I've worked at corporate places before, and the fear of losing your job due to restructuring or mergers is always something that comes with the territory. I feel for people in those situations because it often doesn't come down to how well you're doing your job; it's sometimes just a question of whether your place in the company is necessary anymore.
But with Paramount's acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, those fears are echoing throughout various brands under the WB umbrella, and that seems to be especially true for people working at CNN.
And for them, I have no sympathy.
According to The Daily Beast, employees at CNN are running around as if the sky is falling, because for them, it is:
“We are doomed,” one staffer told Status. “We are f---ed,” said another. “Everybody is reeling about the obvious things,” said a third staffer, with the network looking set to get the Bari Weiss treatment.
[...]
“The panic at CNN right now is off the charts,” one insider told Status.
Now, are these the panicked screams of people about to lose their jobs?
Maybe.
I'm sure there will be a large chunk of the network that gets sliced off like a guillotine trimming fat, not muscle, but I don't think the panic is strictly about layoffs. I'm pretty sure a lot of this has to do with the idea that many of these people are terrified that they're losing one of their ideological footholds in media.
And, in my opinion, that says as much about CNN's leftist ideological infestation as its obvious leftist bias on screen does.
There will definitely be people who still have their jobs after the great bloodletting is done at the network. I think some of the people putting their panic so articulately with "We're f***ed" are afraid that they'll have to work at a place that will, from time to time, sing the praises of the man they've been trained to hate more than anyone else in the world, past, present, or future.
They're worried about their paycheck, sure, but this is a group of people who are just as worried about the idea of having to play fair in the media realm, where, just a short time ago, this kind of bias was the standard and was even expected of you if you wanted to keep your job or move up the ladder.
Which would mean that this was not a news organization by any measure. It was a propaganda outlet for the Democrat Party at best, and at worst, just a network that hates Trump so much that it's willing to debase and degrade itself just to move the ball for its side even a little.
What's more, you know it's a propaganda outlet because they'll carry out these attacks regardless of how easily disprovable their claims are. They still function as if X doesn't exist, and Facebook is still controlled by the government, which, in itself, is proof that CNN is holding onto a strategy it should've let go of a long time ago.
It's not just biased to an unforgivable degree; it maintains its biased strategies despite being outdated, untenable, and unsustainable.
This moment was always approaching. CNN's inability to be a news organization was inevitably going to result in its change or collapse by virtue of the fact that the news landscape has altered so drastically. Cable news went from being the place you went to get the story to being the place you just got commentary on a story you already read about on X an hour ago.
The only trouble is that you could get commentary there, too, so what use was CNN at that point?
CNN isn't going to just need to restructure itself into being less biased; it's going to have to find a way to exist in a world where news moves at the speed of a retweet. I'm not sure what that looks like. I'm not the guy you ask for business-savvy ideas, but I do know that it can't continue to look like what CNN has going right now.
I also know, without any doubt, that it can't be a propaganda outfit anymore, and if that bothers the current crop of employees at CNN, then that should be their sign that maybe they shouldn't work in a media environment.
