“Republicans are back on the air. Republicans weren’t on the air,” on CNN, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav told a media conference Thursday as he said the storied brand is moving to become less of an “advocacy network” under new leadership.“During the McCarthy hearings, for those four days, we had 75 Republicans on the air, 41 went on us before they want on Fox [News]. And the reason is, as I’ve said, and Chris [CNN chief Chris Licht] has too, to a number of them, they are not going to get one more vote on Fox News. They’ve already got that.” He was referring to successive votes over four days in January as the GOP struggled to unite its ranks to reach a victory for House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.Zaslav’s comments at the MoffettNathanson conference were a broad overview of the last year since Discovery acquired Warner Media, but CNN has been one of Zaslav’s biggest projects.The network outraged many on the left for giving former President Donald Trump a mic and the opportunity to spout lies at a Town Hall last week moderated by Kaitlan Collins. Licht defended the decision, but it also was met with some consternation from inside the network. On Wednesday, Christiane Amanpour, in a speech to Columbia Journalism School graduates, publicly voiced her disagreement with giving Trump a platform to spew misinformation, per Puck News. Amanpour warned the budding journalists that “both-siderism, one the one hand, on the other hand, is not always objectivity. It does not get you to the truth. Drawing false moral or factual equivalence is neither objective or truthful.”Fox News CEO Lachlan Murdoch wondered at the same conference yesterday why CNN hadn’t been sued. (Fox just settled a defamation lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems for $800 million, although the issues were different.)“CNN should be where people come for the best version of the truth and for journalism, and that is what we are building,” Zaslav said.“We announced yesterday our new 9 o’clock [Kaitlan Collins will lead the hour]. “Chris is rebuilding the network. It’s going to take some time. But advertisers are interested in CNN again. They don’t want to be part of an advocacy network. We’ve had meeting after meeting and they say, ‘We are with you.’”He noted that CNN is litte bit different that other networks in that it’s driven more by distributor fees than advertising. “And, in fact, even when ratings were good the perception of the brand was left leaning.”CNN’s primetime ratings have fallen further behind rivals Fox news and MSNBC.Zaslav said this past week there was a new [YouGov] poll showing overall trust in the U.S. for CNN up 11 points. “That’s what we are going for. Our view is there’s advocacy networks on either side, that we have the best journalists in the world, we need to show both sides of every issue.”
© 2023 Deadline Hollywood, LLC.