Time's Up

I stopped watching "60 Minutes over six months ago, when Norah O'Donnell interviewed Trump for the program and failed to challenge any of his lies, and I refused to watch that interview as well.  But I knew in the back of my mind that the program could always get worse.

It did, and in just the past several days.  After CNN's Anderson Cooper chose not to continued reporting for "60 Minutes" as a sideline - and, given that CNN is about to be acquired by the same power-hungry Zionist family that owns CBS, the Ellisons, he's not long for that network either - CBS reported that "60 Minutes" correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, whose story on the Salvadoran concentration camp for undocumented migrants apprehended in the U.S. was shelved by CBS News dominatrix Bari Weiss but then aired after massive protests against her decision, learned that management had rendered to nullify her contract after careful consideration of her state of employment.  In other words, she was sacked.  Then the last hired was the second fired - Cecilia Vega, the new girl on the "60 Minutes" on-air staff, was also let go, as was the program's producer, Tanya Simon, who had been on the job for only one year. 

The big surprise came when CBS veteran Scott Pelley went into a meeting with Weiss and Nick Bilton, Tanya Simon's successor as the producer "60 Minutes," who according to some sources, has less experience in television than Weiss.  Pelley accused Weiss and Bilton of "murdering" the news-magazine broadcast.  Bilton publicly and noisily dismissed Pelley for his attitude, which is extraordinary because no one knew that Pelley had an attitude.  Pelley likely knew it was a matter of time before he followed Alfonsi and Vega out the door, and he didn't give a twit because he had no more twits to give.  But he did have a couple of twits to tweak - namely, Bari Weiss and Nick Bilton.

I'd be happy to see Alfonsi, Vega and Pelley start a YouTube channel together and join the independent-media bandwagon, but if such a channel materializes, don't expect them to produce investigative journalism like they did on television.  Stories of the sort these three correspondents did on "60 Minutes" require deep pockets and a cadre of lawyers to back them up, and YouTube channels usually have neither.   Thanks to Trump and his oligarch allies, we won't see much in the way of news stories that calls out corruption and scandal, and outlets like ProPublica, which do that sort of work, will become more important.  But one must remember that legacy media, even CBS News, don't have a legacy that's always worth celebrating.  How far back do you want to go?  Bear in mind, that after Edward R. Murrow exposed Joe McCarthy as a fraud, CBS quietly reassigned him to "interview" celebrities on the chat show "Person to Person," which included an "interview" with Harpo Marx, in which the quiet Marx brother stayed in character and mimed his answers to Murrow's perfunctory questions.  And you don't have to go back to far at CNN to remember how the news channel fired Soledad O'Brien - who, being white, black and Hispanic, as well as a woman, was a walking DEI program - because she asked too many people too many tough questions.  Fired for doing one's job, what is the world coming to? She won the admiration of Stephen Colbert, but not much else.

Speaking of Colbert, his CBS late-night talk show just ended with a bang, and Bryon Allen's stand-up compilation show, which replaced Colbert, began with a whimper.  And even though late-night talk shows are going out of style like neighborhood bars and front porches, Colbert's show was the highest-rated of the late-night talk shows by a wide margin, and the two Jimmys, Fallon at NBC and Kimmel at ABC, still dull respectable ratings of their own.   Colbert was a dwindling return on investment due to falling ad revenue, to be sure, and he was allowed to remain on the air until the end of his contract, but it's becoming obvious that the only reason he's no longer on the air is because Trump wanted him off the air due to Colbert's anti-Trump political satire.  If dwindling revenue from advertisers were the only reason for Colbert to leave television, Fallon and Kimmel would have joined him in exile.  

And to those who find it unprecedented that a President forced a comedian off CBS, you can ask Dick Smothers about that, as he and his brother Tom (who died in 2023) saw their Sunday night variety show canceled because of their political satire against President Nixon.  Ask Dick Smothers how he and his brother had also lampooned President Johnson, but be sure to also ask him about the letter that Johnson sent the Smothers Brothers after he left office, which the brothers read aloud at the end of their final show in 1969, in which the thirty-sixth President lauded them for their clever satire and said that the right to make fun of political figures was necessary to preserve freedom of speech in America.  Nixon clearly didn't agree.

Though, Nixon did appear on CBS in October 1968 while campaigning for the Presidency to talk to a correspondent of this new CBS news magazine, on its second-ever episode, about his candidacy.  The correspondent was Mike Wallace.  The program was "60 Minutes."

"Let me make this one point.  Some public men are destined to be loved, and other public men are destined to be disliked, but the most important thing about a public man is not whether  he's loved or disliked but whether he's respected, and I hope to restore respect to the Presidency at all levels by my conduct." - Richard Nixon, on CBS's "60 Minutes," October 8, 1968

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.  

So Stormy

My time is brief today, and  I only have one other blog entry on tap for later this week before my next Music Video Of the Week for Friday, so I'm going to be very succinct in my reaction to Anderson Cooper's "60 Minutes" interview with porn actress Stephanie Clifford, also known as Stormy Daniels.

The cover-up is always worse than the crime.  Everyone knows that Donald Trump is a skank and that having a sexual encounter with anyone - porn actress, Playboy model, Shakespearean actress,  haute couture model (yeah, right - like any woman of the latter two professions would have anything to do with the Donald or that the Donald would have anything to do with them) - when your wife has just given birth to your son is the height of skankishness, but being a skank is not a federal offense.  What is a federal offense is how the Trump team tried to cover it up by covering up the cover-up, assuming the allegations that Clifford and her lawyer enunciated in last night's interview are true.

If this doesn't being Trump down from a legal standpoint, his affair with Clifford will still be his undoing. Because people will be so tired of hearing of his sexual peccadilloes that they'll vote him out of office just so they don't have to hear about him anymore.

Aside: I don't think it's a coincidence that porn actor, professional wrestler, and rapper are three of the most disreputable professions ever conceived and that porn actors, professional wrestlers and rappers go by such outrageously stupid stage names. Stormy Daniels?  Sergeant Slaughter?  Dr. Dre?

Cable News News

Remember when the Cable News Network was the most trusted name in news? The best source of unbiased reporting in commercial television? Well, CNN is still a reliable news source, but no one cares thanks to the more partisan successes of MSNBC and especially Fox. In response to its low ratings, the once-vaunted cable news channel has re-arranged the deck chairs on its sinking ship, with more of an emphasis on reporting than on commentary. It's not the CNN is tone-deaf to the trends that favor punditry. It's that they obviously haven't done punditry well enough to compete with the partisan news channels.

Gone is Eliot Spitzer, the disgraced former new York governor. His old partner Kathleen Parker left a while ago, because Spitzer was seen to better as a solo act. But, apparently, not much better, as viewers still found the show boring. Thus, it's been canceled. If I were Chuck Todd at MSNBC, I'd be worried. His show, "The Daily Rundown," started out with a female co-host - Savannah Guthrie - but now features just Chuck Todd, along with a panel of pundits who join him at the end. And the show has only gotten more ridiculous.

For now, at least, Anderson Cooper's "AC360" will air at 8 PM Eastern on CNN and repeat at its current time slot, 10 PM Eastern. Spake Gloria Vanderbilt's son, "I'm looking forward to the new time slot and am (and am?) excited to share AC360 with a new audience at 8 P.M., while still connecting with my regular viewers at 10 P.M."

He's kidding, right?

In the fall, CNN is starting a news program to be hosted by former CNBC personality Erin Burnett at 7 P.M. Eastern, with John King's show moved up to 6 P.M. Eastern. None of these folks are partisan pundits - which is what CNN wants to make clear.

Over at MSNBC, things seems to have settled down for the moment. Ed Schultz is settling into his 10 P.M. Eastern slot comfortably, and after a hiatus, he brought back "PsychoTalk," a segment of outrageous statements made by (mostly) Republican politicians. In between the time Schultz dropped his segment under pressure from MSNBC bosses and the time he brought it back, he had a segment called "The TakEDown," which was really "PsychoTalk" with a different name.

Cenk Ugyur has done a pretty decent job in the 6 P.M. Eastern hour, but there's a reason his air time doesn't have a name; it isn't really a show. It's just a block of time Uygur - or anyone who happens to be available (Al Sharpton has been substituting for Ugyur recently) - fills between the original and repeat airings of Chris Matthews's show.

Keith Olbermann's new show on Current TV? I haven't had much time for that, though commenting on that will require a separate blog entry.