CNN Tied Its Fortunes to Jim Acosta, and Now They're Both Sinking

CNN's slow-motion death throes continue with yet another shakeup at the once-mighty international news network. I'll give you a quick recap before we get to the juicy stuff.

According to Mediaite, "CNN This Morning" is all but dead. That's the morning show that former CNN honcho Chris Licht launched to much fanfare with the now-disgraced Don Lemon alongside Poppy Harlow and Kaitlan Collins. "This Morning" is getting truncated to two hours in the dismal 5 a.m. to 7 a.m. slot and will be hosted by CNN's current 5 a.m. anchor, Kasie Hunt.

Current anchors Harlow and Phil Mattingly "will be taking on new roles at the network," as yet unannounced and seemingly undefined. CNN only mentioned "talking" with the two.

A new 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. show called "CNN News Central" will replace the prime hours "CNN This Morning" used to occupy. If the generic names and presumably similar programming leave you unimpressed or even confused about which one is which, I suspect you aren't alone.

Former White House correspondent and current weekend anchor Jim Acosta will get a new role, too. Acosta will soon move to weekdays to host "CNN Newsroom" at 10 a.m, a much cushier gig than his current weekend anchor duties. Believe me when I tell you that a five-hour-long weekend anchor slot is not exactly prime TV news real estate.

Over at Instapundit, my colleague Ed Driscoll headlined the news with "DECK CHAIRS REARRANGED," and that's exactly right.

Let me show you why.

Along with billions of other non-viewers, I failed to notice when CNN changed its corporate slogan to "Facts First." With the period at the end, right under the famous red and white CNN logo. Looking into it, I found there's a short credo to go along with the slogan.

Facts are facts.
They aren’t colored by emotion or bias. They are indisputable. There is no alternative to a fact.
Facts explain things. What they are, how they happened. Facts are not interpretations.
Once facts are established, opinions can be formed. And while opinions matter, they don’t change the facts.
That’s why, at CNN, we start with the facts first.

I'll pause here a moment so that we both have a chance to recover from laughing so hard that my Golden Retriever just hid under the coffee table he doesn't quite fit under.

Let's go back to Jim Acosta because he represents everything wrong with CNN's laughable insistence that they "start with the facts first."

Acosta made his name showboating in the White House Briefing Room against Donald Trump but his fortunes — just like CNN's — diminished once he didn't have Trump to kick around anymore. Acosta, for all his unseemly rants, was just one more well-coiffed cog in CNN's 24/7/365 version of Oceania's daily Two Minutes Hate.

Without Trump, neither Acosta nor CNN amounted to much — as shown by the network's three-year-long ratings collapse and Acosta's weekend exile. Here's the question that must be driving CNN programming chief Eric Sherling a little crazy. Acosta peaked from 2018-2020, so what audience does he bring to the 10 a.m. weekday slot who wasn't already there? What does moving a weekend deck chair to weekday mornings do to change anything?

If CNN had started with the facts — or at least ended with the facts, or maybe just stuck some facts in the middle there where people might sometimes accidentally come across one or two — then they wouldn't be playing yet another game of Titanic Deck Chair Arrangement.

But the thing about the Titanic is that, in the end, the rising waters won.