The chaotic collapse of CNN+
axios.com
axios.com
It's quite common for ventures like this to be put on hold while a review is conducted, and even if the venture is sound, such things often wind up dying because of infighting over the review or loss of momentum. The article suggests that the team, anticipating this outcome, rushed the launch to make it more difficult to cancel the service.
As it happened, the launch fizzled. But if I'm reading it right, the service was doomed from the moment the merger was finalized. Perhaps if the launch was a surprise success, it might have survived the merger.
So perhaps the rushed launch was a "Hail Mary," and while it seems embarrassing, it's no more embarrassing than launching a Hail Mary pass in the dying seconds of an American football game and seeing it picked off and run back for a touchdown.
Such things are of no real consequence, because the game was already lost.
… and I am in a much more desirable demo …
I have no idea if the service would have succeeded under different circumstances, but as OP stated, this was the rushed pet project of outgoing executives during a merger. Any outcome other than DOA was highly unlikely.
This is 100% unadulterated speculation on my part, but if the executives still in charge of CNN+ thought it had problems, they'd be doubly fearful of the axe coming down when the business was reviewed, so they may have been motivated to get it launched whether they were ready to launch or not.
If they had no fear of a business review and possible cancellation, they might have decided to delay the launch and try to fix the content/market problems.
A minor part of inexpensive cable packages in 1980 alongside MTV, it somehow became very expensive to buy despite running endless ads. CNN's current Neilsen numbers are abysmal, it's hard to imagine why they thought people would pay even more for 'plus' content, especially given their predominantly retirement age+ demographic. Meanwhile Joe Rogan is averaging 11m views per podcast with Tucker Carlsen and his script writers a very distant second at around 3.2m. (CNN got .8m fpr their most viewed primetime show Q3 2021)
Doesn't CNN still have more reporters world wide than any other US based news org? I imagine the BBC has the most when comparing news orgs around the world.
I think this is why CNN still gives better news coverage than other stations, but the opinion shows drown a lot of that out.
Don't forget about the captive audience in airports, too. That kept CNN artificially in the public eye.
Zucker rationalized the decision by blaming streaming services and other mobile media but I don't buy that because Airport was still invasive - i.e., people look up from their devices and could still be seeing CNN, etc. today. And, from a business perspective, it required very few internal technical resources (a single master control system and operator) so the costs were almost certainly exclusive to whatever fees CNN paid to airports to install their receivers and displays.
(Full disclosure: I'm a former operations-level CNN employee, half speculating from my time at CNN WHQ)
Like that time they interviewed Osama bin Laden right before the 1998 Embassy bombings to make sure the public knew who he was: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orawG7vt68o
But was this programming built for their elderly audience, or was it supposed to be an attempt at picking up a new, younger audience? Who was this for?
You watch a program like CBS Sunday Morning and it's clear they know who their audience is. Each week, they feature who passed away. They feature anniversaries of things like the Godfather and other stuff that their audience will like to reminisce about. A comedian talking about aging gracefully. Etc. But I don't think CNN did any of that with CNN+.
(Source for age claims: https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2021/05/24/msnbc-rashid... )
EDIT: To all the people saying that younger people get their "unhinged" through social media and other platforms, that makes a lot of sense. Thanks for the explanation.
I hear that said a lot, but I doubt it, at least not with those proportions. Those things offer important perspective, but to put it bluntly: George Washington isn't running for president anymore and slavery has been abolished for more than a century. The past is the past and this is the present: there are some commonalities but also a lot of important differences.
To be a "better citizen," you need pretty deep knowledge of current events. That takes a lot of time, because a lot is going on and it's often more informative to follow a story than just read a summary once it's over. Think of it this way: an investor will lose his shirt if he spends 95% of his time reading classic investment books and only 5% actually researching businesses. Being a citizen is similar.
Also, one of the nice things about the news is it exposes you more to the rough edges and uncertainty of the present, rather than smoothing that over with theory and narratives (that can be thoroughly curve-fitted to the past, so as not to jar you with their wrongness).
The modern "news" environment takes the worst of our justice system, the unethical, dishonest, manipulative lawyers who consider it their duty to use every rhetorical tool to achieve their goals, and has mainstreamed it. The news, and politics, are dominated by attorneys. But most of us aren't, and most of us don't use those same techniques in our lives, or are even familiar with the techniques, and so we're left vulnerable to them.
No, it's based on the hypothesis that sufficient up-to-date information is required.
> People's perspectives are not deepened by more information, but made more shallow. In large part this is because the information they get is mostly second order, information about other people's reactions, or even reactions to reactions. This reaction information is used to preempt and override people's own reactions, often with something extreme, which drives engagement, which represents value for the corporation.
That's a twisted cartoon of the news. If that's how you've actually experienced it, you probably need to pick better sources or get better at separating the wheat from the chaff.
> The modern "news" environment takes the worst of our justice system, the unethical, dishonest, manipulative lawyers who consider it their duty to use every rhetorical tool to achieve their goals, and has mainstreamed it. The news, and politics, are dominated by attorneys. But most of us aren't, and most of us don't use those same techniques in our lives, or are even familiar with the techniques, and so we're left vulnerable to them.
That's another twisted cartoon, but I'll say one of the best ways to avoid being manipulated is to actually be familiar with the facts.
Quite possibly. You're usage of Good News/bad news there is about the most confused thing possible. There are much clearer ways of saying what I think you might be saying.
I think the policies from the 60s and 70s have way more impact today than people realize and without understanding that context, "deep knowledge of current events" gets you nowhere. The seeds for an event like 9/11 were planted almost 50 years earlier and without understanding that it's easy for people to get swept up in takes like "they hate us for our freedom".
> I think the policies from the 60s and 70s have way more impact today than people realize and without understanding that context, "deep knowledge of current events" gets you nowhere.
I'm not arguing for an extreme opposite position (e.g. all current events, no history). If you thought I was, you misunderstood me. I'm just saying it's not being a "good citizen" to bury yourself in the past and neglect the present day.
However, I will say understanding current events probably takes more effort, because history can be digested and presented more efficiently (e.g. for the Civil War: 4+ years of 19th century newspapers vs. a 500 page history).
Of course, this view is shared by every fanatic everywhere, of every faith, such that the jingo "They hate us for our freedom" applies to them, too.
Osama Bin Laden's own motivations for 9/11 had more to do with American imperialism in the Middle East and less to do with "rejection of God's Law". This isn't speculation, but from the horse's mouth. The "hate us for our freedom" was propaganda by Bush, and anyone who only looks at that, without studying the history of American imperialism in the middle east, starting from the coup of Iran, ends up in the backwards conclusion that Islam is a violent religion (or at least any more violent than any other Abrahamic religion).
Please bear in mind that "rejection of God's law, the soul of heresy, for which the punishment is death" is also a major tenet in all Abrahamic religions. Secondly, there are plenty of Americans who are pining for nuclear war with Russia over Ukrainians; but somehow the blowback of nearly 50 years of foreign intervention by the CIA wouldn't be a motivation for anti-American sentiment in the middle east and instead "they just hate us for our freedom".
I'm not saying religion isn't a tool for executing these goals, but the orchestrators have always been acting under geopolitical goals.
What motivates you to resist the simple truth that Islamists hate and wish to kill Westerners for breaking their holy law (the same behaviors we call "freedom"), admire martyrs who suicide themselves into civilians for this purpose? Do you think an Islamist would disagree with any of that? If so, why?
The soldier does not have a larger strategy in mind; he kills for simple and extreme reasons. The government however is rarely so naive, and initiates their wars with much larger goals in mind. Even with a dictator, they represent the filtered understanding of many advisors, and balance the many goals of the group (so almost by definition, they cannot sustain a singular goal with singular purpose for long). The individual just needs one reason to do what he does, which might be as simple as “his boss told him to”.
Because it's a ridiculous premise that you would not apply to any other religion. It's not even a consistent view of Islam; you don't have Islamists in Malaysia (60% islamic) or Turkey (99% Islam) holding the same sort of contempt with to West.
Consider it this way, if a Russian came to you and said "the Ukrainians hate Russians because they are full of Nazis and they hate how Stalin purged Germany of Nazis" you would quickly realize that is ridiculous notion - Ukrainians are currently being bombed by Russian soldiers which fuels their animosity.
The West has largely done the same in the middle east, and not understanding this history leads you down to conclusion that they must hate the West because of Islam. I don't know how you could look at an entire group of people who have been practically waging a war for sovereignty against a incredibly more powerful adversary for almost _60 years_ and come away that their wish to kill westerners comes from breaking their holy law. Yeah, you can pretend Islam is a tiny part of it, but I think a larger part of that hate is having their government overthrown and then having their children blown up in an air strike.
I explicitly said in my initial comment that the slogan "They hate us for our freedom" applies to any fanatic of any religion. You are misrepresenting me, and are drifting further away from a specific point around what motivated the 9/11 attackers. Perhaps you are confused by the difference between Islam[0] and Islamism[1]?
People today are vehemently anti-China because of censorship in video games, but somehow it’s a leap of faith that people can be anti-West after their home is targeted in an air raid and we must turn to “religious fanatics”. If China dropped a bomb on your parents home over some mineral rights, don’t you think you would become a little anti-Chinese? What would you think if those Chinese turned around and called you fundamentalist Christian when you voiced those complaints?
If you buy that fact that the Middle East sustained aggression for over 50 years because of “religious fanactism” then you must also believe Putin’s line of reasoning that Zelensky is a nazi because it’s the same kind of propaganda
I believe all of that, yet "they hate us for our freedom" remains an accurate description of the fanatic. It is, essentially, definitional.
>If China dropped a bomb on your parents home over some mineral rights, don’t you think you would become a little anti-Chinese?
You seem to interpret what I'm saying as bigoted against Muslims (it's not, BTW), so I'm surprised you'd make this argument. Furthermore, it's ambiguous what you mean: do you mean anti-China, or anti-Chinese? Yes, I would certainly feel the former, but not the latter. Individuals aren't nations, never were, never will be.
The reality is that post world war 2 soviet containment is the most relevant starting point for explaining Islamic terrorism in the west. Yes, religious rhetoric was used by bin Laden and al-Qaeda to justify their actions, but they only took these actions because western powers (US, Soviets) were playing proxy war in the region for decades.
The vestiges of the later slavery are still around too, well, I guess the slavery is too, but now you have to buy their labour from the government, and the government keeps ownership of the slave. Actually, I don't know how that goes for private prisons?
But pressuring people to plea guilty to crime, perceptions of black people as violent criminals, the large US prison population, the police, etc. Those are legacies and continuations of practices from slavery.
A but more reading on history puts today's problems in better context
[0]: https://weeklysift.com/2014/03/31/slavery-lasted-until-pearl...
Sure, but I doubt someone with a deep grounding in political science, economics, and history, but who'd never heard of either candidate, would need more than an hour or so on Google to decide between Trump and Biden, for instance. Our choices are, as voters, for better or worse, pretty limited.
Frankly, I often make decisions about local candidates or ballot initiatives based on like 5 minutes of research. I doubt any of those choices would change if I closely followed all those candidates and issues and spent 50x more time on them—what might change them is if I'd read fewer, or different, books. (meanwhile, if I wanted to make any actual difference in the world, I'm aware that what I ought to do is get involved with one of the big two political parties, at the local level)
That's a bad example, because Trump was such an oaf. A better recent example might have been choosing between McCain and Obama, if you're focused on presidential races.
The bigger issue isn't so much picking candidates, but understanding current situation and problems, and having opinions about those things to inform your choices.
> A better recent example might have been choosing between McCain and Obama, if you're focused on presidential races.
I'd love to see some blank-slate person try to judge them just by their own websites. God, those were so different.
https://www.businessinsider.com/study-watching-fox-news-make...
I was actually referring to exactly this.
Everyone has a bias and skews stories, also, creating fear probably increases viewership. If the media always said everything is fine, less people would watch IMO.
I understand the sentiment, and I'm also careful about how much news I consume, but there's a fine line between this and being privileged to be able to afford to skip news because those suffering aren't your family.
In a less extreme example, if a big project came into your neighborhood to destroy all the houses on your street to build a highway, I'm sure that suddenly this news would make you want to get involved politically to advocate against the destruction of it. But when that happened in the other neighborhood and you didn't care to even write an email to your local politician to oppose it because you didn't know about it, other families suffered.
It's a fine line.. I've seen my parents watch news 3 times a day (lunch, dinner, and late-evening news) and it was definitely not healthy and did not make them better citizen either. I don't have a perfect answer.
I don't think there's any obligation to keep up with events on the other side of the world (or the other side of your country) if you're not also able and willing to do something about it. I dunno about applying the "privilege" label to that—in fact, the fewer resources you have, the less point there is in it.
Things that happen across the world affect us here too. Maybe your friends have family in Ukraine or are from there. I have students who are Ukrainian. Currently Ukrainians are leaving their homeland as refugees and resettling all around the world. They could be moving in down the street and will be your neighbors! Knowing what's happening around the world allows one to be empathetic to the situations of others.
Being an American is like being a Roman citizen; you have to run the whole empire.
Again, I think that end would also be better served if a high proportion of news media consumption were shifted to citizenship-relevant books (and maybe very high-quality, low-frequency periodicals), probably starting with textbooks and classics in political science, history, and economics (I doubt anyone who's mined those well already, needs any help picking their next high-value read).
Nope, not my duty. My duty is to elect politicians who enact policy affecting me. If a politician enriches my country at the expense of another, it is my duty to vote for him, for the sake of myself and my family. No one is a citizen of the world.
Watching the news is not helping these people.
Hence why I said most. I definitely agree that being exposed to outside events can be important for sympathizing with those affected (and possible helping them), but at the same time, one does not need to be aware of everything going on in the world.
But if you live in a democracy, you have to spend some of your time being informed about things so you know how to vote. Think of it as a democracy tax. If you didn't live in a democracy, you wouldn't have this tax on your time. Freedom isn't free, eh?
Of course, this democracy tax is totally voluntary. You're only obligated by your own morality. You may choose to opt out of democracy entirely. Not voting or being informed is your choice, if you wish to live your life off the backs of others. No one will make you feel guilty about it at all. Right? ;)
I don’t think you fairly addressed his question at all in this comment, and the reason lies right in that vague word: “things”.
People who live anywhere will always take an interest in information which directly affects them, or that they can profit off of, or which might cause them to incur losses. Generally there are multiple means of attaining this information and the “news” in the mass media sense is just one of them. I don’t for example pay close attention to all legal news, so when I need legal advice which tends to be situational in nature I hire people who do rather than proceeding on my own partially-informed opinions from what I gleaned out of a newspaper which probably missed important details and which is usually written from a biased perspective. This is true for any number of domains I don’t specialize in (almost all of them), and in seeking counsel I gain information along the way that can shape my future actions.
So lets come back to that word, “things”, which things should people be informed of that you get from the news media but are unlikely to receive from anywhere else?
Neither do I.
If you think you're learning about social, political, and economic mechanics on a global scale from the news, then I implore you to keep consuming. I've never learned anything from the news that I couldn't have learned talking to someone else who watched it instead.
Added to which, the news is a business model which increasingly earns its living off manufacturing outrage (not by making its viewers more informed and worldly). The same can’t be said of history books, which is why I agree with one of my sibling commenters here, who recommends swapping most news with reading history.
The purported Twain quote, "If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed; if you do, you're misinformed," applies here.
People love to do comparisons to this or that news organization, "Fox News viewers are most likely to have a Beanie Baby collection," or "MSNBC viewers are most likely to believe that Elvis was an alien," or whatever. It doesn't mean much. They are all entertainment platforms that sell ads.
There is still bias, of course - The Economist makes it clear they are pro-free market, for example - but they tend to give a decent overview of the most salient facts and they write for a global audience.
uninformed is passively annoying, misinformed is aggressively annoying.
What other mainstream news networks are there? Are you including non-cable news? Because the only other cable network I can even think of is OAN, which is much less mainstream. I'm not arguing whether any of those are/aren't partisan, just that I don't know what you're comparing them to.
Well that's part of the problem, there is an older generation that probably still thinks of CNN as the sober, trustworthy cable news network.
I don’t think I know a single person under 50 that routinely sits down to watch TV.
CNN’s turn, I think, is all about Trump. Old democrats like my dad are the exact audience for unhinged 24/7 anti-Trump content like CNN has become. These are the folks who built “our institutions” and have the deepest faith in them. Trump’s disregard for those institutions drives them nuts, much more so than any policy.
Younger democrats, I think, are more cynical about everything. They might hate Trump because of his stances on immigration or policing, but not necessarily any more than they hate any other Republican who has the same views. And it’s not going to get them to watch an anti-Trump rant on loop.
I suspect that’s why CNN’s ratings have collapsed since Trump left office. The non-Trump left wing stuff isn’t compelling to my dad. He thinks parents should decide what kids learn in schools, the police should be fully funded, we should thoroughly vet afghan refugees, etc. CNN also lost the Trump-hating institutionalist conservatives they had picked up. My wife was obsessed with Trump-gate while it was happening, but she’s been reading National Review since high school and isn’t going to tune in to hear why government spending isn’t what’s causing inflation.
If it's huge news, I'll hear about it (you can't avoid it) and if it is not huge news, why do I care?
Which I know isn't ideal and I should pay for a proper news source but the state of "print" journalism in Canada is really, really bad right now since all the non-government-run services are being bought up by ideological conservatives.
In additiok to that we have dogital subscriptions to NYT, WP and physical ones for Wired and our local newspaper. Anytheing else is the non-subscription stuff from reliable news papers. I did reduce news consumption a lot so since the Ukraine war started.
Oh, and not to forget: HN.
[EDIT] I take back part of that—I think one guy has cable. He's into football. He's also the only right-winger in my circle. Maybe a coincidence? Wouldn't be surprised if a fair bit of his "vaccine hesitancy" (to put it in mild, friendly NPR terms) came from watching Fox News, now that I think about it.
https://www.foxnews.com/health/us-covid-19-vaccine-boosters-...
https://www.foxnews.com/health/pfizer-covid-19-vaccine-more-...
https://www.foxnews.com/health/covid-19-vaccination-kids-sev...
(Also, IIRC most of their revenue is still advertising from freely distributed content, not subscriber fees.)
CNN+ was instead trying to do all this from the ground up, while competing with a much more robust existing ecosystem. Centrists and lefties already have Slate and Vox and Politico and of course all the existing "print" media sites to fill their "legitimate" news needs. What was CNN going to give them that they didn't already have?
Because in order to be 64, you first have to be 63. It's not like you wake up one day and say, "Well, looks like I have to watch news all the time". These habits accrue over time.
Especially as you get older and you get more involved and have less to do.
The old habits are pretty much gone.
The person I responded to was musing that CNN was doing this to try and crack into a younger audience. And it's like: no shit. They want to either find ways to integrate into more youthful demographics or get more youthful demographics to integrate them into their habits.
Joe Camel wasn't made to appeal to adult smokers.
The average age of CNN watchers is over 60 years old, not exactly a prime streaming demographic. But who would want to pay for the news monthly for a streaming service? Newspapers have enough trouble getting people to pay a bit for text. CNN needs to compete with other streaming services, and all of the free streams out there and podcasts (which are typically higher quality than CNN ).
It's all baffling.
Who?! Why, all those countless streaming service customers, of course! I mean, have you seen how much Netflix and all these others are bringing in?! Surely if we launch some sort of streaming service they'll throw that money at us too! Right? Right?
Not that I buy it, but that had to be the idea: not to reach CNN viewers, but new viewers.
> It's all baffling.
Not really. If they thought cable is in long-term (perhaps terminal) decline, they've really only have two choices: let the business wind down or try to pivot into something that's perceived as not dying. Starting a streaming service seems like an attempt at the latter. A lot of newspapers (especially ones owned by private equity) are doing the former.
I figured I would get CNN light for $3 a month vs Sling for $30 (which I only use for CNN now).
>The average age of CNN watchers is over 60 years old, not exactly a prime streaming demographic.
Isnt it? Every 60 year old I know has some kind of streaming device and social media accounts.
That sounds pretty good.
At least the people who are most affected by the poor leadership and decision-making are getting a decent chance to land on their feet.
And the previous article buried subscriber counts in paragraph 14, and never mentions CNN's ratings or viewership, or CNN+'s viewership per show.
Instead, both this article and the previous one is an attempt to obfuscate the reality of awful viewership as just a victim of executive realignment:
It's being shuttered due to a strategic misalignment between Discovery executives and CNN executives.
and
The service was shut down because CNN and its new parent disagreed over whether the investment made sense long-term.
But not, "CNN shut down the service when it became obvious virtually nobody was willing to pay a non-promotional price for the product."
You can clearly see what's going on when you read the viewing figures of other media and streaming services out there and figure out why they're starting to shut down and restructure in the first place. Instead with this article, they continue to dodge those metrics and blame it on something else, or even on something totally un-related.
It is another form of deflection and denial to try to salvage anything useful to learn from this failure. Expect that there is nothing to learn from this since, it is the sequel to another repeated mainstream media product failure since Quibi and they haven't learned anything since that collective failure even in a global lockdown.
It is quite silly to see any defence in any prospect of this service quite frankly.
Sorry, that's pretty funny. It seems like everyone outside of CNN could see that CNN+ was doomed to fail, but the Kool Aid was flowing freely inside.
I guess Fox News has figured it out. I'd be curious to see more examples of both success and failure.
Back then the entire project was designed to appear like it was a serious look at investing in digital for the channel when the goal was actually to slow down the shift from linear cable subs to apps.
It was bizarre then but today it looks like the bread and butter of traditional media company politics.
"Yeah, I'm Disney positive. I was Apple positive, but got over it in February. Don't hardly know anyone with CNN positive."
Maybe it's because I'm from a younger generation, but it all comes off as overproduced and inauthentic media-speak.
It's obvious that their demographic is old people, since all of their media personalities are old people.
Ben Stiller talking about making new friends in old-age thanks to Twitter. Discussing parenting tips with Anderson Cooper. A bunch of washed-up media personalities with nothing new or interesting to say.
The refusal to pass the torch onto a younger generation while clinging to their positions of power becomes a generational plague. CNN is a walking corpse which will pass away with its audience.
Launching new products is insanely difficult, if not impossible, in large organizations - even in the most esteemed tech companies. And yet that is how many companies die, because they cannot overcome the internal inertia to launch something new.
I'd wonder whether the natural evolution of a succesful large org ends as a ventures group.
My Roku has channels like SkyNews and Al Jazeera where I can watch both live and pre-recorded stories at no charge. No commercials either. They of course, have their own bias problems, but since I know what those are, I can take any stories on affected topics with an appropriate grain of salt.
I don't know why CNN thinks I would pay them when better is available free.
Makes sense, but it's astonishing how bad HBO Max's app continues to be, given its strategic importance. The catalog is generally excellent, but the UX and reliability of the app and platform are terrible. I wonder if the new executive team will lop of heads responsible for the current state of the product, or whether they're insulated enough that the dysfunction will continue.
Or at least, they seemed to have burned through slightly less money, and may be able to renegotiate some of the contracts to get the talent onto the main CNN service. And it’s not a totally bonkers idea to try to move the CNN brand into streaming as cable becomes less and less dominant…whereas Quibi was just madness, through and through.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/22/21528404/quibi-shut-down...
CNN+ streaming service is shutting down a month after launching - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31111276 - April 2022 (316 comments)
My take, anyway.
I'd call it doing business.
See Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post as a leading example. Does Bezos care at all if the Washington Post turns a profit or not, as long as they can be counted on to spin their news coverage in the direction Bezos prefers, and not cover stories like the nature of AWS contracts with various federal agencies, etc.?
Most people are aware of this dynamic at some level and very few would now actually shell out their own money to be fed more of this state-corporate propaganda, which is why a paid subscription service like CNN+ rapidly went belly-up.
Probably the only way to fix it over the long run is to bring anti-trust efforts to bear on the corporate media conglomerates and their affiliates (i.e. Youtube/Google directs all news inquiry searches to these 'legitimate outlets' like CNN, FOX, MSNBC, blocking any access to a wide variety of independent shows being run by non-affiliated news & opinion content generators, regardless of their popularity).
In contrast the two daily newspapers closest to me charge $10 a month and $4 a week for online access.
So you could break up the media conglomerates, but it isn't going to make people pay directly for news and unless you want government-funded news, that would be the only thing that could prevent the advertiser hold over news, which is responsible for the dynamic of today more than anything else.
The majority of people don't want pure news or information as a whole though, because most people aren't rich. The life of non-rich people is more stressful and people in that class will always tend to seek things with narratives and emotional resonance over critical-thinking-skill-needing information when they aren't working or otherwise trying to survive.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/i/interlocking-directorat...
When big-time investors, ultra wealthy or large institutions, purchase corporate stock it often isn't done as any sort of "long term retirement investment" like small time individual investors do.
They purchase the stock because they want control over that company for some purpose. Usually it is tied into other investments they own.
So one company pay purchase another in order to intentionally run it into the ground. They can leverage it, liquidate it, eliminate competition, etc. Like what is suspected motivation the parent company of Bass Pro purchasing Cabela.
In the case of major media corporations like CNN the value these companies represent isn't necessary the operational revenue they receive from advertisements or subscriptions. These companies may be attractive because of the influence they have over the American public.
So that would help to explain why CNN did weird things like fire people criticizing the government's position in the lead up to the Iraq wars. It could be that CNN ownership had some stake in other companies that had the potential to profit significantly from the war.
> Probably the only way to fix it over the long run is to bring anti-trust efforts to bear on the corporate media conglomerates and their affiliates
Well that then brings up the second problem and third problems.
Second problem: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/regulatory-capture.asp
I worked in an extremely "captured" industries in the past. For example, voting machines.
These corporations were regulated to such an extent that it was impossible for any new corporation to be created to compete with them.
In effect the 3 or 4 major corporations providing voting machines were the only voting machine companies that could ever possibly exist. It simply wasn't financially feasible for anybody else to make voting machines and be profitable.
The multi-years-long certification process, close governmental relationships, the constant lawsuits, and threats of lawsuits made any sort of major investment in the area financial suicide.
Because they are so regulated they are effectively above the law. The government can't afford to see them go out of business. It's cheaper and easier to keep them profitable then it would be to go back and change all the voting machine regulations in order to allow real competition.
And because of that these companies have real influence and power. It is bizarre and counter intuitive, but it's also how it works out in real life.
I experienced this first-hand. And I know that the same problems exist in other highly regulated industries such as pharmaceuticals.
This is why all the generic companies are now owned by all the name brand companies. The government changed the rules in the 2000's to make creating new generic companies infeasible financially. This then allowed all the bigger pharma companies to buy up all the smaller ones.
Which means that the laws and relationships that these companies have with the Federal government to constrain them actually end up increasing their power and influence.
There is a lot more to it then I mentioned here, but some visual reinforcement of how this ends up working is:
https://www.geke.us/VennDiagrams.html
> conglomerates and their affiliates
Conglomerates exist because of anti-trust and anti-monopoly laws. They don't make sense otherwise.
Conglomerates are corporations that have positions in many different industries. So a conglomerate may own a media business, a defense contractor business, a factory in china that produces children's toys, and 30% of a shipping company. Or whatever.
The point is that they own a lot of positions in lots of different industries. This way they can still grow as corporations and get bigger and bigger without running into monopoly or anti-trust problems.
In effect they are a hack around regulatory restrictions.
And they are not nearly as popular as they used to be.
During the 60's and 70's people just assumed that conglomerates would take over the entire world. That they had a special sort of modern corporate governance that was ultra-efficient and simply out competed every other form of business in existence.
They would go around and use their vast asset resources to leverage loans to buy up and often liquidate smaller companies and roll that money into new acquisitions. etc etc.
People would defend this behavior as it is just a way to increase the efficiency of the market by eliminating all these poorly performing and older smaller firms.
The reality was that they were playing accounting games and engaging in borderline fraud. It was effectively a hack around crappy regulations that many politicians and bureaucrats in the government happily conspired with in exchange for huge amounts of personal wealth and political funding.
This whole system failed and conglomerates are very unfashionable nowadays.
But before they did they managed to wipe out most of the industry in the mid-west, among other things.
Question, if a conglomerate owns both a major corporate news company and a major federal defense company doesn't that represent a conflict of interest since the news giant can effectively promote information, such as a war in Iraq or Ukraine, that encourages federal defense spending that, then, directly benefits the the defense company?