Seven current CNN employees who spoke to NBC News on Thursday night, hours after Netflix announced it would not try to match Paramount’s bid for WBD, expressed a combination of fear and concern. They described the mood inside the company as “shaken” and” depressing.”

Keep in mind this was less than three years ago:

Zaslav’s marching orders for Licht were to push CNN more toward the political middle. It makes some sense — Fox News is a right-wing propaganda machine; MSNBC is basically the same thing for the left. You’d think there would be a fair amount of room right down the center.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/tv/2023/06/07/relief-chris-licht-out-at-cnn/70299362007/

And that article was about Licht being fired…

He was replaced by this shithead:

In a 4 February 2024 investigation by The Guardian, some CNN staff blamed their channel’s newly appointed director Mark Thompson for what they described as biased reporting of the Gaza war. The staff criticized their network’s coverage of the war, charging that it had promoted Israeli propaganda, and gave more attention to Israeli suffering, and the Israeli narrative of the war. One staffer claimed that this bias was systematic and institutionalized, as many journalists’ stories were forced to be cleared by channel’s Jerusalem bureau before publication.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Thompson_(media_executive)

Meaning the current employees who are now worried, haven’t been worried enough to leave over ethical concerns long ago. And they’re still worried about what is happening.

It’s neoliberalism all over, they keep ratcheting to the right, it fails, so they double down and move further right. We have to accept the people calling the shots aren’t trying to make it work and know it won’t. They just want to drag the Overton window the right under any pretext.

No matter what happens, in 3-5 years they’ll say their only choice is to move to the right, that’s what authoritarians do.