CNN+: Destined to Fail

WarnerMedia Attempted to Sell What the Public Wasn't Buying

“I have questions about raising my child. I will seek parenting advice from a show featuring Anderson Cooper,” said no one ever.

In a nutshell, this explains the failure of the streaming service CNN+. WarnerMedia attempted to sell a subscription service no one wanted. The foundation for CNN+ was many of the same personalities and programs airing on the lightly-viewed CNN that is available free on basic cable. “If no one is watching the free version, why would anyone pay to watch a carbon copy?” was a question that apparently was never contemplated by network decisionmakers. WarnerMedia might have learned a lesson on selling CNN+ if it examined the success of taking British Telecom private four decades earlier.

The 1984 privatization of British Telecom was the largest public stock offering at the time. The secondary public stock offering of AT&T months earlier had set the record of $500 million. The valuation of BT was 16 times larger with a public offering of just over 50% of the stock valued at $5.2 billion. It was the desire of the British government that citizens, and not institutional investors, become the primary stockholders.

The first order of business, according to marketing professionals, was to ensure shares in British Telecom was something the public wanted. Herein lay the challenge. In the years leading up to the public offering, 4 of 5 public pay phones in urban areas were either broken or vandalized. One in 25 telephone calls would fail. Operators, if a caller could actually reach one, were often unhelpful. There was even a waiting list to have a telephone installed. British Telecom was a mess. Who’d want to own it?

British Telecom knew it had to radically transform its public image if privatization was to be a success. BT invested hundreds of millions of dollars in an aggressive plan to repair, replace, and reenergize, transforming the company in just two years’ time into a valued product everyone wanted. Millions of Britons purchased shares.

In contrast, WarnerMedia stayed pat with many of the same, tired on-air personalities and stale content that was available on the basic cable systems that was ignored by viewers. CNN ranked 24th in the coveted 18-49 years old demographic among cable and broadcast networks. TLC, HGTV and the Ion channels were just some of the many networks ranked ahead of CNN.

Despite national distribution, Brian Stelter’s weekly Reliable Sources program had an audience that oftentimes measured in just the tens of thousands of viewers. No one was watching it. Yet, WarnerMedia thought Stelter’s troubling obsession with anything to do with Fox News was worthy of a daily run.

The Lead with Jake Tapper has struggled to find an audience when it’s purportedly about news of the day. So, why would anyone care what books Tapper reads in Jake Tapper’s Book Club?

How was Go There, which “takes you to the front lines of breaking news” any different than CNN sister channel Headline News? Or what would The Newscast with Wolf Blitzer offer than wasn’t already covered in The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer? Kate Bolduan and Poppy Harlow were to seemingly rehash their CNN content on CNN+.  Obviously, the paying public wasn’t interested.

CNN+ may have been banking on reruns of traveling chef Anthony Bourdain to draw in viewers despite his having taken his own life years ago. There would be no new Bourdain episodes.

It was thought luring to CNN+ Chris Wallace from Fox News (at a reported $9 million salary), Kasie Hunt from NBC News, and Rex Chapman from Twitter stardom would excite viewers. It did not.

Some of the personalities CNN+ was promoting as part of the new streaming service were insulting toward viewers. Jemele Hill has a history of race-baiting. Christiane Amanpour has been identified with antisemitic behavior and comments for years. Kamau Bell sees racism everywhere explaining, “[it’s] one of my jobs is to explain racism to white people.” Gee, who wouldn’t want to pay to be lectured they are evil and despicable human beings?

Content shortfalls aside, CNN’s brand has been in tatters. It was hit with a class action race discrimination employment lawsuit in 2016. And it’s long had a problem with sexual misconduct by senior staffers.

A pair of alleged child sexual predators were senior producers on the shows of the network’s most recognizable pundits, Jake Tapper and Chris Cuomo. Cuomo, the biggest (and now, fired) prime time star at CNN, has been dealing with his own sexual misconduct allegations. Jury selection begins in the coming weeks for the federal trial of Don Lemon, also doing double-duty with CNN and CNN+, who has been accused of sexually assaulting another man.

Sexual misconduct is not a recent phenomenon at CNN. It wasn’t that long ago the cable channel launched a one-hour show featuring disgraced former New York governor Eliot Spitzer, who resigned when it was discovered he spent more than $100,000 on prostitutes. Legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin was caught masturbating in front of colleagues on a video call. CNN put him back on air after a brief suspension. One can assume co-workers decline shaking his hand.

Much of the network’s apparent acceptance of sexual misbehavior grew when Jeff Zucker was heading up CNN. He had his own not-so-secret sexual imbroglio with an immediate subordinate that apparently started when both were married. Perhaps his laissez-faire attitude toward sexual hijinks should have been expected. Prior to arriving at CNN, Zucker was in charge when a pseudo-rape room was located just steps away from the Today Show set.

A recent revelation was the secret coordination among senior CNN staff, including Zucker and Cuomo, with the now-resigned New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. CNN was working behind the scenes to prop up Cuomo while his scandals grew. Publicly, CNN was falsely claiming to cover Cuomo’s shenanigans and misdeeds as impartial, professional journalists.

CNN+ was destined to fail from the very beginning. WarnerMedia’s first order of business should have been to fix what was broken, which was the entire crew and program line-up of CNN, before it attempted to sell more of the same.

It didn’t. The rest is history.

Mark Hyman is an Emmy award-winning investigative journalist.

His books Washington Babylon and Pardongate are on sale now.