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CNN is laying off Crom knows how many staff in a cost-cutting effort — Axios reports its “a couple hundred,” according to one insider — and the biggest name among those getting pink slips is politics reporter/analyst Chris Cillizza, possibly the most annoying practitioner of both-sides political analysis, although many say the title rightfully belongs to MSNBC’s Chuck Todd.
Cillizza tweeted that his time at CNN had been “an absolute blast,” although he may also have struggled to find a clever, counterintuitive upside to losing his job right before the holidays. He no doubt got an OK severance package.
Variety, which broke the news yesterday, reports that the cuts also included several on-air correspondents, and that CNN will also end live programming on HLN. You may recall HLN as the vestigial “news” channel that started out as “CNN2,” became “CNN Headline News,” and eventually became the channel you always skip past when flipping between CNN, Fox, and MSNBC during breaking news. We learned from reading about the layoffs that HLN did have a live news show, “Morning Express,” which ran before all the endless reruns of “Forensic Files.” That’ll be replaced by a simulcast of “CNN This Morning,” so viewers flipping through channels might have a higher chance of landing on the latter.
The layoffs at CNN come as part of the Great Encrappening of Cable ‘N’ Streaming resulting from April’s merger of Warner Media and Discovery. The new company, WarnerBros. Discovery, went straight to work cutting costs, adding a bunch of Discovery programs to the HBO Max streaming service while eliminating streams of dozens of animated series, and pissing off comics nerds by cancelling HBO Max’s nearly completed Batgirl movie so it could be written off as a tax loss.
As Variety reports, the CNN cuts come as part of an overall drive to cut $3 billion in costs at Warner Bros. Discovery; that too will include a bunch of tax writedowns for scrapping programming and paying out severance packages across the media conglomerate. Remember how everyone laughed and shrugged when CNN’s streaming service, CNN+, went belly-up earlier this year after just three weeks? Not that a CNN streaming service was a great idea to start with, but that too was the result of the merger.
So what we’re getting at here is that, while Chris Cillizza won’t have a CNN byline for his fantastically bad takes — like Why haven’t Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama commented on Harvey Weinstein being a sick rapey monster?? — these layoffs are still pretty shitty, the result of Building Shareholder Value in the aftermath of the merger. We’re sure Cillizza at least will find work somewhere — he’d fit in great as a regular on “Morning Joe,” and that’s not a compliment — where he can bless America with more brilliance, like maybe yet another vapid prediction that Hillary Clinton must surely be planning another presidential run.
In a just universe, Cillizza would be fired for his breathtaking mediocrity, not simply let go in a round of corporate cost-cutting, the end.
[Variety / Daily Beast / Poynter]
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