Business

CNN Enters the Post-Jeff Zucker Era. Bye-Bye ‘Breaking News’ Banners.

Published

3 years ago

June 5, 2022

CNN Enters the Post-Jeff Zucker Era. Bye-Bye ‘Breaking News’ Banners.

CNN’s ubiquitous “Breaking Information” banner is gone, now reserved for situations of really pressing occasions. Snarky on-screen captions — “Angry Trump Turns Briefing Into Propaganda Session,” as an illustration — are discouraged. Political reveals try to e book extra conservative voices, and producers have been urged to disregard Twitter backlash from the far proper and the far left.

A month into his tenure as the brand new chief of CNN, Chris Licht is beginning to depart his mark on the 24-hour information community he inherited in Might from its outstanding former president, Jeff Zucker. To this point, the Licht Doctrine is a change from the Zucker days: much less hype, extra nuance and a redoubled effort to achieve viewers of all stripes.

Working a community is a brand new problem for Mr. Licht, a 50-year-old lifelong producer who has by no means led a corporation as large as CNN. (His final employer, “The Late Present with Stephen Colbert,” had a workers of about 200 individuals; CNN has roughly 4,000.) Some CNN journalists say they marvel if he can navigate a sprawling, unwieldy world information community previous what has been a no good, very dangerous yr.

In December, the anchor Chris Cuomo was fired for moral lapses, prompting an investigation that finally led to Mr. Zucker’s ouster in February over an undisclosed relationship with a co-worker. Then, in April, the community’s new house owners, Warner Bros. Discovery, shut down the streaming platform CNN+ weeks after its $300 million debut. On the identical day, Mr. Licht introduced the prospect of a whole lot of layoffs in his first formal deal with to workers.

Underneath Mr. Zucker, a micromanager who dictated headlines and whispered in anchors’ ears throughout interviews, the community developed an “Viewers of One” tradition. “What Jeff Needs” was the mantra, and that always meant spectacle and drama. Mr. Licht is now tearing up that playbook with a administration fashion notably completely different from his predecessor.

“I’m not right here to get into the weeds of day-to-day editorial resolution making,” Mr. Licht instructed workers on his first day. His extra hands-off method to protection, and his sweeping pronouncements that CNN will “problem the normal philosophy of cable information,” have left his skeptics wishing for extra particular course from the highest, not much less.

Mr. Licht’s early strikes, and the temper contained in the community, had been described by a number of individuals with information of the inner dynamics at CNN who would communicate solely on the situation on anonymity.

Mr. Licht is conscious of the criticism. “I’m going to make selections slower than some would love,” he wrote in a newsroom-wide memo on Thursday. “I do know this group has been via large change during the last 4 months, which is why I’m approaching this course of slowly and thoughtfully as we take a look at all components of the operation.” (CNN declined to remark.)

One early focus has been morning programming, an enviornment that Mr. Licht is aware of effectively from overseeing “Morning Joe” and his profitable retooling of “CBS This Morning.”

Mr. Licht instructed advertisers that he needed to “disrupt” morning TV. Internally, he has stated he desires a extra inviting, conversational method, and he believes CNN’s foremost providing, “New Day” — which Mr. Zucker created — lacks a transparent id, three individuals stated.

In coming weeks, he desires to create a roster of “mates of the present” who would make common appearances on this system, the individuals stated. Amongst these being thought-about is Audie Cornish, the previous NPR host who had been slated to host a program on CNN+.

Mr. Licht additionally desires to revamp the Sunday evening lineup, introducing a brand new discuss present from the previous Fox Information anchor Chris Wallace, in addition to a brand new long-form newsmagazine program.

Mr. Licht is intent on dialing again partisanship on the air, telling advertisers final month, “At a time the place extremes are dominating cable information, we are going to search to go a distinct means.” At a latest assembly in Washington with producers and journalists, Mr. Licht stated he needed to e book extra Republicans and conservatives on political reveals to supply a wider vary of viewpoints. Internally, he praised Dana Bash’s latest interview about gun management with Consultant Dan Crenshaw, a Texas Republican.

In some methods, Mr. Licht is working to undo the showman-like tendencies that Mr. Zucker, a former “As we speak” present producer, embedded in CNN’s DNA over his nine-year tenure.

Mr. Zucker positioned sportscaster-style microphones on pundits and inspired political anchors like Jim Acosta to embrace adversarial reporting about Donald J. Trump, resulting in protection that might seem to be advocacy. Outsized teams of partisan visitors dialed up the ethical dudgeon nightly.

“It was so loud,” stated Peter Hamby, a former CNN correspondent and a columnist at Puck who writes about adjustments in cable information. “They discovered a brand new outrage each single day. It made it troublesome for audiences to separate what was actually an emergency and what was a scores ploy.”

The Zucker method did have advantages. CNN loved its most worthwhile and highest-rated years beneath his tenure, although viewership fell sharply after Mr. Trump left workplace. Many anchors felt deeply loyal to Mr. Zucker, who championed his group amid assaults from Mr. Trump, demise threats and even pipe bombs mailed to CNN’s workplaces. After Mr. Zucker’s exit, the anchor Don Lemon delivered a tearful on-air farewell, saying, “We misplaced a person who was the spine, the glue and the spirit of this firm.”

Some CNN producers and journalists turned accustomed to awaiting Mr. Zucker’s particular directions. Mr. Licht is much less inclined to micromanage, an method that’s constant along with his producing philosophy in previous jobs. Mr. Licht has instructed associates that he prefers empowering deputies to make selections for themselves, even when errors can typically happen.

On-air journalism is only one side of Mr. Licht’s new function; he additionally has to ensure the community makes cash. With scores down throughout cable, Mr. Licht has instructed colleagues that strengthening CNN’s popularity as a fair-minded information outfit will assist appeal to blue chip advertisers.

With little expertise on the company facet of working a community, Mr. Licht introduced in outdoors assist: Chris Marlin, a pal for many years and a enterprise government who most not too long ago labored at Lennar, the enormous Florida-based house constructor. Mr. Licht met Mr. Marlin, who grew up in a trailer park in Arkansas, when he was 17 at a Washington convention for highschool college students.

Mr. Marlin, who’s combing the community for brand spanking new sources of income, has proved an object of curiosity and unease at CNN. Some workers have taken to calling him “Fish Man,” a takeoff on his maritime surname. To this point, his concepts embody increasing CNN Underscored, a consumer-focused procuring information, and increasing the CNN model into overseas markets like China.

For on a regular basis viewers of CNN, the clearest signal that the community is beneath new management could also be what’s now not a fixture on their tv screens.

Based on a brand new entry within the CNN requirements information, obtained by The New York Instances, a narrative should qualify as “‘cease what you’re doing and watch’ information” to safe the “Breaking Information” label. Even then, the information says, the label ought to solely seem onscreen for one hour, except there’s an unfolding stay story like a faculty taking pictures, main hurricane or demise of a world chief.

“Its influence has change into misplaced on the viewers,” Mr. Licht wrote in his memo, including that CNN needs to be “targeted on informing, not alarming our viewers.”

Benjamin Mullin contributed reporting.

Business

Cleveland-Cliffs Signals a Possible New Bid for U.S. Steel

Published

4 hours ago

January 14, 2025

Press Room

Cleveland-Cliffs Signals a Possible New Bid for U.S. Steel

A possible new takeover bid for U.S. Steel emerged on Monday, teeing up more turmoil over the once-dominant company’s future after President Biden’s decision to block its acquisition by a Japanese company.

Lourenco Goncalves, the chief executive of an American competitor, Cleveland-Cliffs, said his company had “an All-American solution to save the United States Steel Corporation,” stressing that acquiring U.S. Steel was a matter of “when,” not “if.” But he offered no details of the bidding plans.

The renewed expression of interest from Cleveland-Cliffs comes less than two weeks after Mr. Biden blocked a $14 billion takeover of U.S. Steel by Nippon Steel, arguing that the sale posed a threat to national security. Cleveland-Cliffs tried to buy U.S. Steel in 2023, an offer that was rejected in favor of Nippon’s higher bid.

CNBC reported on Monday morning that Cleveland-Cliffs would seek to take over U.S. Steel and sell off its subsidiary, Big River Steel, to Nucor, another American producer. But Mr. Goncalves, at a news conference later in the day, would not confirm any partnership with Nucor on a bid.

U.S. Steel and Nucor did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Investors seemed pleased by the potential bid, sending shares of U.S. Steel up as much as 10 percent on Monday when CNBC reported the potential offer. Shares of U.S. Steel finished about 6 percent higher on Monday but are down 23 percent over the past year, including Monday’s spike.

But the fate of Nippon’s proposed takeover remains in limbo. U.S. Steel and Nippon sued the United States government last week in the hopes of reviving their merger, accusing Mr. Biden and other senior administration officials of corrupting the review process for political gain and blocking the deal under false pretenses.

The companies filed a separate lawsuit against Cleveland-Cliffs, Mr. Goncalves and David McCall, international president of the United Steelworkers union. They argue that Cleveland-Cliffs and the head of the union illegally colluded to undermine the Nippon deal, assertions that both defendants called “baseless.”

On Saturday, the companies said the Biden administration had delayed enforcement of its executive order blocking Nippon’s takeover until June, to give the courts time to review the lawsuit.

“The problem is, we can’t make anything happen until the current management and the current board of U.S. Steel make the decision to abandon the merger agreement with Nippon Steel,” Mr. Goncalves said at a news conference in Butler, Pa., on Monday.

Given this rancor, it is unclear how receptive U.S. Steel would be to a new bid by Cleveland-Cliffs. If U.S. Steel does not engage, one option would be for Cleveland-Cliffs to take an offer to shareholders.

U.S. Steel was once the world’s largest steel producer, but the company has fallen in global rankings in recent years. Concerns about its long-term future are rooted in a failure to quickly adopt alternatives to traditional mills that are more energy-efficient and cost-effective. Nippon, U.S. Steel has argued, is the only buyer that can make substantial investments in multiple steel mills and protect jobs.

The United Steelworkers, which represents 11,000 U.S. Steel employees, has voiced strong opposition to the proposed merger with Nippon. The powerful union has said the Japanese company engaged in illegal trade practices and dealt with the union in bad faith. Previously, the union expressed its preference for a merger with Cleveland-Cliffs, which is unionized.

A new bid by Cleveland-Cliffs, if it materializes, risks antitrust scrutiny from federal antitrust regulators, though regulators in the Trump administration are widely expected to take a less aggressive approach to merger enforcement than their Biden administration predecessors.

Business

Supreme Court denies oil industry plea to block climate lawsuits filed by California, other blue states

Published

5 hours ago

January 14, 2025

Press Room

Supreme Court denies oil industry plea to block climate lawsuits filed by California, other blue states

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court dealt a major setback to the oil industry Monday, refusing to block lawsuits from California and other blue states that seek billions of dollars in damages for the effects of climate change.

Without a comment or dissent, the justices turned down closely watched appeals from Sunoco, Shell and other energy producers.

In Sunoco vs. Honolulu, the oil industry urged the justices to intervene in these state cases and rule that because climate change is a global phenomenon, it is a matter for federal law only, not one suited to state-by-state claims.

“The stakes could not be higher,” they told the court.

But none of the justices said they wanted to hear their claim, at least not now.

The decision clears the way for more than two dozen suits filed by states and municipalities to move forward and try to prove their claim that the major oil producers knew of the potential damage of burning fossil fuels but chose to conceal it.

“Big Oil companies keep fighting a losing battle to avoid standing trial for their climate lies,” said Richard Wiles, president of the Center for Climate Integrity. “With this latest denial, the fossil fuel industry’s worst nightmare — having to face the overwhelming evidence of their decades of calculated climate deception — is closer than ever to becoming a reality.”

Two years ago, California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta filed a lawsuit in San Francisco County Superior Court against five of the largest oil and gas companies — Exxon Mobil, Shell, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and BP — and the American Petroleum Institute for what they described as a “decades-long campaign of deception” that created climate-related harms in California.

“For more than 50 years, Big Oil has been lying to us — covering up the fact that they’ve long known how dangerous the fossil fuels they produce are for our planet,” Newsom said in announcing the suit.

In recent days, California officials have blamed climate change for the devastating weather conditions that contributed to the deadly wildfires that destroyed thousands of homes and other structures, leading to what many experts expect to become the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history.

California’s suit followed the pattern set by similar claims from the cities of Baltimore, New York, Chicago and San Francisco as well as blue states including Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Jersey and Minnesota.

These suits argue that the oil producers used deceptive marketing to hide the danger of burning fossil fuels. Under state law, companies can be held liable for failing to warn consumers of a known danger.

In June 2024, the court asked the Justice Department to weigh in on the issue. In December, lawyers for the Biden administration urged the court to stand aside for now because the suits are at an early stage.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said he took no part in the decision to deny the appeals, presumably because he owns stock in companies affected by the dispute.

The climate change lawsuits were patterned after the successful mass lawsuits filed by states and others against the tobacco industry over cigarettes and the pharmaceutical industry over opioids.

Cigarettes and opioids were sold legally, but the suits alleged that industry officials conspired to deceive the public and hide the true dangers of their highly profitable products.

Under state law, plaintiffs can seek damages for broad and open-ended claims such as a failure to warn of a danger, false advertising or creating a public nuisance. All three claims are cited in California’s lawsuit. Federal law, by contrast, is usually limited to damage claims that are authorized by Congress.

Had the Supreme Court agreed to hear the oil industry’s appeal in the Hawaii case, it “would have frozen the cases for a year or more and could have resulted in a death blow for all of them,” said Patrick Parenteau, an environmental law expert at the Vermont Law School.

Los Angeles lawyer Theodore J. Boutrous Jr., who represents Chevron, said the company “will continue to defend against meritless state law climate litigation, which clashes with basic constitutional principles, undermines sound energy policy.”

Meanwhile, Alabama and 20 red states urged the court to throw out these blue-state lawsuits. They said liberal states and their judges should not have the power to set the nation’s policy on the energy industry. The court has not ruled on that claim yet.

The case dismissed Monday began five years ago when the city and county of Honolulu sued Sunoco and 14 other major oil and gas producers, alleging a failure to warn and creating a nuisance.

The Hawaii Supreme Court last year rejected the industry’s motion and refused to dismiss the suit.

“Simply put, the plaintiffs say the issue is whether defendants misled the public about fossil fuels’ dangers and environmental impact. We agree …. This suit does not seek to regulate emissions and does not seek damages for interstate emissions,” the state court said in a unanimous opinion. “Rather, plaintiffs’ complaint clearly seeks to challenge the promotion and sale of fossil-fuel products without warning and abetted by a sophisticated disinformation campaign.”

Business

How the NFL Moved the Vikings-Rams Playoff Game Away From the L.A. Fires

Published

12 hours ago

January 13, 2025

Press Room

How the NFL Moved the Vikings-Rams Playoff Game Away From the L.A. Fires

Matthew Giachelli got the call he anticipated on Thursday morning: The N.F.L. was moving the Rams’ playoff game to Arizona because of the wildfires raging in Los Angeles, and the league needed 200 gallons of paint pronto.

The game on Monday between the Rams and the Minnesota Vikings would now be held at State Farm Stadium outside Phoenix, and it had to look and feel as if it were being played in the Rams’ usual home, SoFi Stadium. That included painting the field with the team’s and league’s logos and colors. The hometown Cardinals, though, did not have some of the needed hues on hand, including the Rams’ blue and yellow.

Giachelli’s company, World Class Athletic Surfaces in tiny Leland, Miss., provides paint to most N.F.L. and top college teams. Within hours, he and his co-workers had loaded five-gallon buckets of nine custom paint colors, as well as stencils for the N.F.L. playoff logos, onto a truck that left Thursday afternoon on a 1,500-mile journey to Arizona.

“I definitely regret what’s going on in California, but I’m glad we could meet their needs,” said Giachelli, the vice president of production and distribution.

Getting the right paint was just one of hundreds of details that the league, the Rams, the Vikings, the host Arizona Cardinals and ASM Global, which operates State Farm Stadium, have juggled since the N.F.L. decided to move the wild-card round game.

The N.F.L. has canceled preseason games and postponed and moved regular-season games over the years because of hurricanes, snowstorms and other calamities. But it had not moved a winner-take-all playoff showdown since 1936, when the site of its championship game was changed from Boston to New York to drum up ticket sales.

A battalion of people — from the front-office workers to the training staffs to the thousands of game-day workers — have been mobilized on short notice. Each game, particularly in the playoffs, generates tens of millions of dollars for television networks, advertisers and stadium operators, and with the season coming down to its last few weeks, there was little margin for error.

“If it can be played, they play it, and in this case, it can be played in Glendale,” said Joe Buck, who will call the game for ESPN on Monday. “We’re in the playoffs now, and you’ve got all this pressure to get this first round finished before Kansas City and Detroit,” which had first-round byes, “get back in.”

A big reason the N.F.L. is the world’s most valuable league is scarcity. There are just 272 regular-season games and 13 playoff games, so each one is of critical importance to the 32 teams. (By contrast, there are about 400 Major League Baseball games every month during the season.) They are also critical to the owners of those teams and the league, as well as broadcast networks, sponsors and other companies that spend billions of dollars a year to attach their businesses and brands to the N.F.L.

It has not escaped notice that one of those businesses, State Farm, will have its name attached to Monday night’s broadcast less than a year after it announced that it would not renew 30,000 homeowner policies and 42,000 policies for commercial apartments in California. (The N.F.L. has donated $5 million to Los Angeles relief efforts.)

With so much riding on each contest, the N.F.L. does everything it can to play every game every year. When the league creates its season schedule each spring, it prepares contingency plans including an alternate site for each game. In 2022, when a massive snowstorm hit western New York, the Buffalo Bills played a home game at Ford Field in Detroit.

During the pandemic, outbreaks in locker rooms forced the league to postpone several games, though none were canceled. When pandemic conditions in Santa Clara County, Calif., deteriorated, the San Francisco 49ers moved to Arizona for a month, playing three home games in State Farm Stadium. Arizona was also a backstop in 2003 when the Chargers moved their home game against the Miami Dolphins because of fires in San Diego.

This time, the fires spread so quickly, the league decided to move the game five days before kickoff. Kevin Demoff, the president of the Rams, said the team had been in constant contact with officials in Los Angeles, who initially thought the game could be held at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, which was unaffected by the fires.

But that changed midweek, when fires broke out close to the team’s training facility in Woodland Hills, forcing some players and staff to evacuate their homes and for one practice to be cut short. Demoff said he did not want the players and staff to be distracted, nor did he want city and county resources to be diverted for the game when they could be used to help others in need.

Moving the game is “just a recognition that there’s some things bigger than football and we owe this to our community to make sure that this game can be played safely and not be a distraction,” Demoff said Friday.

ESPN was on hold as well. Four of its production trucks were en route to Los Angeles from Pittsburgh when the league told the network on Wednesday night that the game could be moved to Glendale. The crews spent the night in Kingman, Ariz. On Thursday, the plan was to set up in both stadiums in case the league waited until Saturday to decide where to play. So the trucks continued on to Los Angeles while another set of trucks left for Glendale. When the N.F.L. said Thursday that the game had been moved, the first set of trucks, which had reached Ontario, Calif., turned around and arrived in Glendale with time to spare.

The Cardinals also helped out the Rams in ways beyond just lending their stadium. The team’s owner, Michael Bidwill, sent two team planes to Los Angeles to help the Rams get their entourage and equipment to Arizona.