CNN+ Folds, Chris Wallace to the Masked Singer?

BUCK: Clay, we just got the news. We just got the news that I guess we are not gonna have to worry about competing for our audience’s attention for the three hours we’re on daily with CNN+. CNN+ has been put out to pasture. I guess CNN+ has been sent to the glue factory, actually. It is no longer with us as a network, as of today. We’ve been talking about streaming, Netflix. They’ve gotten crushed. Big changes in the media and political landscape come as a result of all this stuff. But I gotta say: What was CNN thinking?

CLAY: CNN+, rest in peace, shutting down after just 21 days, Buck. I think that’s basically the length of Kim Kardashian’s marriage to Kris Humphries back in the day, if I’m not mistaken. This is maybe the biggest media failure of all time, when you consider that they have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the launch of CNN+.

They said, “Hey, what America wants is more Brian Stelter. What America needs is Don Lemon on that wall. What you absolutely, positively will pay for is Jemele Hill and Rex Chapman breaking down the latest in the woke universe.” Buck, they got an average viewership in a day of under 10,000 people. Under 10,000 people for CNN+.

To put that into context, we have videos on OutKick, on our OutKick programming that do infinitely better. OutKick is bigger with the eight shows that we do or whatever than CNN+ was, and, Buck, they spent hundreds of millions of dollars — hundreds of millions of dollars, on the belief that people were committed to CNN, despite the fact that no one watches it for free on their cable and satellite packages, by and large. This is one of the greatest miscalculations in the history of media. I don’t remember… I know the Quibi thing was a huge mess. I think that was Katzenberg, if I’m not mistaken.

BUCK: The Daily Beast, you remember when that launched? Actually, the Daily Beast, in its initial years of publication I think lost a hundred million dollars but over the course of a few years.

CLAY: Of several years.

BUCK: Yeah, over several years.

CLAY: So basically, light this much money on fire. Hundreds of millions of dollars they spent on the launch, and to have this few people respond and to shut the entire thing down after 21 days — effective April 30th CNN+ will no longer exist — is an unprecedented failure in the world of media. And I gotta tell you, Buck, when I saw this, my phone blew up with text messages ’cause I didn’t even see the news breaking and everybody was like, “CNN+ is done,” I just had such a great smile on my face and I bet a lot of people sort of without even intending to smile I bet also a lot of people out there listening to us right now also are smiling.

BUCK: What do you think the over-under is on when Chris Wallace shows up on The Masked Singer or perhaps Dancing With the Stars?

CLAY: (laughing) It’s not gonna be The Masked Singer ’cause that’s a Fox product. Somebody tweeted me. “Worst decision,” and this is fun, you know, from a career art perspective. Back in the day remember Chris O’Donnell? He passed on the Titanic role.

BUCK: Was he Robin in the really bad Batman movie?

CLAY: Chris O’Donnell, Chris O’Donnell turned down the Leonardo DiCaprio Titanic role to play Robin in that Batman movie.

BUCK: Oof!

CLAY: One of the all-time worst Hollywood decisions. Obviously, Leonardo DiCaprio has become a monster star. I don’t even know what Chris O’Donnell does now. So he turned down the role of Jack in Titanic, and somebody tweeted me and I retweeted, didn’t make that choice, could probably get some great responses out here.

BUCK: Chris Wallace joining CNN+ to leave Fox News, better or worse decision than Chris O’Donnell becoming Robin to turn down the Titanic role snickers I think you gotta put that to the people. I think you got a phone a friend on that one as in our audience and put that out in a poll —

CLAY: Open phone lining. Some of you guys — and there may be other things that people think of from a career-art perspective. I mean, some people might say Johnny Depp marrying Amber Heard, given the fact that that’s been on news for the past couple of days. But I think this is going to be sort of a seismic shockwave event, ’cause some people say, “Why do I care about CNN+?”

This is a sign. CNN has new owners in the Discovery/Time Warner merger, and they’re looking at the data now with fresh eyes, and they are saying, “My goodness. To me this is a test of the overall value of the CNN brand and how much it’s liked by the people who consume it — and the answer is: Not at all.”

BUCK: I think there’s a number of things that all come together here that are of interest, of general interest. One is Donald Trump broke CNN.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: Donald Trump almost single-handedly — and it was Jeff Zucker pushing it over there — managed to turn what could still front as a journalism first, left-leaning to be sure, and I was a contributor there for a couple years when it was in this phase when it was still in the… You know, Kayleigh McEnany was with me, I was over there, Ben Ferguson was over there. We had conservatives that would — and, you know, Tucker Carlson had his own show.

People forget that at CNN for years and years. That’s where he got his start. CNN in the Trump era went essentially full left-wing activist woke in a way that’s irreparable to the perception of the public about what the brand is. I do think they’re trying very hard now, ’cause it’s really about the Ukraine war.

The whole channel is effectively about the Ukraine war right now. They’ve moved even away from insurrection and January 6th coverage. I think they’re trying to reestablish themselves as a news entity in the minds of the public because they just became a kind of more boring, less honest version of MSNBC.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: Which is a lib propaganda network, but everybody knows it. You know what I mean, everyone understands it and agrees that MSNBC is Democrat, is liberal. And CNN I think in a lot of ways, because it’s such a legacy media brand, insulated the thinking of various anchors and executives over there from the reality of if you have to compete in a marketplace when now people have a lot of choices… You know, streaming is very different from the cable news world. Cable news is very difficult to get on, it’s very expensive, and there’s a lot of incumbency protection for cable news networks.

CLAY: Limited actual options.

BUCK: That’s right.

CLAY: Right? Whereas you can sit down on YouTube and watch anything from anywhere from any perspective. There’s three or four options for news if you want to sit down come from television.

BUCK: And for people saying, “Oh, but, Buck, I’ve got 500 channels.” Yeah, but to be in the news spectrum you have to be in certain channels in a certain zone and have to have a certain leverage of coverage in households. Anyway, that may be a little inside baseball but the point here is, this is just a massive bellyflop.

It’s stunning to watch this play out, but it’s really not surprising. Like, wouldn’t…? Clay, you sold your business to Fox, you know, successful business with streaming. Wouldn’t you have been shocked in all of a sudden CNN was drawing — CNN+, I mean, was drawing — half a million, a million viewers a night?

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: That would have been stunning.

CLAY: It would have been stunning. And, Buck, I think you’re right because what CNN not only did under Jeff Zucker before they forced him out during the Trump era was there are a lot of people out there listening to us right now who had CNN pegged as “the most trusted name in news,” right, in the context of back in the Gulf War, I remember being a kid.

You would come home and you would turn on CNN, and they had Bernard Shaw reporting from Baghdad or Kuwait or wherever it was. The first television war was the way that that was characterized. And you would put it on, and you trusted them to bring you the news. And they totally gave up the decades that they had branded themselves to turn into an anti-Trump network. He broke them. He really did.

BUCK: You obviously have a history at CNN.

CLAY: I’m banned.

BUCK: Being banned, which is amazing.

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: That is like being banned from North Korea, by the way. That is a badge of honor.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: If North Korea says that Clay Travis and Buck Sexton are not welcome to visit again, you’d be like, “Ah, that’s pretty cool.” But I can just, from personal experience — to give folks a sense — I think I first started doing occasional CNN maybe 2014, 2015. So it’d be like pre-Trump era and Jeff Zucker himself came up to me once and said…

I did some analysis of a Russian assassination that occurred right near the Kremlin in real time on TV and had my… You know, you have a lawyer hat; I had my CIA hat, and he came over and was like, “That was such astute analysis.” They used to have me on with their top terrorism analysts on panels when there was breaking news about major terrorist attacks, I was one of the people they would call…

You know, would be me and Paul Cruikshank and a handful of other folks. Not saying I was the top of the list, but I was one of the people that they would draw upon. By the time Trump was running and I started being a pro-Trump voice on the air, I was told that there were conversations in the control room when I’d be on air about how they really needed to dig into my background because they thought I never actually worked at the CIA.

That was how crazy it made them. That was how… You know, I could show them briefing photos from the Oval Office. I’m sure they still wouldn’t believe it. It’s a deep fake, right? The point is that was how much they were broken by the Trump phenomenon that they would go, even with someone like me, from, “Wow, this guy really knows his stuff,” to, “Oh, my God, he likes Trump? He must be lying about everything!”

CLAY: And it’s well said there too. And to your point earlier from my background in media, what I have found is, people pay, are willing to pay… I don’t mean like you pay for a cable subscription. People pay based on strong brand affinity. In other words, if you’re subscribing to something that you actually directly pay for.

I mean, the cable bundle is such an amazing business because most people don’t realize that they’re paying for 400 channels or whatever ’cause you pay a hundred or $150 a month, whatever you do, and that money gets redistributed to all the channels. When you actually have to make a choice to pay for a brand, what matters more than anything else is brand affinity. Do you like and trust that brand?

So your point, I would have been stunned if CNN+ worked because I don’t really believe there are that many people who are like, “Man, you know who I love? Don Lemon! I can’t get enough of Anderson Cooper.” I mean, you might not like Chris Cuomo, but I actually think he had stronger brand affinity. People aren’t going to pay money for Jake Tapper, right?

I just don’t believe that they are. Now, I think there are people in media. Whether you like it or not, people will pay for Rachel Maddow, right? They trust her on the left; they’ll pay for her. People will pay for Tucker, they’ll pay for Sean directly. CNN doesn’t have any of that. They’re kind of still in the squishy middle where there isn’t strong brand affinity. Nobody’s paying for Brian Stelter, Jemele Hill, or Rex Chapman so I would have been stunned beyond belief if this worked. I did think it was gonna last, Buck, longer than 21 days.

BUCK: You know, they do have some real journalists over there, I mean, to be fair, and some of their anchors are more fair-minded than others. And so I wonder if now, with the massive failure of CNN+ — massive CNN failure — maybe now necessity try to go back to, at some level, the CNN roots, if you will, of being a more… They’re never gonna be objective, folks, okay? It’s a question of where do they go on the scale but, you know, I mean, Clarissa Ward has done some very good foreign affairs, foreign policy reporting.

CLAY: Yeah, she does terrific stuff.

BUCK: She does brave stuff and knows her stuff and she’s the real deal. And, you know, they could be more a network that at least is center left. And I think they may have to go in that direction, otherwise, I don’t know what happens.

CLAY: Well, they may get a bailout because they could just go to the anti-Trump network because I think we both think he’s gonna run, and then they just run the Piers Morgan interview and the outrage and The Trump Show and continue that for basically a couple of years. It will be interesting to see whether they’ll go and take that sugary sweetness high which destroys their brand or stick to, as your point, Clarissa Ward on the ground at Ukraine.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

CLAY: My phone is continuing to blow up with people making jokes about CNN+ shutting down. One of my friends texted, “Iraq lasted longer in Desert Storm than CNN+ did” as I was reading.

BUCK: I think that might even be factually accurate.

CLAY: Yeah. I think Saddam held out longer during Desert Storm than CNN+ did, and a lot of people want to weigh in, by the way. We’ll take some of your calls here as we — let’s be honest — gleefully tap dance on the grave of CNN+. I just wanted to read this to you, Buck. I thought this can’t be real so I went and made sure that it wasn’t one of those fake Twitter accounts.

CNN+, the streaming service that was hyped as one of the most signifiant developments in the history of CNN, will shut down on April 30, just one month after it launched. https://t.co/K92mv8qBE7

— CNN (@CNN) April 21, 2022

CNN’s Breaking News Twitter account, which has 60 million followers — @CNNBreak tweeted — “CNN+, the streaming service that was hyped as one of the most significant developments in the history of CNN, will shut down on April 30th, just one month after it launched.” That… CNN having breaking news about CNN+ shutting down, I feel like we’re through the looking glass, Buck, when I see that, which is absolutely fantastic. 1-800-282-2882.

BUCK: Let’s take some calls.

CLAY: Who we got first?

BUCK: By the way, I generally don’t celebrate people having professional difficulty. CNN tried to destroy a presidency and wants to ruin all of its media opponents on a regular basis and get them canceled and destroyed. So we will joyride through the wreckage of CNN+. I have no qualms on this.

CLAY: I will tap dance on their grave, Buck, given that they literally banned me for life for saying that I believed in the First Amendment and boobs. So we’ll take your calls some when we come back.

BUCK: You should make an offer for CNN+ right now.

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: Add it into the OutKick umbrella and turn it around.

CLAY: $28.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

BUCK: Current TV, which was Al Gore and some others funded, they bought, what was it, I think they bought a channel, maybe was it from Al Jazeera or something. They flipped over a channel, gave them a hundred million homes of access, paid lunatic guy Keith Olbermann.

CLAY: Oh, I remember that.

BUCK: They paid Keith Olbermann $10 million a year to sit in what looked like his mother’s basement and do this ridiculous show, and it never got above — I think the highest it ever got was something like 5,000 viewers or whatever, paying him $10 million a year, folks. That completed evaporated. There was nothing left of that when it was done and they spent hundreds of millions of dollars to buy that channel because buying a cable channel and flipping was very expensive. So that’s a pretty… But everyone forgets that. No one even remembers that epic —

CLAY: That also was a slow moving one. Like, what is it, 21 days.

BUCK: No that lasted a couple years, I think, maybe 18 months before they realized this is just a disaster.

CLAY: They basically lit $300 million on fire.

BUCK: How’d they spend so much money on something that…? Where did that money even go? This is the fire festival of media brand launches. I don’t even know how they did this.

CLAY: They hired, first of all, a lot of people and gave them a lot of money and those people probably —

BUCK: They just gave $12 million to Chris Wallace. You could have somebody more compelling and more interesting for a fraction of that cost.

CLAY: So and then they sent people all over the world to do this programing. Like, I was reading, you know, this idiot Rex Chapman. They sent him to, like, three different continents to do an interview show, and I don’t know how they… But the money was ridiculous.

BUCK: And, by the way, does Jeff Zucker avoid this on his resume, because it was all built by Zucker, right? I mean, the run-up to this had to all be a Zucker decision so in a sense him being pushed out over the, what was it, the sexual harassment but also the Cuomo thing. It was kind of a number of things that came together over there. But this was a Jeff Zucker project. Had to be.

CLAY: It’s a great point. I think probably they would not have KO’d it as quickly if he were still there, would be my bet, because there’s no way he could stay on at CNN with this big of a failure, right? But this way with Discovery coming in now, they’re basically bearing the dead body problems of CNN.

BUCK: Yeah. I mean, Jeff Zucker leaving CNN is almost like, you know, the guy in the crow’s nest or whatever from the Titanic getting fired because his cigarette break was too long about two minutes before it hit the iceberg, right, like he just sort of evades being the guy who missed the big one here, messed it up. It’s funny, I would think…

Clay, our lines here lit up, I mean, you know, producer Greg has been… It’s a shame he doesn’t have eight hands and eight phones and ears and everything all at once because we’ve got everyone lining up to weigh in on this. Dave in Scottsdale, Arizona, what do you got for us, Dave?

CALLER: Yes, Clay and Buck. Does CNN+ knock New Coke from the top spot of the biggest corporate fails of all time?

BUCK: (laughing)

CLAY: There’s so many… That’s a great point. New Coke was a disaster. Remember New Coke back in the day?

BUCK: Remember clear Pepsi, was it clear Coke, both, there was a clear version of it they came out with and then SNL had a funny sketch where it was like, “Clear gravy. Clear sandwich bread.” So, yeah.

CLAY: That, by the way, other things for sports fans out there, Mike Price was memorably hired as the football coach of Alabama, went to a strip club. Everything blew up. He was the head coach of Alabama longer than CNN+ has lasted.

BUCK: Was Anthony Scaramucci, the White House communications director longer?

CLAY: The Mooch.

BUCK: Was the Mooch the white comms director for Trump longer than CNN+? No, it’s close. I think the Mooch lasted 12 days. I think he lasted… I’m just guessing, but I think it was 12 days before he decided to call up one of the most anti-Trump hostile reporters imaginable and go on a profanity laced tirade the likes of which I couldn’t even begin to tell anybody about on air.

CLAY: Crystal Pepsi according to Ali, by the way.

BUCK: Was Crystal Pepsi, that was the clear version of Pepsi with somehow having the food coloring in it you’re like, “This isn’t just sugar water that is rotting my teeth and mind.”

CLAY: Yeah, right.

BUCK: Not that soda’s bad.