CNN’s Latest Innovation: Slathering Your Screen With T-Mobile Ads

Failures

from the just-put-it-out-of-its-misery dept

CNN, like most U.S. cable news networks, professes to provide users access to journalism.

Instead, what you’ll most consistently find is a sort of generic, ad-slathered, center-right, corporatist drivel with the rough edges (read: truth) sanded off like a Ken doll’s genitals to avoid offense. “View from nowhere” journalism that doesn’t inform so much as it tries to present a sanitized, corporate-friendly, apolitical platter of feckless infotainment mush.

Usually this kind of pseudo-journalism directly reflects the interests of corporate ownership, something that’s been particularly true with Time Warner CEO David Zaslav. Zaslav has tried to “fix” CNN’s sagging viewership by routinely doing all the wrong things, because doing the right things (harder-nosed journalism, better quality content, hiring more actual reporters) don’t really align with his or the company’s broader interests.

The latest case in point: CNN is working to implement even more advertisements during its news coverage. They’ve struck a new deal with T-Mobile that will involve splattering your screen with T-Mobile logos and advertisements at every opportunity. Much the way that corporate brands now permeate all Sports team press conferences, brands will not permeate news broadcasts.

Because when people ask “how can we improve CNN?” “More ads,” was almost certainly the inevitable response.

I really enjoyed the way Variety covered the deal, which was itself kind if indistinguishable from an advertisement:

That’s a lot of marketing gibberish. This is, so we’re clear, the same T-Mobile whose security and privacy standards have been so shitty, that it has been hacked eight times in the last five years. T-Mobile has also repeatedly found itself at the center of privacy scandals related to the way it spies on its customers and covertly sells their sensitive movement data to all manner of nitwits.

Later on in the story, Variety just copies and pastes the weird, baseless claims of a T-Mobile marketing official who pretends this is at all useful or good:

This is the steady deterioration of U.S. media as it increasingly consolidates at the hands of corporations and billionaires who are utterly incapable of innovating in journalism. In part because they don’t want innovation in journalism (that would inevitably result in more criticism of how and why they got wealthy); they want a sort of journalistic infotainment simulacrum.

And it’s going to get worse: Trump’s FCC is eliminating the last few limits on media consolidation, paving the way for even greater consolidation. That’s likely to include the Ellison family acquisition of Warner Brothers and CNN, which will inevitably make CNN’s already shaky journalism even more pathetic and friendlier than ever to the interests of corporations and the U.S. right wing.

On the plus side, the steady devolution of U.S. mainstream media into a mishmash of soggy advertorial invertebrates creates new opportunities for real journalism, reporters with a backbone, direct-to-audience newsletters, worker-owned media outlets, and alternative media sources actually interested in serving the public interest.

Filed Under: ads, cable news, consolidation, david zaslav, journalism, larry ellison, media
Companies: cnn, t-mobile, warner bros. discovery