The Jay Weber Show

The Jay Weber Show

Jay Weber knows what you want to talk about. His show examines the big issues, trends, and events at all levels -- local, state, and national -- from...Full Bio

 

Poorly rated CNN and MSNBC need to be totally blown up and retooled.

Jay Weber Show transcript 6-8-22 7:10am

President Trump and the conservative media members love to giggle over the demise of CNN...but MSNBC’s terrible demise deserves at least as much attention.

MSNBC’s show hosts might not have had the scandals that CNNs did, which exacerbated its demise...

But MSNBC’s ratings are -just. Awful- none the less.

Ever since Trump left office in January of last year, the ratings of these two cable stations have been plummeting.  And the theory was: they became so well-known as the place to go to ‘hate Trump’-

It so engulfed their programming-that when trump left office and people lost interest-ratings plummeted.

But folks, Trump has been out of office for sixteen months now, and the ratings of both CNN and MSNBC have only continued to slide.

It suggests that these cables outfits-really did-destroy any modicum of journalistic integrity or reputation that they had with the American people.

Not even Democrats want to watch them, anymore, because no one can trust their coverage. Not after they so gleefully made a steady diet of five years’ worth of smears and lies related to trump, without ever once being skeptical of the misinformation.

Whether it was the Russia collusion lies, or lies about Trump’s corruption and businesses, or the trashing of trump’s kids. The Ukraine impeachment falsehoods-

Repeatedly. Nightly. CNN and MSNBC hosts and producers gleefully lied to their gullible audiences ...as their ratings went up.

And now-Trump might be gone from their daily coverage-but their ‘crazy’ has been exposed, permanently.  Rachel Maddow was exposed several times as being an untrustworthy liar.

Joy Reid is now seen as nothing more than a racist ‘white hater’, by anyone who would tune into her show.  And yet, NBC execs refuse to make changes.

So- MSNBC had a terrible may-despite several compelling, high-profile stories like ‘two mass shootings’, numerous high profile political primaries- and Putin’s violent war.

And that was after a massive drop between January and May of last year. Some of you might remember us talking about how most viewers abandoned both CNN and MSNBC- almost immediately-upon Biden taking office.

Their ratings dropped precipitously -and immediately-

That’s one thing-but what’s got to be really alarming for their executives is that over a year later, they are still eroding.

To the point that- i swear to you as someone who has been in broadcast his entire career-

CNN and MSNBC are both so poorly rated that both stations need to be totally blown up and retooled.

They could get better ratings with old Andy Griffith reruns, and I’m not exaggerating.

CNN has this group of new execs who say they want to take the station back to its news roots. Start doing straight news again, with the nighttime shows focusing more on ‘news analyses.

But if they are serious about that-they need to fire all their on-air personalities, and all their executive producers.

All of them.

They need to get rid of the people who decided it was okay and advantageous to abandon all of their principals, sense of fairness, or journalistic integrity when Trump came around and they discovered that bashing and smearing him was a ‘ratings getter’.

The perfect storm formed in which-as the producers and main anchors allowed themselves to tap into their worst biases and instincts- their ratings went up.  They abandoned all pretense of fairness.

And you cannot put that ‘genie’ back in the bottle.

These people. These prime time faces on CNN and MSNBC, simply cannot get their ‘journalistic integrity’ back, now.

It’s an impossibility.

This is like exposing yourself to your friends and family as a serial killed. And then expecting them to look past it and not treat you any differently.

Yes, I’ve killed sixteen hookers. Can’t we just get beyond that? I’m just. Good ole uncle joe...at the family cookouts. Gaww...

Knowing certain things about people changes and forms your opinions of them-most often-permanently.   

So how can CNN’s new execs expect that-magically- everyone from jake tapper to Anderson Cooper to Brian Stelter and Don Lemon are going to get their ‘integrity’ back?

But this is what they are asking of them-which proves to me that this team of cnn execs isn’t serious about changing things.

The big insider story from Axios this week is:

The new head of CNN is looking at current talent. If he wants ‘nuance and not noise’ maybe. Maybe. John King and Wolf Blitzer can stay.

Everyone else must go. Jim Acosta was rewarded for being a hyper partisan, flame throwing jackass covering the Trump White House.

Brian Stelter’s entire show is trashing the right. Ditto for Don Lemon.

None of these personalities can stay, if their shows and their careers at CNN have been built on their personal brand of hyper partisanship.

It’d be like WISN changing to a straight news format and asking me, belling and the rest of the show hosts if they can just read straight news.

Even if we could- would anyone in the audience ‘buy us’ as unbiased? 

Come on.  

Maybe-Ben Yount and Dave Micheals could stay. Maybe.

The rest of us would be fired. We are-known-commodities. Our biases are clear.

Ditto for CNN’s entire on-air staff.

And the exec producers that went along with their brand of cable-leftism would have to be fired, too. They can’t be trusted to be straight-shooters when it comes to picking the most important news stories and content of the day-and then playing it straight-either.

This new exec- Chris Licht- is already proving that he’s not serious.

He’s already trying to find a way to ‘let everyone stay’. His standard has already slipped to ‘if you can all just tone it down a little’.

Yeah. Okay.

That’ll work.

You are going to have to fire everyone currently on staff and go out and find those journalists.

Because no one currently at CNN can wear that cloak of credibility-nor are they going to be able to reign in their editorializing after decades of doing it.

Any half-hearted rebuild like this, will fail.

photo credit: Getty Images


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