Here’s a quick update on last week’s post, How Jeff Zucker made Trump. The Hill reports that CNN’s ratings seriously imploded last year. “Ratings fell 90 percent overall when comparing January 2021 to January 2022,” it says.

That may have a lot to do with Jeff Zucker’s “resignation.”

The article reviews Zucker’s tenure. As soon as he took charge, he threw standard news coverage out the window in favor of chasing sensantional narratives such as24/7 coverage of the missing Malaysian passenger plane. And then from 2015 on he made Donald Trump the centerpiece of CNN’s news coverage, in one way or another. Once the network had helped make Trump president, it led the way in sensationalized negative coverage. (I assume that’s true, as I don’t usually watch CNN.) But once Trump was out of office, it appears CNN couldn’t remember what else there was to talk about in the world, and ratings plummeted.

CNN has been purchased by the Discovery Channel, which in itself says something. The Discovery Channel’s largest stockholder, John Malone of Liberty Media, is a big-time Trump donor, so I don’t have a lot of hope that CNN will go back to being about news coverage.