Former CNN senior media reporter and liberal media janitor Oliver Darcy expressed disgust in his Tuesday night newsletter Status that “one of Warner Bros. Discovery’s most powerful stakeholders” and legendary media boss John Malone has been blasting CNN this week in interviews with CNBC and The New York Times about a new memoir, insisting CNN’s “a left-leaning, anti-Trump news service” run by “progressives.”
As a result, he argued, CNN has become “a shadow of what its founder [Ted Turner] had envisioned” even if it has some “great journalists.”
For this, Darcy seethed that his “groans” and “swipes” were a reminder “most of the MAGA audience simply cannot be appeased” no matter the number of “moves to soften its posture toward Trump” like “oust[ing] top anchors like Don Lemon and Jim Acosta, put[ting] dishonest MAGA commentators like Scott Jennings across its programming, and, broadly speaking, toned down the punchy style in which it reported during the Jeff Zucker years.”
Darcy — the man who melted down over One America News being allowed on YouTube TV and has supported efforts to ban Fox News, Newsmax, and any conservative media outlet from cable packages — claimed Malone and anyone who dares to raise concerns about CNN’s biases are impatient and impossible to please.
“[T]he MAGA audience is never going to see [CNN] as a legitimate source of news. Trump’s fans love to complain about these organizations, but have no intention of ever consuming their products. Instead, they view snippets from outlets like CNN through the filter of Fox News and X in which right-wing hosts and personalities unfairly attack mainstream coverage,” they added.
Darcy likes to pretend we at NewsBusters don’t exist, but let’s go ahead anyway and call this pants on fire.
He even blamed CNN’s cratering ratings for not being the home of the resistance:
WBD’s strategy has resulted in a diminished audience. Many of its most loyal viewers, who once relied on the network to report reality plainly, without fear of political repercussions, have tuned out. In other words, the idea that CNN—or any truth-based network—can win over MAGA viewers is pure fiction...[T]he ultimate outcome is predictable: a smaller, less trusted network, abandoned by its existing viewers, and still despised by the crowd it is trying to court.
Darcy also found anonymous CNN journalists to remind us how much they hate those who don’t see the world through their deep-seated partisan lens (click “expand”):
Suffice to say, the insults have not played well over in Hudson Yards, according to conversations I had with several staffers on Tuesday. “Lord,” one CNN journalist texted me, noting that the network is “not anti-Trump” and does its best to cover politics carefully. “The thinking seems to be: if you question rather than celebrate Trump’s actions, or even simply cover the consequences and costs or try to assess their legality, you are taking an editorial stance,” another CNN’er told me, adding, “We might ask how would Watergate or Iran-Contra play today? As partisan hit jobs or fair journalism?”
A third CNN staffer put it even more bluntly: “CNN is not anti-Trump. We report the facts whether it is good or bad for Trump. For example, when CNN criticizes [Robert F. Kennedy Jr.] for promoting dangerous conspiracy theories, that’s not anti-Trump. That’s reporting the facts to our audience. Sometimes there are not two sides to a story. RFK’s junk science on autism is the perfect example. If Malone is going to criticize CNN for being anti-Trump, does he think we should present RFK’s views on autism as rooted in sound science? Should we give both sides to RFK’s conspiracy theories even though there is only one side, in the name of being fair and balanced?”
Speaking on his yacht off the coast of Maine, he told Times media reporter Benjamin Mullin that CNN “can’t help themselves” but be liberal partisans (click “expand”):
In June, Warner Bros. Discovery announced it would split into two companies, with one owning the HBO Max streaming service and the other its cable channels. One of those channels is CNN, which Mr. Malone reveals in his memoir he considered buying from AT&T in 2020 after receiving a message from Mr. Turner suggesting one last deal. (They decided against it, believing the network might falter financially outside its parent company.)
Mr. Malone, who identifies as a libertarian, says in his memoir that CNN is now “a shadow of what its founder had envisioned,” though he adds that it still has “some of the best journalists in America.” One problem with CNN, he said, is that the network’s employees — whom he described as being largely “left of center,” — “express their opinions too much in their news.” He said Mr. Zaslav had been “unable to have any meaningful impact” in fixing what he viewed as the channel’s partisan tilt, a problem he said affected every news network.
“They can’t help themselves,” Mr. Malone said. “And so what you’ve got is a left-leaning, anti-Trump news service.”
The network’s next plan, he said, will be a paid subscription service that will allow viewers to stream hours of CNN video without a cable subscription. A CNN spokeswoman said in a statement that the network’s chief executive, Mark Thompson, “has made it clear from day one that he believes in a CNN that is fair-minded and biased in favor of the facts rather than any political party or interest.”
Malone doubled down Tuesday morning on CNBC’s Squawk Box in response to this question from co-host Joe Kernen: “Do you think CNN has changed to the point where you’d like where you are seeing actual journalism now? Do you see it across mainstream media anywhere?”
“No. And in fact, it’s very difficult,” Malone began, noting his familiarity with cable news and ties to the launches of CNBC and Fox News as well as supporting PBS’s MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour.
Expanding on what he meant in saying no, Malone said he’s “always struggled with the question of — of news” and always insisted on the need for journalists to “just give me the news, the factual news.”
He also drove Darcy up a cliff based on his positive view of Fox News and stating “[t]he reality...that journalism schools turn out people who are tend to be reformers” and thus “progressives personally” (click “expand”):
When Rupert pitched Fox News, it was going to be that we’re going to have a true news division. That will be just the news. And I guess you would say that’s Bret Baier today. But then we’re going to have essentially entertainment programing focused on news and current events and culture and so on and that was his formula and — and C — CNN decided to stay and try and be just news as opposed to news and comedy and entertainment. My view was that you should have — that it was okay for Fox to do what they did, as long as you labeled opinion as opinion like the newspapers did. You know, you have journalism, you have the facts, and then you have editorial opinions, and then you may have guest editorials. I mean, and you can make it all interesting and entertaining, but what you’re calling factual news, it would be nice to be just factual news. Now, I know how difficult that is. CNN has great journalists. They always have had great journalists. They have a large organization that does the best job of covering breaking news worldwide. That clearly is a big strength for them.
The reality is that journalism schools turn out people who are tend to be reformers. They tend to want to fix the world from the journalistic perspective, so they tend to be “progressives” personally and it’s impossible to separate that sort of personal opinion structure from the way they — they cover news, the kind of adjectives that come to their mind when they are reporting a story. Now, I never had much to do with CNN — you know, I was chair of the governance committee at Warner. I stepped off that board this spring and became executive chairman emeritus, but so that they could keep me tied up and, you know, I could continue to be involved, but — but not be a voting member of the board, even during the period, the three years when I was on the board of the combined company, I had zero to do with the governance of CNN. That was — that was David [Zaslav] and his efforts to bring in leadership, new leadership.
To see the relevant CNBC transcript form September 2, click here.