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CNN’s Existential Post-Election Season

With the election in the rearview, C.E.O. Mark Thompson will finally implement his true transformation plan at the network—including the culling of hundreds of jobs. Many of CNN’s own journalists, plenty of whom were blinded by Trump’s significant victory, have evinced similar naiveté about their own fates.

mark thompson
Everyone is a producer inside a place like CNN, and many people’s frustration with the Thompson plan is a consequence of the fact that these folks love making television, are addicted to the ephemeral high it provides, and pray that its old audience will one day return. Photo: John Lamparski/Getty Images
Dylan Byers
November 8, 2024

For about 15 or 20 minutes on Tuesday night, sometime after Sean Hannity declared that Donald Trump was going to win North Carolina, but long before his colleague Bret Baier was actually ready to make that projection (the network in a nutshell, I guess), Fox News was being watched by more than 11 million people. It was a capstone on an election night—and, frankly, an entire election cycle—during which Fox figured as the dominant television news network.