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The Mark-est Hour

A gloomy company-wide meeting revealed Mark Thompson’s CNN is still caught between the linear past and the digital future, and nonpolitical news versus 24-hour Trump TV. Insiders wonder who’s paying attention to the content while others wonder if a more sinister fate beckons.

Mark Thompson
In the process of this slow-but-inevitable transformation, Thompson has obviously had to manage the decline of the cable asset, which still pays the bills—a point that the network’s linear natives never tire of pointing out. Photo: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
Dylan Byers
November 15, 2024

On Wednesday morning, CNN chairman and C.E.O. Mark Thompson kicked off the network’s daily 9 a.m. all-hands call with some observations and recommendations that at least hinted at an editorial strategy for the center-left news network amid the Trump 2.0 era. Throughout the week, CNN had, and has, been dedicating much of its coverage to the torrent of Trump’s middle-finger cabinet appointments—Matt Gaetz for attorney general; Pete Hegseth for defense secretary; R.F.K. Jr. for H.H.S. secretary, etcetera. These are the sorts of shock- and revulsion-inducing news developments that have historically driven liberal and anti-Trump audiences to douse their burning scalps in a cooling bath of cable news.