The Funeral of CNN

Happy Thursday, Sept. 24, 2026. Somewhere out there, a copy editor is sharpening a red pen for their favorite day of the year.

My calendar says it's Punctuation Day, Cherries Jubilee Day, Bluebird of Happiness Day, and Horchata Day. Fix a misplaced apostrophe, make yourself a cherries jubilee if you're feeling fancy, spot a bluebird if you can find one, and wash it all down with horchata — just don't try to punctuate the horchata, no matter how strongly you feel about the cinnamon-to-rice ratio.

Today in History:
1852: French engineer Henri Giffard flies the first passenger-carrying airship, traveling from Paris to Trappes.
1869: Speculators trigger "Black Friday" on Wall Street after a failed attempt to corner the U.S. gold market.
1902: Cookbook author Fannie Farmer, who revolutionized American cooking with standardized measurements, opens Miss Farmer's School of Cookery in Boston. Yes, that's the same one whose (Slightly altered) name adorned Candy shops that she literally had nothing to do with. Rochester, N.Y. History, ya know.
1906: President Theodore Roosevelt proclaims Devils Tower in Wyoming the nation's first national monument.
1935: Rodeo cowboys Earl and Weldon Bascom stage the first rodeo ever held outdoors under electric lights.
1948: Soichiro Honda incorporates the Honda Motor Company in Hamamatsu, Japan.
1948: American radio propagandist Mildred Gillars, known as "Axis Sally," pleads not guilty to eight counts of treason.
1950: The final flights of Operation Magic Carpet land in Israel, completing the airlift of nearly 50,000 Yemeni Jews.
1957: President Dwight Eisenhower federalizes the Arkansas National Guard and sends the 101st Airborne Division to enforce the integration of Little Rock Central High School.
1964: President Lyndon B. Johnson receives the Warren Commission's report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
1968: CBS airs the first episode of 60 Minutes, which goes on to become one of the most successful news programs in television history.
1988: Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson wins Olympic gold in the 100-meter dash, a victory stripped days later after he tests positive for steroids.

Birthdays Today include: F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby; Jim Henson, puppeteer and creator of the Muppets; Kevin Sorbo, actor best known for Hercules: The Legendary Journeys; and Nia Vardalos, actress and writer of My Big Fat Greek Wedding — if today's your birthday too, happy birthday from everyone here.

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Turns out the real story about the most mistrusted name in the news, CNN, right now isn't a ratings slump or a bad quarter, as important as those are to the story. It’s not even Donald Trump banning the network from the White House press room. It's a funeral — and that's not me reaching for a snappy headline. It's almost the exact word being used by people who actually work there.

A Variety report published Sept. 22 describes the mood inside CNN as "like a funeral" in the wake of the settlement that clears the way for Paramount Skydance to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery. And once you look at what's actually converging on the network at once, the metaphor holds up better than most newsroom clichés do.

CNN is getting a new owner, on a short clock. Paramount Skydance is expected to complete its acquisition of WBD by early October, according to reports from KVIA — which means whatever CNN becomes next gets decided by people who didn't build it.

Leadership is a question mark. Mark Thompson's future at the network remains unresolved, and Fox News reports that Paramount CEO David Ellison still has to figure out how CNN fits alongside CBS News — two once-fierce competitors about to share a corporate parent, with no clear answer yet on who runs what. Attention, Bari Weiss: I’d not be spending much time unpacking just yet.

Layoffs are coming, and CNN's own people are saying so. Brian Stelter, still on CNN's payroll, (why I have no idea) said on air that layoffs and cost-cutting are "almost certainly" coming as Paramount hunts for efficiencies and works off the debt load from the deal, according to CNN's own transcripts. When the in-house media reporter is narrating his own newsroom's layoffs on air, that's not spin — that's a company bracing for it in real time.

And the audience problem hasn't gone anywhere. Variety notes CNN's linear ratings sit well below where they were during Trump's first term, even as the company has poured effort into building out a digital subscription business to compensate. The cable-news gravy train that used to cover for everything else isn't pulling its weight anymore.

Here's the detail that makes the whole thing almost too perfect: this isn't the funeral of a company hemorrhaging money. WBD had actually projected CNN would pull in roughly $600 million in profit on $1.8 billion in revenue in 2026. So nobody's burying a corpse. They're burying the CNN its own employees thought they worked for — the assumptions, the standing, the sense of being untouchable, all going into the ground at once, while the balance sheet, ironically, still looks fine. Traditionally, that’s the description of a company chugging along on a reputation it no longer deserves, if it ever did.

That's the real story here, and it's worth stating plainly: CNN isn't being buried because it lost money. It's being buried because the business model, the audience, the ownership, the management, and every assumption that defined the network for three decades are all getting interred simultaneously, on the same afternoon, by a company that didn't build any of it and owes it nothing sentimental.

And the symbolism practically writes itself from here. CNN is about to join the same corporate family as CBS News — a rival network it spent decades trying to beat — while Paramount reportedly contemplates real structural changes to both operations at once. The merger settlement even mandates the creation of a joint News Editorial Independence Board covering both CNN and CBS, which Investing.com reports experts are already warning will be toothless in practice — a supervisory body built mainly to look reassuring on paper.

But now, here's the part of the eulogy nobody at CNN wants read aloud: underneath the ownership shuffle, the layoffs, and the ratings slide sits one stubborn, well-documented fact. CNN's left-leaning reporting is the disease. Everything else in this column is just the list of symptoms.

Start with how ordinary Americans actually perceive the network, not how CNN perceives itself. A YouGov survey from May 2026 asked Americans to rate the ideological lean of major outlets and found CNN sitting among the handful of sources most likely to be classified as liberal rather than conservative — in the same company as MS NOW and the New York Times. That's not Fox News saying it. That's a general-population poll.

And it's not a partisan mirage where only Republicans see it. AllSides recently ran a blind bias survey in which participants across the political spectrum rated CNN's content without knowing whose logo was attached to it. The result: CNN landed at "Lean Left" on their scale — and self-identified Democrats rated it Lean Left too. Independents rated it further left than that. When Democrats, independents, and Republicans all rate the same content as leaning the same direction with nobody's brand recognition in play, that's not a smear campaign. That's a pattern showing up in the copy itself.

I mentioned the issue of trust in the first paragraph. And that’s the tell. The trust numbers tell the same story from a different angle. A June 2025 Pew survey found 58% of Democrats trust CNN while 58% of Republicans distrust it — a near-mirror-image split that a Center for Integrity in News Reporting event later summarized as "both sides see exactly the bias they expect to see, in exactly the outlets they already distrust."

(Shrug) Fine, except that's not actually a "both sides" problem when you follow the money: Gallup's own trust-in-media numbers put overall public trust in the media at a wretched 28%, down from roughly 70% in the 1970s. An outlet that used to command trust across the political spectrum now commands trust almost exclusively from one half of it. That's not stable equilibrium. That's a business that spent decades converting a national audience into a partisan one, and now gets to enjoy the smaller audience it built.

None of this is theoretical for CNN's bottom line, either. Layer the perception data on top of the linear-ratings collapse I wrote about above, and the picture sharpens considerably: a network that alienated half its potential audience by reputation, then watched its actual viewership contract to match that reputation. Add a January 2025 defamation verdict against CNN in favor of a Navy veteran, plus CNN's own staff going public with complaints about the network's Israel-Hamas coverage, and you get a newsroom that's spent the last two years generating its own worst headlines.

Even the network's more sympathetic bias trackers concede the underlying problem: analyses of CNN's actual word choices find a consistent pattern of favorable framing for one side's policy language and unflattering framing for the other's — liberal proposals "expanding access," conservative ones "imposing limits" — the kind of editorial thumb on the scale that shows up so often it stops being an accident and starts being a house style. So, yeah, it’s making money, as I say, but not for long given the trajectory.

So when Paramount Skydance finishes carving up CNN's carcass in a few weeks, don't let anyone tell you the corpse died of natural causes — a bad ratings cycle, a debt-heavy merger, an unlucky ownership transition. Those are the instruments of death, not the disease.

The truth is that CNN spent the better part of two decades building a newsroom that half the country correctly identified as leaning against it, then acted surprised when half the country stopped showing up. You don't get to alienate an audience for twenty years and call the funeral a mystery.

So if you were thinking if my headline "The Funeral of CNN" is too cute for what's actually happening: it isn't. The funeral is already the word CNN's own people reached for first. All I did was show up with the flowers and the dance music.

Thought for the Day: Fannie Farmer changed American cooking not with a new ingredient but with a standard measurement — proof that half of getting anything right is simply agreeing on what "a cup" actually means before you start arguing about the recipe. Kinda like Bubba Clinton with the definition of "is."

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Take care, gang. Your stopping by to read these daily columns means a lot, and I thank you for it. I'll see you here tomorrow.

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