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CNN Prepares for the Afterlife

With the industry in inexorable decline, ratings at a nadir, and younger audiences turning to YouTube and TikTok, Gunnar Wiedenfels will inevitably look at CNN and decide he can maintain relatively similar profits at a mere fraction of the cost. This is the beginning of the end.

Gunnar Wiedenfels
As for Gunnar, well, he’s a notorious cost-cutter who now finds himself in charge of a collection of nearly obsolete assets—an NBA-less TNT, TBS, Food Network, HGTV, etcetera—primed for even more value extraction. Photo: Christopher Goodney/Bloomberg/Getty Images
Dylan Byers
June 11, 2025

On Monday, minutes after David Zaslav announced his long-awaited and well-telegraphed plan to split Warner Bros. Discovery into two companies—an allegedly growth-hungry streaming and studios business that he will run, and a debt-saddled, Versant-style cable channel spinco-shitco that he’s handing off to his C.F.O., Gunnar Wiedenfels—I received a deluge of text messages from addled employees at CNN, the asset that has arguably suffered the most during Zaz’s three-year leveraged buyout experiment. The question from many, whether in verbatim or in spiritu, was: What does this mean for us? Or, as one high-ranking CNN insider put it: Thoughts?! Reader, I have a few.