. doesn't make the 2022 World Cup.  Johnson & Johnson's COVID vaccine was supposed to be a game changer in the fight against the disease the stopped the world because it required only one shot and could be stored at refrigerator temperature.  Then a few young women got blood clots after having received it.  The vaccine was paused, and so were people's enthusiasm about getting vaccinated.

Yesterday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which obviously has had a hard time in both of those endeavors, and the Food and Drug Administration allowed the Johnson & Johnson COVID vaccine to go forward with a blood-clot waning label, saying that it is highly effective and that blood clots are extremely rare.  Too little, too late.  This pause in the distribution of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is expected to boost confidence in the vaccination efforts because the government took questions about the vaccine seriously enough to investigate the issue and put it through the rigors of great scrutiny before concluding it's safe.  No one buys that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is safe.  And the fact that Johnson & Johnson had Yugo-like quality problems in producing it in the first place only makes people wonder if getting it - or the much more effective and reliable Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, for that matter - is worth it.  Even President Biden has given up on the idea that the COVID vaccine from Johnson & Johnson could boost the number of Americans vaccinated because of its one-does regimen, saying it has enough of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines to vaccinate everyone in the U.S. Besides, so few people have actually gotten the Johnson & Johnson shot compared to the the two.

This snafu with the Johnson & Johnson vaccine isn't just going to cause vaccine hesitancy; it's going to cause vaccine refusal.  Hesitancy is one thing - "Oh, I'll wait see what happens, but I'll probably take it eventually" - but refusal slams the door on getting a shot. And with herd immunity now in doubt because of all that, hopes to end the COVID pandemic before Thanksgiving have been dashed. And all because a turkey of a vaccine.

By the way, I'm probably going to root for Germany next year.

No Deal

Well, the Trump health care bill is kaput.  Trump tried to ram through Congress a health care bill that would have destroyed the Affordable Care Act (ACA), done serious damage to Medicaid, kicked 24 million people off their health insurance plans, and given tax breaks to the rich.  He set out to negotiate a deal, and he was left with nothing.  And without those tax breaks,  Trump's infrastructure-spending plans and Paul Ryan's tax reform plan are all but dead in the water.  The costs in this bill were too great even for many House Republicans, and even my own congressman, Representative Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-NJ) - chairman of the House Appropriations Committee - wouldn't support it.  The party's conservative wing didn't like the health care bill because it didn't go go far enough in repealing and replacing the ACA (imagine!).  So, after nine weeks, the S.S. Trump Presidency is already aground.

Democrats had best not get too cocky, though, because last time I checked, the Republicans still control the White House and both houses of Congress, Neil Gorsuch is headed for the Supreme Court, and not only has the Dakota Access Pipeline been resumed, the Keystone XL pipeline has been approved as well.  Among other Obama-policy reversals.  Let me make this clear: The people brought down the Trump health care bill.  Congressional Democrats didn't sabotage the Republicans; the Republicans sabotaged themselves.  The Democrats did nothing.  Nothing.  The Democrats still have a lot of work and catching up to do if they want to get back in power (great laughter at that, I'm sure) and avoid going full Whig.  If the Democrats, who are more unpopular than Trump these days, want to be taken seriously, they have to show leadership.

Just standing there and gloating is not a show of leadership.    

A Super Failure

The deficit reduction super committee created by Congress in the wake of the debt ceiling debate is ready to admit failure in advance of a Wednesday deadline to reach a deficit-cutting mandate without failure as an option.  Automatic cuts to everything are to take place beginning in 2013.

Wow, like we couldn't have seen that coming.  After all, there are six Democrats and six Republicans on that committee, each side it sticking to its pea shooters - Democrats on entitlements, Republicans on taxes - without enough compromise to break through anything, and Washington is more partisan than at any time since the decade before the Civil War.     

I'm sorry we don't have a parliamentary system.  If we did, President Obama - who would be a figurehead, kind of like what he is right now - would fire his prime minister and call new legislative elections, and every incumbent in Congress would lose.

And, of course, while Democrats would run a fresh team of challengers and pretend after the election never to have heard of John Kerry, Republicans would still be running the same people over again.