Big cuts coming for CNN+ after slow start | Hacker News Reader

Big cuts coming for CNN+ after slow start

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56 pointsuptown78 comments

I used to really like CNN back in like 2010. Over the years its just become worse and worse to the point I don't read it anymore. It's basically turned into gossip news and is constantly skewing reality in favor of profits.

I'm over it, and I think most other people are as well.

Anecdotally yeah. Agree. To me cnn is the exact same garbage as fox. Just leftist instead of rightist. I never click on any links to either media. Actually I used to line the guardian but in the past two years the quality of their reporting also just went alarmist and hyperbolic. In some cases blatantly inaccurate.

Looking for a good news source currenty that arent afraid of critizicing any political party and their actions.

An hour of PBS Newshour a day. Very much fact based reporting with maybe a slight left leaning bias. Digest it and move on and live your life.

Besides that, I just turn off the news spigot. I'm slowly coming to the realization that watching news was kind of becoming my version of watching reality TV shows. There is of course value in being informed but outside of that, a single person can't meaningfully take action on all the things being reported on. So I see less and less reason to keep up with the news besides just being generally informed.

I think a better way to consume news might be to get a few "general" news tidbits through your regular news outlets. And then get more focused news on topics you personally care about and are willing to take action on through non-traditional news outlets.

> with maybe a slight left leaning bias

As someone with a conservative leaning bias, I would consider PBS to have a very strong left (whatever that means) leaning bias. I guess it depends on your start point.

As someone who puts priority on distinguishing rhetorics vs facts, PBS is the furthest of the mainstream news outlets toward the "facts" end of the spectrum by a very large margin.

What about the BBC?

Is there anything concrete you can say about that bias and PBS News Hour?

Or is it more just general "they're publicly funded and the left supports that" sort of bias? Are they disproportionately covering or ignoring issues due to that bias?

I have one example. They were doing an article about why it is bad to legalize pig hunting. They quoted an "expert" who said "I've seen deer hunters, and they LOVE hunting deer... so I would expect anyone with a gun to release pigs in other people's land so they can hunt them"

I happen to know several hunters, and that kind of accusation was pretty offensive and far from what actually happens in real life.

This is the type of thing to overlook as being bias when you don't grow up in that culture that would be offended at the accusation. I watch the PBSNewsHour, but I absolutely recognize they have a bias on certain topics, and know I am unable to see the bias because I am too steeped in it on other topics. That is true no matter how "fact based" any reporting is. It isn't terribly hard to stick to "just the facts" and still leave readers/watchers with a very warped picture by putting greater emphasis on some facts while downplaying or outright ignoring others.

Yeah maybe. Are we talking about PBS overall or the Newshour segment?

In PBS Newshour the upfront report by Judy is very much fact based. I agree though that the various mini-documentary parts of the segment are less direct-fact based reporting and bias starts to creep in.

Anyways, I'm not too interested in starting an internet politics fight. The main takeaway from my post is that we should reevaluate what we are getting out of following the news obsessively.

It has been said the reality has a liberal bias.

...by people who have a liberal bias.

That's not really a helpful point. You've introduced a tautology.

People who rely on faithful, factual descriptions of reality would be liberals if reality had a liberal bias and they interpreted reality accurately.

It's a completely BS statement, so I don't know what you're trying to say. It's not even possible for reality to have a bias in the first place. Reality just... is. It's the people who try to tell you what reality is that have biases.

It's glib, but the meaning is that rational observation tends to strongly disfavor conservative views. Things like climate denial and supply-side economics that are tentpoles of conservatism consistently fail to hold up to any level of scrutiny. Modern American republicans are currently hanging their hats on completely farcical assertions that the 2020 election was stolen and Democrats are all pedophiles. When an outlet like CNN reports the truth, they are going to appear liberal in comparison.

I understand what the phrase is trying to convey. It's literally just saying "I agree with things that conform to my biases" though.

You have a liberal bias, and you think conservatives are wrong? Wow, that's a first! And vice-versa.

That's not what it means. It means that rational observation free of bias aligns more closely with liberal politics.

Per the examples given: Scientific observation says climate change is real, man-made and an urgent threat. Liberals agree, conservatives don't. Maybe not to a person and maybe not with 100% fidelity to the science but the trend is unmistakable.

Same for many other conservative fallacies like "tax cuts pay for themselves". We have data and know it isn't true. And current hot topics like election fraud. All the evidence says it's extremely rare. Liberals agree with the evidence, conservatives don't.

That's not the entirety of the political divide and there's plenty of subjective and philosophical arguments irrespective of evidence but when it comes to justifying policy, one side relies on evidence one doesn't.

No, both sides have different realities they don't like-

Reality Progressives don't like:

- Gender correlates with biology

- Giving chronically homeless people housing won't fix their homelessness

- Not charging serious crime won't lead to safer neighborhoods

- You can't fix societal disparities by changing who is at the top and bottom of a pyramid of privilege

- Demonizing the wealthy won't lead to any productive outcomes

- The amount of GDP consumed by government already should be manifestly sufficient to fix the things government is capable of addressing efficiently

- Universal Basic Income is a pipe dream with no mathematic or social basis in reality

- Getting rid of religiosity without replacing it with another moral foundation will lead to progressively worse societal outcomes (and progressive thought is in no way an adequate replacement)

- Shouting down unpopular opinion doesn't make those opinions go away

Reality conservatives don't like:

- Locking prisoners away for long periods leads to greater gangsterism and lifelong criminality

- Racial disparities, whatever their source, need to be addressed systemically for society to prosper

- Making huge changes to our atmospheric mix is 100% likely to lead to undesirable outcomes- the globe, and humans as part of it, will not prosper with large changes leading to unknowable outcomes in our biosphere

- Education is essential to social mobility

- Social safety nets are essential to social mobility

- Free markets are rarely free of defect and tend towards capture, either regulatory or monopolistic, and need frequent intervention to function efficiently

- Even if you've felt deceived by the media, making it a point of pride to doubt anything/everything you hear opens you up to those who will manipulate that doubt for their profit and power

Either way, the smugness both sides have in being sure they are the 'righteous/scientific' side only opens them up to lack of self-reflection on whether their side is correct on a particular issue. If you're sure that your 'sides' agenda is correct top to bottom, you've assuredly sold yourself a bill of goods.

Nothing you listed under progressive misapprehensions are liberal dogma, nor are they categorically disproven. No sane person would argue that biology has no bearing on gender identity. The liberal idea is that people should be able to live their lives as they choose. Obviously someone with XY chromosomes can never get pregnant even if they outwardly change their gender. Giving the chronically homeless housing has had some positive results and nothing else has, so it's something some democrats have been willing to try. It's experimental, but definitely hasn't failed and we would absolutely abandon it if it ever does. Absolutely no one advocates not charging serious crimes, that's propaganda. UBI is also nowhere near liberal dogma, but has some credible theory behind it worth exploring. We already do EITC and it's wildly successful. The democratic candidates for president in 2020 who supported UBI got zero delegates. Government has enough money to solve everything it should solve? That's just unquantifiable gibberish.

Regardless, my point is still that the preponderance of evidence aligns with a preponderance of liberal policy. Climate denial, covid denial and election fraud conspiracies on their own are enough to condemn modern American conservatism to the garbage heap of corrupt populism even if liberals were buying every drug-addled hobo a luxury condo. I'd still rather live in that world.

Breaking Points is a good option: https://www.youtube.com/c/breakingpoints

They do have their own biases, but the dynamic is more conservative that hates the direction the GOP is going in (Saagar) and liberal progressive who is not a fan of the Democratic establishment (Krystal). As such neither one hesitates to call out what they disagree with for both Republicans and Democrats.

They have an optional subscription service that is doing extremely well. CNN should have consulted them for how to set up their premium service, because they have it figured out. Most of their content is free to the public in segments, but you get an unedited full stream unlisted Youtube link if you pay (plus some extra back and forth commentary), as well as bonus segments every week that are unlisted as well.

Being independent also makes it so they're not afraid to speak their mind about things either.

There's a few things they like to cover repeatedly that I really don't care about personally, and I don't always agree with their views on certain issues, but there's always a few things I like to hear their take on.

more conservative that hates the direction the GOP is going

I've heard other people say this, but I've never heard Saagar say anything I thought was conservative. He's not paleocon or libertarian because he's comfortable with big domestic government programs. He's not neocon because he spends a lot of time attacking big banks and big tech and he has been very critical of foreign military interventions. I've never heard him take a position on socially conservative issues like abortion or gay marriage. So what am I missing?

> what am I missing?

It's very hard to define people who don't fit inside the normal blue-vs-red spectrum.

It's really hard to define people who don't fit into an easy quadrant on the political compass test.

My wife listens to Bloomberg or CNBC. It’s news for rich people who want an accurate analysis of reality because they have money in the market. E.g. I listened to some segments just before the recent Virginia/New Jersey elections and it was just the facts, not teeth gnashing about how the wrong side might win.

Jonathan Turley, Glenn Greenwald.

> Glenn Greenwald

Who is actually on Fox quite a bit these days, funnily enough. 15-25 year old me would have laughed in disbelief, but if I decide to turn on cable news these days, I turn on Fox.

Edit: Also, Whitney Webb at Mint Press News is very good, just to throw her in the ring.

Greenwald is going on Tucker Carlson and reciting Kremlin propaganda without any evidence. Russian state media has been gleefully quoting the two of them.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/mar/18/ukrainian-biow...

Greenwald is absolutely off the deep end. Being brave enough to criticize orthodoxy is only laudable if the orthodoxy is actually wrong. Greenwald hasn't backed down from any of his nonsense takes on the Ukraine war no matter how wrong he is.

I think Shepherd Smith on CNBC is generally pretty good. He definitely does some entertainment and "feel good" stories but for the most part there's less commentary and opinion than most other cable news.

I like reading The Bulwark, The Dispatch and Lawfare Blog. All seem centrist and have indepth information.

Reason.com is a libertarian source whose coverage and perspective does not align with the Dem or Repub parties.

"Not-red/not-blue agenda" is different from "no-agenda".

Every news source has an agenda. GP was asking for news sources that are not afraid to criticize political parties, and they are not. They even have a range of libertarian views, and they criticize each other/the libertarian party.

There are plenty others too. Many go further, to criticize corporations and even bare narratives! Below is a small sample, and none are aligned with any party in particular.

Center for Public Integrity

Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR)

Novara Media (UK-based)

scheerpost.org (Chris Hedges's main outlet)

Citations Needed

Truthout.org

In These Times

Evonomics

naked capitalism

Are any of these not aligned with the far-left? I didn't check them all, but none of them seems to be to the center of the Dems on the issues they cover. Perhaps I didn't dig deep enough?

It's possible that the commenter was asking for Dem/Repub-critical sources that are all aligned with one pole, but I interpreted the question as asking for sources whose coverage would not correlate with either party.

If you're going to criticize Reason for having an agenda, I would say that critique would apply equally to these sources as well. They seem very agenda driven (which doesn't make them bad)!

"Center" does not mean "rational" it just means "non-committal". Sometimes committing to certain viewpoints is rational, sometimes it is not.

Not sure what you're responding to. Is your list all far-left? Do you disagree that they're agenda-driven? You criticized my suggestion of Reason as having an agenda and then gave your list instead. I'm trying to understand in what way it is a better set of suggestions than a non-left/right oriented outlet like Reason.

Man you missed CNN in the early 1990s. I used to watch Larry King interviews with my dad. He was so normal and direct and human.

Larry King went on SNL and did his show as a joke, and one of his mock commentaries to the camera was "Does anyone actually care that Pakistan has the Bomb?"

There was not-great stuff then too. Wolf Blitzer, for example, seemed to rise quickly and get a lot of air time mostly because he happened to be the one doing the remote reports from Baghdad in Desert Storm.

Wolf Blitzer was the one who observed off the cuff that the Katrina refugees he was seeing were "so poor, and so black"

Awkwardly worded and delivered, but it seems his observation was that Black residents were disproportionately negatively affected by Katrina. A perfectly valid point.

I am by no means a defender of Blitzer--his interviews and his framing of issues show him to be a banal thinker--but I feel he received a lot of undeserved criticism for this utterance. Which seemed at the time to mostly come from bad-faith actors like Rush Limbaugh, taking a cheap shot.

The time to say that is not when the camera is panning across an extremely dark-skinned family wading.

The last time I watched CNN it seemed like their writing staff was replaced with unscrupulous psychologists intent on plucking every heart-string they can reach.

I haven't watched CNN via TV for years, mostly because i cut the "normal TV" cord years ago. Although back when i did have regular and cable TV, i actually liked it the best as far as Tv News was concerned. For several years now, i have simply subscribed to their daily "5 Things" email newsletter...which aims to give a brief top 5 things one should know. It started out amazing; helping me get the gist for top headliones all while being really short and succinct. Over the years, the amount of content in each daily issue has grown both in content and ads, which i can understand becuase they are still a for-profit business after all...and it is still brief enough for me to skim through every morning. Oh, and its free, so while it does ppiont links to their cnn.com website (which is a different awful beast of advertising hell), i feel that its worth it...and in fact, sort of the kind of reason why i liklely would never subsrcibe to this CNN+ type of subcription.

The rise of the internet has not been kind to general purpose journalism. To stay alive news businesses are essentially required to cover specific things in specific ways which maximize capturing people's attention.

Yeah, Fox and CNN - at least their websites, have both become little more than he-said she-said tweet screenshots. I don't use Twitter for a reason, but now I have to see the garbage anyways.

At least Fox sometimes has recipes in the comments of Twitter news stories.

I don't get it, CNN+ looks exactly the opposite of what we need as a country. I looked at their show offerings[0] and 75% of them looked like true crime dramas. If I wanted a news source that would make me live in perpetual fear I'd go to Fox. Thinking there's a gunman around every corner is what we used to make fun of Fox viewers for (and their need to carry a weapon to respond to said gunman). Maybe it's just me, but this is the exact opposite direction CNN or any news should go. News isn't for entertainment and it shouldn't ever be. And I'm pretty sure a lot of us have been fed up with the attempts to make it so.

[0] https://plus.cnn.com/

Mainstream news is basically dead. It's all for entertainment and ad revenue. There are very few journalist of any sort of integrity that exist on any of these networks.

They'll be eaten by the younger upstarts that actually care to report on news and write real journalism. And then the cycle begins again (look at Vice).

"If I wanted a news source that would make me live in perpetual fear I'd go to Fox."

You could literally pick any of them to get your daily allowance of fear. They all lead and follow with some form of bloody hook to get the echo chamber reverberating.

I stopped watching the news PRE-covid! Actually, TV, i turned it all off... because? the power the media has in influencing dumb people. I got sick of it after the last eelection. Turning off is the only way.

Never felt happier. I recommend it to everyone. I crowd source my news from friends.

I am exactly the same way. Not 100% cut off, maybe 90% cut off. Also, if it's important enough I hear about it any way.

>If I wanted a news source that would make me live in perpetual fear I'd go to Fox. Thinking there's a gunman around every corner is what we used to make fun of Fox viewers for (and their need to carry a weapon to respond to said gunman).

Wow, you weren't kidding. I was at least expecting it to differ from fox by showing different kinds of crime, but nope - subway shootings in NYC was the first thing I saw. Who the hell would ever pay for this???

> subway shootings in NYC was the first thing I saw

Today isn't a normal day or a good day to compare news sources; there was a mass shooting in which at least 10 people were shot and 28 injured. That subway shooting is also the top story on Google News and the NY Times website.

Yeah I grew up in a household that watched Fox. I saw CNN shift hard in this direction with the pandemic so shifted towards more neutral tone sources like Reuters and AP. It's honestly disgusting to me to see so much fear based content.

And to be fair, I did see some non-fear based content. But the vast majority was and even some of the non-fear based stuff (maybe, I'm literally judging a show by its cover) still had those dark tones/style of posters.

I cannot stress this enough. People don't watch news for the entertainment value (even if that does increase viewership, that's not why they are watching it).

Of course people aren't paying $6 a month for news, they really mis-calculated the audience for this. People who watch CNN already subscribe to cable (Traditional or OTT) It should've always just been an add on or included in HBO max for free to add additional value to that streaming platform. It's not too late, they could easily integrate it with HBO max to offer live news to all who subscribe.

I'd pay $6 a month for actual informative content, but have you ever actually watched cable news for an extended amount of time? It's mostly just inane blathering and repeating the same thing over and over. They just don't have more than 30 minutes worth of information to share each day, but they stretch it to 24 hours. If they upped the information content, lowered the emotional appeal, and just covered a whole lot more I bet they could boost their audience...

My take on this was it was just a clone of the Fox News pay service. The CNN one would just be from a left-leaning perspective or some such. I bet if they market it better, it will do OK.

Then they've missed the mark, because they aren't left, just center.

I don't know about the leanings of CNN+, since I don't pay for it. I do know that Don Lemon and (former host) Chris Cuomo are obviously slanted left. I don't know if there's an objective way to measure this, so I just look at my own reactions, as I know I'm a moderate (my most recent presidential votes were Biden, Clinton, Romney, Obama, Bush; and I support about half of each party's political platform -- I'm pro-choice, pro-nuclear, anti-gun, anti-woke).

If you've seen anything from Chris Cillizza you wouldn't say CNN is left-leaning. Also, their major star of CNN+ is Chris Wallace who they poached from Fox News.

That's interesting. I don't pay for CNN+, so I'm just familiar with their standard news coverage, which is definitely left-slanted.

Here is an article saying their total tv viewership in the demo is just 126,000 a night. (Older than the demo seems more likely to me to be people that are going to keep paying for cable and thus be less willing to substitute a streaming service, you may or may not agree. In that case it comes up to 500,000 a night.)

https://www.forbes.com/sites/markjoyella/2022/02/21/cnns-rat...

How can they seriously think they could quadruple their current cable viewership with a paid app in a year? "expected to bring in around 2 million subscribers in the U.S. in the service's first year and 15-18 million after four years."

First I've heard of it, and I spend a fair amount of time watching news, mostly PBS, SkyNews, and AlJazeera. All of which I can see on my Roku without spending any money.

Feels like they missed something in their marketing plan. I may have seen the little + there when skimming cnn.com at some point, but didn't understand it was some new product.

But, as mentioned in the first paragraph, I don't have a strong need for a paid product at the moment anyway.

Edit: Probably doesn't help that Google doesn't know what it is either...[search for cnn+] -> "Showing results for CNN -> Search instead for CNN+" -> "Did you mean: CNN?"

I didn't ever understand the value proposition here. I already get CNN thru YTTT. Or I can go to CNN.com for more choices. Why do I need to pay $$ for a different CNN source?

There's not even a single area on https://plus.cnn.com that would answer your question either. It doesn't even tell you it's not free, or have a pricing page either. You apparently would have to sign up for an account to see the pricing.

Edit: Ah, so if you try to click play on a video, it offers just a little info "Plans start at $2.99/month for a limited time only"

The other problem is cnn+ doesn't actually give you live cnn. It's additional content.

I've seen some speculation it was simply a play to keep talent who are being courted by big platforms. Giving said talent an outlet to try different format shows with more freedom, etc... would help lock them in.

> cnn+ doesn't actually give you live cnn

Ok, now that's just insane.

CNN has spent the last 6 or 7 years transforming itself from a credible news organisation into an activist organisation. Of course this has a lower ceiling on subscriber numbers.

I blocked CNN in ublock origin the day I went there and it had front and center something like "the biggest threat to America is white men"... I just could not take them seriously any longer.

Yup same reason I don't know watch em anymore. I realized I needed to drink their Koolaid, which isn't how news should work.

No one needs more CNN. They're already barely held up by subsidized agreements with airports and YouTube / Twitter algorithm specifics. This was doomed to fail.

CNN has gotten to be too partisan and too childish for my independent taste.

It’s no wonder that they are declining.

I think the problem with the news is that it focuses only on the problems; They should do some research so they can focus on presenting the solutions. I think I would subscribe to a channel that tells me how to improve the world's problems.

That's only part of it. Them focusing on the problems isn't something new really (and from a financial standpoint is "understandable", as much as we hate this because it doesn't exactly benefit society that much), but the bigger problem is the fact that very often in the last decade they seemed to either lie by omitting key facts/aspects or straight out misrepresenting a story: which is something that people have began noticing, though very recently. This is not even going into the phenomenon that some outlets began popularizing the opinion-pieces to the point that their activism about certain topics began smelling too much like propaganda. Only very recently (~2019 and so imo) they started slowing down on this, but not after noticing that their pockets began hurting a lot due to their often-disingenuous journalism. Alternative journalism has grown a lot but some flaws are still there, it's not polished. Though I always tell myself if I want the truth I have to dig for it to the source, and even if misinformation is a legitimate issue, one cannot negate the fact that it's more probable that there's some raw video/information about a story that presents truth as close as possible, and is available deep in a social network or the internet.

Lol. I signed up to receive an email notification when it launched and I never got it. I guess I’ll go check it out? But yeah it feels like they hired the Quibi guys.

Anyone else think their plus logo is a misuse of the Red Cross emblem?

It’s definitely cutting it close.

Paywalled news apps and websites have a real problem attracting and retaining subscribers. My local news website forces you to talk to a human to cancel, and they will cut rates to the bone to keep customers. NYT does this as well, although it's an easier sell because the articles and special features are such high quality and they have really figured out the hooks and cross-sells (Cooking, Wirecutter, games, etc.)

In terms of video, many well financed companies have tried to make it work and struggled, whether it's niche audiences, drama, talk, news, or whatever. From what I understand, Bloomberg TV survives only because of revenue from their terminal business. As someone else pointed out, with so many free alternatives for international news and political talk, what's the attraction of CNN+ to potential subs?

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