CNN Has Had a Rough 24 Hours and I’m Here for It

Somewhere between President Trump’s surprise announcement that its once esteemed news network (along with fellow scurvy partisan media blackguards Politico and MS-NOW) was ‘banned’ from the White House and this morning, the folks at CNN had a single shining moment of being loved again.

In a rare moment of solidarity, as when all those rebelling against Rome stand one by one to declare they ‘are Spartacus,‘ the rest of the major media whimpered in unison that they would be CNN.

The ‘No Trump coverage’ boycott was on.

All Major Networks Join Trump Coverage Boycott, Including Fox News, After Trump Bans CNN, MSNOW, and Politico

All five major news networks, including Fox News, have joined together in a TV boycott of Trump events after Trump banned CNN, MSNOW, and Politico from the White House Press Corps. The five are Fox, ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN, which constitute the entire White House TV press coverage.

Fox News TV pool chair Bryan Boughton released a statement which read: “This is to advise that, effective today, the TV pool will not be covering events designated as pool coverage of the President. This follows the White House’s position preventing CNN from fulfilling its assigned pool duties. There will be no replacement pool put in place.”

This display of solidarity and media muscle in their name had to warm the cold cockles of whatever passes for hearts at CNN headquarters.

Yeah, buddy -they’d show the orange man that he’d messed with the wrong gladiators.

The warm glow and phony ‘boycott’ lasted all of the twenty-four hours it took President Trump to storm into New York City and the UN General Assembly like a force of nature.

The first appalling crack appeared when the president spotted CNN’s rude Oval Office newshound Kaitlan Collins in the press scrum. He didn’t waste a moment and went in for the rhetorical kill. Reminding them of its fit-of-pique boycott…

‘I’m surprised that CNN is here covering me. You said you weren’t going to cover me.’

…while Collins could only weakly sputter that she had UN credentials as her defense.

THE UNITED NATIONS ALLOWED US IN, SIR

       

As for the rest of the stalwart CNN defenders, that Trump coverage boycott lasted only as long as it took all of them to get tickets to New York. Sure, sure, it wasn’t the regular Fox/CNN/CBS/etc White House pool feed that broadcast the president’s UN speech – oh, they stuck technically to the ‘boycott.’

They just stole the UN’s video feed to broadcast it instead – TOTALLY still a boycott!

…On Tuesday, all the networks except CNN aired Mr. Trump’s speech to the U.N. General Assembly live using a U.N. television feed.

The broadcast networks aired the address on their streaming video news channels. Fox and MS NOW aired the address live.

The news outlets accessed the address through UNTV, the United Nations’ television news feed, the official broadcast arm of the U.N. It distributes video footage and live feeds to global news organizations.

Much hilarity ensued at the hypocrisy, but the UN coverage story gets even worse for the boycott boys. It turns out that the feisty little bunch over at Real America’s Voice (RAV), the news channel with Bannon, Prosobiec, John Solomon, and those guys, stepped up and said, ‘We think we can handle the pool feed if you give us a shot at it.‘

Now remember, according to the big five network pool operators, no one on earth is qualified or competent enough to do that voodoo the way they do, which is how this boycott is structured to succeed.

Well. 

RAV had the pool duties shot, there was no danger, and they kind of pulled it off. They were the lone news crew traveling with the president.

🚨 NOW: After a day of NON-STOP meetings at the UN, President Trump is BOARDING AF1 back to DC

Legacy media CONSTANTLY told us independent media couldn’t handle a “pool feed”

But guess what? WE JUST DID. This is @RealAmVoice’s feed.

THANK YOU, RAV, for REFUSING to allow the… https://t.co/2do7LGrJJR pic.twitter.com/oUU8VPaaP7

— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) September 23, 2026

And the camera footage is available to share, even on YouTube, just as the regular pool coverage would be.

🚨 BREAKING: As President Trump returns to DC, @RealAmVoice has agreed to deploy assets to FULLY COVER President Trump as the TV pooler in CNN’s place

They’re proving CNN WRONG. We do NOT need legacy media’s “resources” to cover 47. We can do it ourselves.

LFG! 🇺🇸

Expect live… pic.twitter.com/eORmNTCsn6

— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) September 23, 2026

The White House also launched ‘Trump TV,’ a 24/7 streaming service that someone could check in to see if they’d missed anything during the day while the Energizer Bunny Orange Man was busy shaking up the world.

IT’S LIVE. 📺🦅

TRUMP TV IS STREAMING NOW. 24/7, updated in real time, with top past moments, announcements, and the latest and greatest from the administration all in one place.

Not every big moment has made it on your tv, now it can.

📲 https://t.co/3KwWkBZ69m pic.twitter.com/g4v7n2J04s

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) September 21, 2026

I’m not so sure how long the official ‘No Trump’ boycott is going to be able to hold together if it couldn’t even withstand one day without him.

But there is even more doom and gloom closing over the heads of those at CNN than just utter humiliation on a world stage.

The dark shadow of the David Ellison and the Paramount merger has now been loosed from behind the legal wall that kept it bottled up for what seems like forever – and, in some CNN hearts, would have hopefully driven a stake through it.

Alas. The light is now green, and all systems are go to swallow Warner Brothers…and CNN.

The mood, they say, has turned ‘funereal.’

JUST IN: CNN employees say the mood at the network is “like a funeral” after Paramount’s Warner Bros. victory. — Variety

— Polymarket (@Polymarket) September 22, 2026

And the terrifying specter of a Bari-Weiss-like makeover for their news network has everyone sleeping under their beds with the lights on.

Breitbart calls it ‘an outbreak of fear and loathing,’ which, I’m sorry not sorry, is just delicious.

Paramount’s looming acquisition of CNN parent company Warner Bros. Discovery is reportedly sending shivers down the collective spines of news gathers at the 46-year-old legacy outlet.

As Breitbart News reported, Paramount reached a deal with 12 state attorneys-general Monday that surmounted a major hurdle to closing its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery which will now go ahead.

This clears the way for a media behemoth that will straddle both CBS News and CNN, in addition to Hollywood studios Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros., streaming services HBO Max and Paramount+.

Not everyone is enthused at the prospect and bottom lips are trembling, as the NY Post reports.

“People are very nervous,” one CNN staffer told the outlet. “It’s dark. It’s like when you do hurricane coverage. You see the storm spinning off the coast of Haiti and moving towards Florida and you’re just waiting and you’re like, ‘Oh, s–t’.”

“Bloodbath coming, including at CNN,” a TV executive confided. “That’s the next big step — slashing and burning,” while others also drew death-by-takeover comparisons.

An Unherd article by Ryan Zickgraf today made some really interesting points about the merger. One of the most repeated hysterical accusations has been that it will destroy the film industry. Zickgraf argues that this is not so much Ellison ruining Hollywood, but vulture capitalism cleaning up what’s left of a dying industry. The Weissification of CNN is a minor part of the overall picture.

…The critics are right about almost all of it, but it’s wrong to think of Hollywood as a healthy organism about to be poisoned by a bad merger. 

This is vulture capitalism working as intended. When an industry can no longer grow, the smart money consolidates it, offshores what it can, cuts the rest, and milks the remaining cash flow until the lights go out. American newspapers already went through this: hedge funds like Alden Global Capital bought regional dailies, sold the downtown buildings, gutted the newsrooms, creating what scholars call “ghost papers”: local outlets are still published, but they barely field any reporting staff, and much of the content is syndicated — and, therefore, not really the sort of local news healthy democracies need. 

…Over the last two decades, what was once seen as a creative industry has become a financialized one. In his 2024 essay headlined “The Life and Death of Hollywood,” the historian Daniel Bessner traced an industry in which cheap money after the Great Recession turned studios into playthings for asset managers. By the end of 2023, Vanguard Group, a massive investment manager with $13 trillion in assets, became the largest shareholder in Disney, Netflix, Comcast, Apple, and Warner Bros. These owners, he wrote, have no real stake in Hollywood itself. Thus, the logic of maximizing shareholder returns explains why every other movie or TV show became a sequel or a spinoff. Creative risk means financial risk, especially at a time when YouTube — and now TikTok — keep tearing viewers’ eyeballs and attention spans elsewhere.

The contrast in priorities is striking. Comcast’s spending on buybacks and dividends spiked to more than $18 billion in 2022, up from $3.2 billion in 2008. The new owners, Bessner wrote, were “stripping value from the production system like copper pipes from a house.” These days, there’s less and less left to strip. The biggest film and TV companies were more than $20 billion in the black in 2013; by 2022, those profits had roughly halved. Box-office revenue in 2023 was still 22% below what it was in 2019, and cable revenue has fallen an estimated 40% since 2015. Between August 2022 and the end of 2023, industry employment declined by a quarter. 

It’s no coincidence that the industry keeps racing to the bottom, seeking out jurisdictions willing to hand out the most generous tax incentives. In the last decade, Atlanta became the “Hollywood of the South,” and by 2021, Georgia’s share of tax money to subsidize Hollywood topped $1 billion annually. Now much of that work is being shipped to England, where the tax credits are even bigger. The Hollywood Reporter has anointed London “the new Hollywood,” and one insider called the city “more Hollywood than Hollywood.” Trump’s threatened 100% tariff on foreign-made films has, so far, changed nothing.

Since the 2023 writers’ strike, American production is down roughly 40%. That puts Paramount’s $300 million pledge in context: it’s a reshoring clause for a company town already half abandoned by the companies. But the threat of even more capital flight explains why Gavin Newsom and California Attorney General Rob Bonta folded in their initial opposition to the deal: the threat of departure gave the Golden State a painful choice — challenge the consolidation, or risk losing more of the industry itself.

But the CNN-Bari Weissification nightmare rumors are flying, and honestly, watching the transformation at CBS as it moves along?

Interesting. Ellison backed Rubio.
I’ll take it. https://t.co/o0IoXXfTPZ

— MissusTruth1776 (@MissusTruth) September 23, 2026

It would be the best thing that has happened to that sclerotic pack of progressive prima donnas… 

   

…since they hired James Earl Jones for a five-second voice-over.

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