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Warner Bros. Discovery will split into two public companies by next year, calving off its cable operations from its streaming service. Warner Bros. Discovery said Monday that Streaming & Studios will include Warner Bros. Television, Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group, DC Studios, HBO, and HBO Max, as well as their film and television libraries. The Global Networks company will include CNN, TNT Sports in the US, and Discovery, top free-to-air channels across Europe, and digital products such as the Discovery+ streaming service and Bleacher Report. Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav will serve as CEO of Streaming & Studios. Gunnar Wiedenfels, chief financial officer of Warner Bros. Discovery, will serve as CEO of Global Networks. Both will continue in their current roles until the separation. The split is expected to be completed by the middle of next year.
At a particularly inopportune time for legacy media and CNN, the news outlet is on trial in Florida this week, accused of defaming a Navy veteran involved in rescuing endangered Afghans from that country when the US ended its involvement there in 2021. The veteran, Zachary Young, blames CNN for destroying his business when it displayed his face onscreen during a story that discussed a black market in smuggling out Afghans for high fees at the time of the Taliban takeover. In a broader sense, the case puts the news media on the stand in journalism critic Donald Trump's home state weeks before he's due to begin his second term as president, and on the same day Facebook's parent introduced a Trump-friendly policy of backing off fact checks. Young's attorney, Kyle Roche, leaned into the press' unpopularity in his opening arguments on Tuesday. You're going to have an opportunity to do something significant in this trial, Roche told jurors in Florida's 14th Judicial Circuit Courts in Pan
Vice President Kamala Harris is sitting down with CNN this week for her first interview since President Joe Biden dropped his reelection bid. The Democratic presidential nominee will be joined by her running mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz in an interview with CNN anchor Dana Bash in Savannah, Georgia. The interview will air on Thursday. Harris' lack of access has become one of Republicans' key lines of attacks against her as she ascended to the top of the Democratic ticket after Biden's July 21 announcement. The CNN interview may be an opportunity for Harris to quell criticism that she is unprepared for uncontrolled environments, but it may also carry risks as her team tries to build on momentum from the ticket shakeup and Democratic National Convention. During her three-plus years as vice president, she has done on-camera and print interviews with The Associated Press and many other outlets, often at a pace more frequent than Biden. The Trump campaign has kept a tally of the days sh
CNN is eliminating approximately 100 jobs and plans to debut its first digital subscriptions before the end of the year as the news network leans into reshaping its business. In a memo sent to staff on Wednesday, CNN CEO Mark Thompson said noted that it's cutting just 100 jobs out of a total workforce of approximately 3,500. He said that open roles were closed wherever possible in order to minimise the total layoffs. Media organisations, including CNN have struggled to grow audiences and revenue, and have sought to diversify what they're offering to customers. Thompson said that CNN's digital strategy must be ambitious enough to deliver the audiences and the revenue we need to maintain our unique journalistic firepower and succeed as a business. The executive said CNN will create subscription-ready products that offer news, analysis and context in new formats. He emphasised that there will be an effort to keep users on CNN.com's website longer and finding ways to get them to return
Joe Biden and Donald Trump won't be alone at Thursday's debate. Moderators Dana Bash and Jake Tapper of CNN will be on camera, too, and there's a lot on the line for their network as it fights for relevance in a changing media environment. CNN has hosted dozens of town halls and political forums through the years, but never a general election presidential debate, let alone one so early in a campaign. No network has. This is a huge moment for CNN, said former CNN Washington bureau chief Frank Sesno, now a media and public affairs professor at George Washington University. CNN has to reassert itself. It has to show that it led a revolution in news before and can do it again. As a television network, CNN is struggling at a time many consumers are cutting off cable and most news outlets wonder if the campaign will ignite consumer interest. Those that remain have expressed a clear preference for opinion programming. Fox News Channel has averaged 2.14 million viewers in prime time this .
A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit Donald Trump filed against CNN in which the former US president claimed that references in news articles or by the network's hosts to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election as the Big Lie was tantamount to comparing him to Adolf Hitler. Trump had been seeking punitive damages of USD 475 million in the federal lawsuit filed last October in South Florida, claiming the references hurt his reputation and political career. Trump is a candidate for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination in what is his third run for the presidency. US District Judge Raag Singhal, who was appointed by Trump, said on Friday in his ruling that the former president's defamation claims failed because the references were opinions and not factual statements. Moreover, it was a stretch to believe that, in viewers' minds, that phrase would connect Trump's efforts challenging the 2020 election results to Nazi propaganda or Hitler's genocidal and authoritarian regime, the jud
CNN ousted chief executive Chris Licht after a tumultuous year leading the struggling news network that culminated in a damning magazine profile and the realization that he'd lost the confidence of the network's journalists. The change was announced at CNN's editorial meeting on Wednesday morning and came just two days after Licht said he would fight like hell to earn the trust of those around him. David Zaslav, CEO of CNN parent company Warner Bros. Discovery, accepted some of the blame for the network's struggles as he appointed a four-person interim leadership team. He promised a thorough search for replacing Licht, whom he informed of the leadership change on Wednesday morning. This really caps a tumultuous year for CNN that has seen shrinking profits, programming mistakes and really low employee morale, CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy said on his own network Wednesday. Licht had a mandate to try and make CNN more palatable to both sides of the country's political divide; ...
During a contentious CNN town hall Wednesday night, former President Donald Trump dug in on his lies about the 2020 election, downplayed the violence on Jan. 6, 2021, and repeatedly insulted the woman whom a civil jury this week found him liable of sexually abusing and defaming. Trump, returning to the network after years of acrimony, also refused to say whether he wants Ukraine to win the war against Russian aggression and said the U.S. might as well default on its debt obligation, despite the potentially devastating economic consequences. The live, televised event held in early-voting New Hampshire underscored the challenges of fact-checking Trump in real time. The former president was cheered on and applauded by an audience of Republican and unaffiliated voters who plan to vote in the GOP primary, as moderator Kaitlan Collins sometimes struggled to correct the record as Trump steamrolled with untrue statements. You are a nasty person, he snapped at one point. The event also ...