It’s s sad day for everyone: CNN chief Jeff Zucker announced recently that the cable news channel’s contract for having its news played at American airports will end this March.
CNN Airport Network, which is a specific version of CNN aired at many US airports, will be shown the exit door this March due to COVID-19. Zucker says that since air travel has gone down so much due to the pandemic has made the network’s airport offering unneeded.
“The steep decline in airport traffic because of COVID-19, coupled with all the new ways that people are consuming content on their personal devices, has lessened the need for the CNN Airport Network. Having to say goodbye to such a beloved brand is not easy,” Zucker said, adding that “I am sure most of us have a story to tell about which airport we were at when we first learned of a major news event.”
If he had asked many travelers, Zucker might have heard that CNN Airport Network was already not needed long before the pandemic.
How Big of a Blow is This to CNN?
The closure of CNN Airport Network isn’t a game-changer for the network, but it’s certainly a disappointment and an unexpected side-effect of the coronavirus pandemic. The airport version was founded in 1992 and has been playing at 58 large airports across the country in addition to shows from HBO, TBS and CNN sister networks.
Specifically, CNN Airport Network will stop playing everywhere by March 31. Information has not been made available about how many CNN staff might lose their jobs from the closure, but there is also a fair bit of speculation that Zucker himself is planning to step down from CNN in the next few months.
Despite CNN‘s often critical coverage of President Trump, he has been a huge cash cow for them when it comes to ratings. Zucker has acknowledged that once Trump is out of office their ratings and profits will plummet.
“People say all the time, ‘Oh, I don’t want to talk about Trump. I’ve had too much Trump.’ And yet at the end of the day, all they want to do is talk about Trump. We’ve seen that, anytime you break away from the Trump story and cover other events in this era, the audience goes away,” Zucker explained. “So we know that, right now, Donald Trump dominates.”
Zucker was the one who made Trump into a megastar on the Apprentice back when he worked at NBC and decided to move forward with the popular show in 2004.
Jeff Zucker has notified CNN staff that "the CNN Airport Network will end operations as of March 31."
"The steep decline in airport traffic because of COVID-19, coupled with all the new ways that people are consuming content on their personal devices, has lessened the need…" pic.twitter.com/9se3oCw1gr
— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) January 12, 2021
What Would You Like to Watch at the Airport?
Now that CNN is on the way out there’s a whole new world of freedom opening up in terms of thinking about what to replace it with. So it’s worth asking: what would you like to watch at the airport? Maybe sports, history documentaries, soap operas?
Just like Zucker and Co. like to force Americans to feel their only choice is to embrace wacked out far-left extremism, they wanted to shove our faces in their propaganda outlet anytime we were waiting for a flight.
Now that reign of boredom and misinformation is over, and it’s a great time to think outside the box. Perhaps airports could stream travel shows or things about other countries or the most fascinating places to visit in each state.
There are so many possibilities of things that are more interesting than CNN that there’s a new opportunity now to think about what would be a good replacement for the tired news network at the nation’s airports.
