Joe Rogan Goes to Town on Brian Stelter and the Demise of CNN+

AP Photo/Gregory Payan

CNN has not been doing well. They have new ownership which is imposing a shake-up to bring them back more to their roots and that likely spells doom for people like Brian Stelter, who subsists largely on attacks on the right and Fox News. As we wrote, there are reports that he’s on the chopping block. But CNN+ already has received the ax, after CNN invested $300 million in the effort.

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Joe Rogan — who has been a focus of CNN’s political targeting — had a few things to say about them on his Friday podcast. It sounded like he was having a lot of fun as he let fly on them, with some special mention of Stelter.

“If Jon Stewart thinks you’re a piece of sh**, I’m going to listen, you know,” Rogan said. “But if Brian Stelter doesn’t like you, that doesn’t mean anything to me.”

His guest, author Douglas Murray, said he had a rule where he tried never to be mean about people because of their appearance. “But a friend of mine said to me the other day, do you know how old Brian Stelter is?” Murray speculated that Stelter was 56. The friend said he was “like 34”; he’s 36. Murray said everything about him was strange.

Then Rogan, the former comedian, took off on mocking Stelter.

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Rogan attacked his “pattern of communication” which he said was “so strange,” “It’s like, do you listen to other people? They talk very differently than you.” He pointed out how Krystal Ball mocked Stelter’s way of sitting. Rogan said one of his favorite moments was Stelter took that posture with journalist Bari Weiss where he asked her, “How has the world gone crazy?” But then Weiss just dropped all the instances, one after another. “When you say silence is violence, when actual violence is violence, the world has gone crazy. The world’s gone mad. And she just rattled all these off,” Rogan said.

Rogan then went off about the failure of CNN+ after they had invested so much and laughed at how presumptuous they were. “Imagine the hubris of thinking that something that people don’t want for free, that you’re gonna charge money for it.”

Even after they axed it, Stelter was still spinning. He failed to note how the subscriptions to the service were lagging and they had fewer than 10,000 daily users. Instead, he claimed that CNN+ was “doomed” because “of the timing of a merger and clashing streaming strategies.”

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But even as CNN’s ratings are nosediving and they’re axing CNN+, Joe Rogan had the last laugh on them. He gained a ton of subscriptions as CNN and other liberal media went after him. He said, “It’s interesting, my subscriptions went up massively — that’s what’s crazy. During the height of it all, I gained 2 million subscribers.” Rogan gets an average of 11 million viewers an episode, something of which CNN could only dream for any of its shows.

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