Scandals, firings and ‘tabloid-like’ news – what is happening at CNN?

Cable news ratings are in sharp decline, public trust in journalists is at all-time low, and one of most famous names in the media business is in a post-pandemic C-suite crisis ahead of an important midterm election.

Related: Why is trust in media plummeting? Just look at what’s happening at CNN | Arwa Mahdawi

But the money keeps rolling in, at roughly a billion dollars a year in profit to its parent company, AT&T’s WarnerMedia, while data-driven content decisions push the network toward tabloid-like obsessions and a tone rooted in exaggeration and alarm.

CNN, the company founded in 1980 by Ted Turner on the back of revenue from one of the largest classic film libraries in the world, has found itself at a crossroads that internally at least resembles a crisis.

Two weeks ago CNN president Jeff Zucker was abruptly fired for failing to disclose a romantic relationship with a senior colleague. Few believe the narrative, since the relationship had been common knowledge for years, and at least one CNN host, Don Lemon, shed on-air tears at Zucker’s departure.

Zucker’s departure appeared more likely related to another scandalous firing, that of show host Chris Cuomo, who is suing the network for up to $60m after being axed for playing an outsized and undeclared role in shaping the defense of his brother, former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, against sexual harassment allegations.

The scandals echo previous episodes in which executives at top American TV organizations have been accused of operating a culture of impunity for other senior, almost always male, executives. It seems to illustrate a broader problem in the top echelons of these firms: supremely powerful organizations whose leaderships seem to have assumed that normal rules did not apply to them.

Take CNN’s great rival, Fox News. In 2016, Fox News chief Roger Ailes was fired after a sexual harassment scandal. A lawsuit filed by shareholders, naming Ailes’ estate as well as 21st Century Fox’s controlling shareholder, Rupert Murdoch, alleged that Ailes had “sexually harassed female employees and contributors with impunity for at least a decade” and that Murdoch and others had allowed Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly to harass several female employees.

The company paid out $55m to settle claims of sexual harassment, and lost top female anchors including Megyn Kelly, Greta Van Susteren and Gretchen Carlson in the aftermath.

The Fox News scandal was followed two years later by a sexual harassment scandal involving CBS CEO Leslie Moonves that included allegations of an attempted cover-up by CBS executives. Moonves was later denied a $120m severance package. That followed the firing of Charlie Rose, co-anchor of CBS’s morning show, in November 2017 after several women accused him of harassment and misconduct.

But CNN’s problems, while lacking comparable accusations against Zucker, whose relationship was consensual, suggests other problems are at play in a new sector in a state of near constant turmoil.

CNN viewership in the first week of January was down 90% overall and in the critical demographic coveted by advertisers from a year earlier, while the network – like that of its ideological and previously scandal-plagued counterpoint Fox News – is drawing criticism for editorial positions.

According to Ariana Pekary, public editor for CNN at the Columbia Journalism Review and MSNBC journalist who now focuses on the systemic flaws of commercial broadcast news, a narrative of a toxic, male-dominated culture does not fully describe the issues at hand in the US broadcast sector.

Instead some of the problems involve what’s on the screen, not who is behind it.

“Zucker was hyper-focused on ratings and financial incentives and that drove the changes in news toward opinion because opinion drives ratings,” said Pekary. “CNN is more about trying to creative a narrative that they think the audience will follow, so they build the coverage around certain characters that are in the news every day or will reappear.”

Zucker had been brought in to CNN in 2012, two years after leaving NBC, where he had driven the entertainment division’s ratings with shows like Donald Trump’s The Apprentice, which helped re-establish his public image and, some argue, made his presidency possible.

Despite Zucker’s background in reality TV and morning news, CNN’s then-parent company, Time Warner, hired Zucker to improve ratings and inject “more passion” into programming.

According to the Washington Post, Zucker succeeded in making the network profitable, by expanding programming beyond news. Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown was among the new offerings, along with a new documentary division designed to create programming for weekend viewers.

Pekary walked out of MSNBC in 2020, writing on her website that coming from public radio, “where no decision I ever witnessed was predicated on how a topic or guest would “rate” , at cable news “I saw such choices – it’s practically baked in to the editorial process – and those decisions affect news content every day”.

The pressure of making editorial decisions based on polling and audience data, Pekary explains, starts in the morning news meetings – where Zucker was famously an ever-present force at CNN. “That’s why the coverage from hour-to-hour sticks to the same stories and narratives. They make decisions on what they think is going to rate the best, based on what has done well, and to social media.”

Pekary noted recently that in the absence of Donald Trump to drive ratings, CNN had pushed aggressively into “the realm of tabloid-like material”. There was Gabby Petito, the Long Island woman murdered by her boyfriend in Wyoming, and Alec Baldwin’s involvement in the death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins.

The problem is not exclusive to cable news, but only exaggerated. Devotion to ratings, reasons Pekary, has warped editorial control and the credibility of cable news and the news business overall.

According to data from Edelman’s annual trust barometer, 56% of Americans agree with the statement that “journalists and reporters are purposely trying to mislead people by saying things they know are false or gross exaggerations”.

An even larger percentage – 58% – said they thought that “most news organizations are more concerned with supporting an ideology or political position than with informing the public”.

For CNN, the Cuomo saga began with Chris Cuomo often interviewing his brother on air – a clear conflict of interest – before morphing into a sexual harassment confrontation. After Jeffrey Toobin, a longstanding CNN legal analyst, exposed himself on a Zoom call with colleagues at the New Yorker, he was put back on air.

Devotion to data has created opportunities for competition from other, occasionally contentious, sources. Two weeks ago, podcaster Joe Rogan found himself in a public feud with Neil Young and others over Covid misinformation.

Pekary says that cable news could redeem itself if it focused more on news gathering and less on selling opinion, which is cheaper to produce outside the massive salaries for on-air talent. It matters less is who is in charge. But with CNN making $1bn in profit for its parent company, the incentive to change is limited.

“No matter who is in charge I don’t see that format changing as much as I believe it should,” she said. “They spend an awful lot of time, especially in primetime, rehashing the outrage of the day when they could produce much better news programming with a different format that actually informs a larger audience but they’re going for the lowest common denominator.”