CNN Embarrasses Itself with Documentary Series Slamming the Founder of the Network that has Humiliated It

If broadcast journalism schools had any credibility left (they don’t), CNN’s Murdoch series would be required viewing to teach students how not to write and produce a documentary.

  Peter Barry Chowka  "Launched in 1980, CNN, the country’s oldest cable news network, has been on ratings life support for years. Tonight, Oct. 30, 2022, at 10 PM ET/PT, promises to witness another of the Cable News Network’s major low points – and possibly a potentially terminal blow – for this formerly influential and once passingly credible TV news outlet.

"Tonight’s prime time offering is the final installment of a seven-part, seven-hour-long “documentary” series about the Murdochs – Rupert Murdoch and his family – who founded and control CNN’s major competition and nemesis, the Fox News Channel. Fox News first appeared on the scene in October 1996. In 2001, Fox News first beat CNN and MSNBC (which also launched in 1996) in the ratings. If you can’t beat ‘em, then attack them has been the MO of CNN since then. For most of the next two decades, Fox News has been far and away the ratings leader in the highly competitive, and highly remunerative, cable television news landscape."

"As Fox News’s influence has grown, CNN has struggled without success to restore credibility and reassert its prominence. In the past five years, since President Donald Trump outed the mainstream media as fake news, CNN has gone bonkers. Not only its opinionated prime time hosts (Chris Cuomo, ignominiously fired last year; Don Lemon, demoted to co-hosting CNN’s low rated morning show; and aging former new kid on the block Anderson Cooper) but its total news day has reflected a chronic anti-Trump, anti-MAGA bias. The “Russia Collusion” hoax and its purveyors (remember Michael Avenatti?) found a permanent home at CNN, even after the Mueller Report confirmed over four years ago that there was no there there. For the past two years, CNN has been unwilling to get beyond its hyped-up wall-to-wall coverage of the MAGA January 6, 2021 “Insurrection” and what it hopes is a troubled future for President Trump.

"Earlier this year, CNN’s top dog, Jeff Zucker, the one-time broadcast network TV wunderkind who ran CNN into the woke ground, was forced out (a.k.a. “resigned”) after admitting that he was engaging in a relationship with a female CNN executive that he failed to disclose. Meanwhile, ownership of CNN was shifting again to another large corporate entity, Warner Bros. Discovery. The latter installed Chris Licht as CNN’s CEO. A veteran mainstream TV executive, Licht was fresh from executive producing leftist Trump-hating comedian Stephen Colbert’s late night CBS show.". . .

. . .In contrast to CNN’s disastrous CNN+ experiment, Fox News in 2018 launched its streaming video channel Fox Nation. Four years later, the service is thriving with a wide variety of original programming, documentaries, and replays on demand of Fox News Channel shows. Of particular note are the documentaries and long form interviews on Fox Nation hosted by Tucker Carlson, whose M-F 8 PM program on the Fox News Channel has become appointment viewing for conservatives and people interested in the unvarnished reality that surrounds us