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Former Fox News host Megyn Kelly shredded her former colleague Chris Wallace, who is now at CNN.
“Who is the moron at CNN who actually thought, ‘you know what we need with our ratings in the toilet?’ More of us. We need more CNN. I do love all of the jokes about how while Elon [Musk] is offering to buy Twitter for tens of billions, there are lots of people out there right now who are willing to buy CNN+ for tens of dollars,” Buck Sexton, who used to be a CNN contributor, said of the streaming service.
Then the topic of CNN+ hiring former “Fox News Sunday” anchor Chris Wallace was mentioned and Kelly tore into him.
“He was in last place every week, every year, every month. He was always in last, and they still paid him,” she said. Then she said when she was at Fox News she received an offer from Zucker and CNN.
“I considered going to CNN. CNN made me a huge offer. Huge,” she said. She did eventually land at NBC.
“I said no, Buck, because I knew: who is my fanbase going to be over there? I knew who my fans were and I knew that my Fox viewers were not going to follow me to CNN and that the CNN viewers were going to hate my guts,” she said, and she said she believes that Wallace is “suffering from that very problem right now.”
CNN’s problems are only getting worse.
CNN won’t be at its iconic downtown Atlanta headquarters much longer, much to the chagrin of some former employees and staffers.
According to reports this week, the media giant is undergoing a significant shift in operations out of the building, moving all operations to the Turner Techwood campus in Midtown, which is located outside the city. Matt Vespa at Townhall noted some recent history involving the location:
When left-wing mobs tried to breach the facility during the summer of 2020, maybe it was a window into the future. George Floyd had just been killed in Minneapolis by ex-police officer Derek Chauvin, which set off a wave of protests across the country. Violent leftist mobs burned down half the country with the contentious 2020 election in the backdrop, along with the COVID pandemic.
And CNN was there covering the violent, but mostly peaceful unlawful civil unrest that set records in damaged property claims. CNN’s Atlanta headquarters was targeted, with confrontations spilling into the lobby. The building also housed a police precinct, so while the building was vandalized, protesters could go no further due to police protection.
“After more than 35 years, CNN is leaving its downtown mainstay in stages this year, with the entire operation moving back to renovated space at the 30-acre Turner Techwood campus in Midtown, according to a CNN spokeswoman,” reported the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, referencing a site named after CNN’s founder, billionaire Ted Turner.
Turner chose Atlanta because his vision for the network was not to get caught up in the influences of the Washington, D.C.-New York news cycles, but over the decades, the network has migrated to those ZIP codes anyway.
Reports noted that in the early days, however, Turner had the studios designed so that tourists could get as close to the live TV action as possible without disrupting operations. The HQ building also housed most of the network’s operations, but former and current owners, AT&T and Warner Bros. Discovery, respectively, have been steadily moving operations to the Turner campus since around 2020. The move out of the HQ will be complete by year’s end.
A couple of former CNN staffers voiced their displeasure with the decision to leave the property entirely.
The move is seen as a cost-cutting measure while the network continues its struggle to attract viewers, losing out to cable news leader Fox News and even liberal competitor MSNBC. According to end-of-the-year figures, Fox News Channel placed 92 shows in the top 100 on all cable TV this year.
