‘Heartbreaking’: Ex-CNN Hosts Fear the Worst For Embattled Network

Veteran cable news anchors Alisyn Camerota and Dave Briggs sat down with Puck media reporter Dylan Byers for a wide-ranging interview about the “existential challenge” facing CNN — at which all three have worked — and what the future holds for the embattled network.

Byers appeared on Briggs and Camerota’s podcast Sanity with Alisyn & Dave to discuss his recent piece for Puck — “CNN Prepares for the Afterlife” — which projected a dark future for the network defined by budget cuts and ever-steeper business model challenges as it is spun off from Warner Bros. Discovery.

There’s the fact that the media industry as a whole is in “inexorable decline,” Byers said. But there’s also the matter of the programming at CNN, which executives have sought to temper from the days when CNN chief Jeff Zucker ran the network and encouraged hosts to speak out forcefully against Trump.

“Just doing a milquetoast, down the middle, boring thing is really hard,” Byers said. “And it is very hard to create compelling, engaging programming that is down the middle. It’s much easier to go and light your hair on fire and scream about somebody or something and get a small audience than it is to just go on the news and tell people what happened.”

Briggs, who hosted a CNN morning show, compared the Byers story to a pre-written obituary — preparation for the inevitable. Camerota, who served as a host at CNN for a decade before leaving in late last year, called the reporting from Byers “heartbreaking.”

“CNN has been such a stalwart in the journalism space for decades,” she said. “I think back of how we were all glued to it on 9/11 and the Iraq wars and everything. So the idea that CNN is being shed until it’s a shell of its former self is kind of heartbreaking.”

The interview on Sanity covered the history of CNN from its ubiquity during the Iraq War– as Camerota put it, the network’s essential coverage of major breaking news has often felt “like a birthright for Americans” – to the arrival of new CEO Gunnar Weidenfels, who Byers described as a troublesome omen for the future of the business.

“If you believed that you were going to take the cable channels, CNN, TNT, TBS, etc., and that they were going have some bright new chapter of growth, you wouldn’t put the CFO who’s been doing all of this cutting in charge,” Byers said. “He is there in order to extract as much value from these assets as he still can.”

Despite CNN’s declining audience, Byers argued that in the Trump era “it is increasingly hard to know what to trust” and “CNN provided this really authoritative voice” thanks to a robust international newsroom. “It’s really, really expensive to sustain that news gathering infrastructure and those resources that can be deployed at any time,” he added.

Despite the decline of CNN and other cable news networks, Camerota noted that the downfall of media giants could create a stronger news ecosystem overall.

“If you get rid of 60 Minutes, it not like those journalists go away,” she noted. “They go to Substack, they go to YouTube, they go to a podcast.”

Byers and Briggs agreed with this theory of the media industry’s future, and Briggs added that he’s “heard whispers of a Substack news network being formed.”

Briggs offered a simple solution for CNN: “Do something interesting!”

Watch the full interview above, via Sanity.