What’s the Corporate Cost/Benefit Ratio of AT&T Leaving CNN As It Is???

Is the whole news media the “enemy of the people”?  All of them?

No.

It is the Fake News media which is the enemy of the people.

The Fake News media falls into several categories, from phoning it in much of the time to full-on making it up.  Say on a scale of CBS News to CNN. (We won’t even waste our time on MSNBC because the vast majority of news consumers don’t.)

To hear the poor darlings of CNN and even Fox tell it, the media is under constant attack from the President.  And it’s bad for the country because they are an “institution” which should be exempt from such attacks.

Ummmmm….Seriously?

This is the first time in modern times that the media is in a President’s crosshairs for poor reporting, shoddy sourcing and clear bias and THEY DON’T LIKE IT.

Tough.

Did you see CNN’s Jim Acosta from the President’s rally in Florida last week?  He was doing a standup and the chorus in the background was chanting “CNN Sucks!” in the background.  And the poor dears on CNN chose to treat it like they treated the flight which disappeared from Malaysia.  Only instead of a mysterious flight disappearance, there was the rhetoric that the President was trying to shut down the press.  No, he only voiced his disgust.

Or, in other words, from CNN’s view, freedom of speech applies to CNN but not the President.

CNN has new owners.  AT&T has acquired the Time Warner entertainment assets and those new owners have a problem.

It would have been hard for people to strike back against Time Warner as a protest vote against CNN.

AT&T?  Not so much.  

You see, AT&T has about 142-million wireless subscribers.  It is the second largest cell-phone carrier by subscribers, Verizon being the largest.

How mad does AT&T want to make the Trump base among those subscribers?

It is headquartered in Dallas, in one of—if not the—the reddest state(s) in the country.  How long will people like Acosta continue to have a job?  How many phones will have to be turned in before the folks on Akard Street in Downtown Dallas get the message?  How big a loss is AT&T willing to sustain?

CNN may be profitable today, but in the total scheme of things at AT&T, the question is what overall loss is the company willing to sustain in its other lines of business if the Trump base decides to strike back?

This is a company which does nothing without serious planning and thought.

Surely, as hard as it has fought to buy the Time Warner assets—which include TBS, HBO and other brand name entertainment outlets—they must have factored this into their thinking.

What sort of future should clowns like Acosta, Don Lemmon, Jake Tapper and the rest have?

If AT&T takes a close look at the cost/benefit of keeping them around the answer may well be that you can soon stock an anti-Trump network with out-of-work free agents.  And, unlike the National Hockey League, there’s no salary cap for network blowhards.

As they used to end stories on TV back in the day if you were on the East or West coast, “Film at 11”.

                                                                                                                             FRED WEINBERG