Propaganda outlet CNN is set to fire hundreds of staff members, including major personalities, following a major election loss where it did everything it could to make sure President-Elect Donald Trump was not elected.
The ratings-challenged outlet will reportedly conduct “layoffs that will impact hundreds of employees across the organization,” according to Puck News, after trailing behind MSNBC, which also saw ratings tank, and Fox News on election night. CNN already fired about 100 employees earlier this year.
“The days of liberal journalists being paid millions and tens-of-millions to pontificate and schmooze with their permanent ruling class friends should be coming to an end,” Curtis Houck, MRC Newsbusters managing editor, told The Federalist. “CNN’s parent company WarnerMedia has had a litany of struggles financially, so it’s no surprise they’d look to CNN as a place to slim down.”
CNN CEO Mark Thompson, who came to the network last year after Chris Licht was pushed out, appears to be shifting gears from television production to focus on a “new digital-first landscape,” Puck reported, and fire members of the television team whose “talents won’t necessarily be needed.”
CNN’s demise should not be a surprise to anyone, much less its own employees, who have been actively lying to the American people for years.
While it is unclear who will be on the chopping block, Thompson is also slated to cut the reported salaries retained by anchors like Anderson Cooper ($20 million), Erin Burnett ($6 million), and Kaitlan Collins ($3 million). Chris Wallace, meanwhile, announced he would leave CNN after three years of dismal ratings and pursue podcasting — a news format utilized by the Trump campaign to bypass the corporate media’s deception.
According to a piece from The Ankler last month, Thompson was planning to ask Wallace to take a pay cut, and offered anchors Jake Tapper and Wolf Blitzer no raise.
CNN will also slash redundancies and either cut or eliminate entire divisions, Puck said.
“If it weren’t for the conservatives CNN has among its ranks — Scott Jennings, David Urban, Shermichael Singleton, and now Brad Todd — they would have to be laying off way more people than however many they’re going to end up cutting loose because the web traffic and online conversation for the network would be a barren wasteland,” Houck said.
As Puck founding partner and Senior Correspondent Dylan Byers noted on Tuesday, “Roughly 4.5 million people watched cable news last night. 85% of them were 55 or older. 75% of them watched Fox News.”
Even though MSNBC beat CNN, both outlets’ viewership tanked. According to Mediaite, which obtained viewership data from Thursday, MSNBC saw a 23 percent decline and CNN saw a 40 percent decline for the day, year over year. During prime time, MSNBC plummeted 54 percent compared to CNN’s 30 percent decline, year over year.
As The Federalist’s Elle Purnell noted, “In the early hours of Wednesday morning, legacy news networks were already sliding toward 2016 levels of melting down about the increasingly definite prospect of a presidential victory by Donald J. Trump. For them, Harris’ stinging defeat is personal — because it’s just as much a defeat for them as it is for her.”
Corporate media outlets are not failing because of some off-kilter business decisions, they are losing viewers because they have been systematically lying to the American people, and everyone knows it.
As CNN chief propagandist Brian Stelter put it, quoting a radio reporter anonymously, “It is ‘hard not to see this election as just a national repudiation of what we do,’” adding, “‘We spent four years reporting so aggressively’ on subjects like election denialism and the fallout from the January 6 attack – and many voters evidently didn’t care.”
But the left-wing media grunts actually spent eight years reporting nonsense with reckless abandon, all because they thought they could overwhelm the airwaves with enough lies to convince Americans to agree with them.
“If half the country has decided that Trump is qualified to be president, that means they’re not reading any of this media, and we’ve lost this audience completely,” an anonymous media executive said prior to the election. “A Trump victory means mainstream media is dead in its current form.”
One of the most egregious examples of CNN’s flagrant dishonesty is the Russia collusion hoax, which plastered headlines for years even though it was thoroughly debunked. That did not stop the liars in the media from awarding themselves Pulitzer Prizes for their efforts to undermine the American government. As The Federalist’s Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway noted, CNN’s Tapper, even now, still refuses to take responsibility for being a primary propagator of the hoax.
In the days leading up to the election, left-wing media were trying to find every way to compare Trump and his supporters to Nazis, claiming his Madison Square Garden rally was just like a 1939 pro-Nazi rally at the same location. The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg published a fabrication about how Trump berated a Gold Star family and wished for generals like the ones Hitler had.
As The Federalist’s Eddie Scarry wrote, the media tried to gaslight everyone into believing that they are really not feeling financial pressure from inflation, that crime is not increasing and widespread, and that migrants aren’t destroying American communities by refusing to assimilate, among many other issues.
Breccan F. Thies is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. He previously covered education and culture issues for the Washington Examiner and Breitbart News. He holds a degree from the University of Virginia and is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. You can follow him on X: @BreccanFThies.
