CNN HAS LOST ITS MORAL COMPASS

Over the past number of years the television viewing habits of Americans has changed dramatically due to technological advancements such as the explosion of cable channels, satellite television, digital television and now high-definition. Whether 3D television transmission really impacts our viewing habits is something that remains to be seen, but right now it is not a significant factor and perhaps just a fad.

As channels scramble to maintain saleable audience levels viewing has shifted dramatically. The 24 hour news channels get all the publicity, but they are only one factor. The talent on the older cable outlets is getting a little long in the tooth, i.e., Larry King (who has finally announced his retirement) and those channels are scrambling for solutions and ratings.

CNN over the past ten years has lost a substantial amount of its audience to that new competitor, Fox News, especially in primetime. Recently CNN announced the hiring of disgraced, discredited, and should have been disbarred ex-New York Governor Eliot Spitzer and conservative columnist Kathleen Parker to replace the failed nightly offering at 8pm with ex-NBC star Campbell Brown.

When CNN was formed by eccentric visionary Ted Turner many years ago, it quickly grew into a profitable highly desirable cable channel and the only one broadcasting 24 hour news. With Ted’s success with his Super-Station (WTBS) and CNN he moved on to join forces with Time Warner. Then there was the now disastrous merger between Time Warner and the then high-flying AOL. That action alone did not cause the drop in CNN viewing, but weak management changes and the growth of the Fox News Channel along with some successes at MSNBC has led to its current state of audience erosion.

This Spitzer announcement is, in my judgment, the last straw. How can a supposed reliable news source hire and present a shamed, sex-hungry pervert such as Eliot Spitzer to represent it without the obvious assumption that it has become desperate to attract an audience of any and all fools. Spitzer should be ignored and shunned, but CNN is showcasing a lying, cheating scoundrel in primetime. Have the executives(?) at CNN lost their collective minds or are they attempting to attract a Jerry Springer audience?

Why Kathleen Parker, a noted Washington Post syndicated conservative journalist, would compromise her reputation to sit next to a man with Eliot Spitzer’s blackened reputation can only be explained as a financial sell-out of her professionalism. Parker’s recent article in the Washington Post titled “Obama: Our first female president” suggests the tone of the coming Spitzer/Parker program.

You can read it at:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/29/AR2010062903997.html

Shame on the management of CNN! Even Ted Turner should be ashamed of what his once proud pioneering venture has become under Time Warner’s floundering direction. CNN’s liberal vent did not work, so now they will try to attract an audience with a criminal sex offender as a spokesman. In my household CNN will no longer be viewed, because it no longer has any credibility or integrity.

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