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.
CNN’s series on the Murdochs premiered last month. It’s a sweeping, technically state-of-the-art examination into the lives of Rupert Murdoch, born in Australia and now a U.S. citizen, and three of his children, unsubtly subtitled “Empire of Influence.” Long-gone Yellow Journalism mogul William Randolph Hearst step aside: It’s the Murdochs, according to CNN, who are the most influential – and the most problematic – media barons in world history…
