CNN, Fox News and MSNBC’s Reckoning

At a moment when the news cycle is moving at a breakneck pace, top cable news executives are grappling with an uncomfortable reality: The future of the business has never been more uncertain. As one veteran executive argues, it is more likely than not that by the end of President Donald Trump’s term, CNN, MSNBC and, yes, even Fox News will have new ownership as the power structures that have defined media for the past four decades break down.

MSNBC is already set to be spun off from Comcast and NBCUniversal, joining sister channel CNBC at “SpinCo,” a cable-focused venture to be led by Mark Lazarus. And at Warner Bros. Discovery, a restructuring has placed CNN into a “global linear networks” division, seemingly destined for future dealmaking.

Even Fox News, with its relative financial and ratings strength, isn’t immune from speculation. Rupert Murdoch, who effectively controls Fox through an irrevocable family trust, has been trying to amend that trust to give his son (and Fox CEO) Lachlan Murdoch control. Should that legal effort fail, multiple Wall Street sources believe that Murdoch would engage in sale talks or work with Lachlan to figure out a way to buy out his siblings, thus avoiding a Succession-style public battle for the family empire.

“We believe there is a near zero percent chance that Rupert wants to leave planet earth with the future of the assets he spent his life building left in limbo,” Lightshed Partners’ Rich Greenfield wrote in a note in December. “If Lachlan is unable to cement control through a buyout, we suspect Rupert would look to sell Fox’s assets.”

It’s not hard to understand why the cable news business is seemingly on the edge of a precipice, despite the fact that there’s more news than ever with a president who is an avid viewer and has stacked his Cabinet with TV veterans. As CNN CEO Mark Thompson told staff Jan. 23, there are “profound and irreversible shifts” in the way consumers get their news, and the product needs to reflect that.

Those shifts are even more stark when looking at the troubled economics of cable TV. By now everyone knows that the challenges that cord-cutting has wrought, with younger consumers largely opting not to pay for TV, and instead spending their dollars on streaming platforms. And while cable news channels suck up a higher percentage of cable’s declining viewership (MSNBC viewership has increased 57 percent during the past decade despite 33 percent fewer pay TV households, for example), the business challenges remain stark. 

The finances of cable news channels have traditionally been obscured, buried within larger divisions of their parent companies. A recent defamation lawsuit against CNN, however, brought those finances (or at least a partial version of them) into the open.

According to the data disclosed at trial, revenue at CNN fell from $2.2 billion in 2021 to $1.8 billion in 2023, and while profits remain robust, those too are slipping fast. CNN earned net income of $600 million in 2021 and $400 million in 2023. A CNN spokesperson says that “the numbers represent the plaintiff’s interpretation of a subset of data as presented in litigation, and they do not represent financial data for the whole of CNN’s business.”

The finances will be different at MSNBC and at Fox News (especially at Fox, which has far higher subscriber fees and substantially more viewers), but the overall trend lines are still driven by the fortunes of pay TV, and that pain is being felt everywhere. CNN’s decision to cut some 200 jobs in January is just the latest example.

All this is reflected in the “new normal” for talent deals, according to multiple sources. Some, like Rachel Maddow, are signing new contracts for less money or in other cases new deals without a pay increase (i.e., CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and MSNBC’s Jonathan Lemire). Still others opted to abandon their respective channels after being presented with new deals that offered sharply slashed salaries, with Fox’s Neil Cavuto and CNN’s Chris Wallace among the high-profile examples.

“I think what the networks are looking at is ‘the way we had been doing things was wonderful for us, but it’s gone and it’s never coming back,’” says Ben Bogardus, an associate professor and chair of the journalism department at Quinnipiac University. “Younger generations especially get their news and information online. They enjoy the podcast model, where they hear the unfiltered views of people in a longform interview, or they like the short clips of real people on social media.”

That reality is not lost on cable news channels, which are already beginning to pivot accordingly. Thompson has prioritized vertical video at CNN, while at MSNBC, a flurry of podcasts (many of them hosted or produced by Maddow) have found significant audiences.

And sources at multiple outlets say that there is interest in inking deals with podcasters and other digital-native hosts, either in the form of outright acquisitions or content partnerships. Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway’s Pivot podcast, for example, has been holding talks with multiple media companies, including CNN.

In fact, the podcast revolution is already finding its way to the legacy TV product, in aesthetic form, if not function.

After Cavuto left Fox, the channel gave his timeslot to Will Cain, who also hosts a podcast for the company. His afternoon show features “a signature podcast style,” per Fox, with a microphone on the desk in front of him, and a format familiar to anyone who watches talk shows on platforms like YouTube or Spotify.

It is in some ways a back-to-the-future moment for cable, where lower-cost radio simulcasts used to fill otherwise undesirable hours. Before Morning Joe, for example, MSNBC simulcasted Don Imus’ radio program. Now the format is seeping into far more lucrative time slots.

And across the board, news executives are scrambling to figure out how news fits into the streaming future that is taking shape across the rest of media, subsuming entertainment and now sports.

Thompson told staffers that his channel’s objective is “to shift CNN’s gravity toward the platforms and products where the audience themselves are shifting.” What that looks like remains somewhat opaque, though Thompson said that it will include a new CNN streaming service and lifestyle-focused subscription offerings to complement its digital news report. He added that WBD is investing $70 million in the effort.

At CNN, Thompson told staff that the channel’s objective is “to shift CNN’s gravity towards the platforms and products where the audience themselves are shifting and, by doing that, to secure CNN’s future as one of the world’s greatest news organizations.”

Fox, meanwhile, is in many ways ahead of the game, having launched its Fox Nation streaming service in 2018. Still, that service, geared toward super fans, still only has about two million subscribers as of a year ago, and its content lineup is heavy on entertainment fare.

Now it has decided to take the biggest leap of them all. On Feb. 4, Fox said that it would launch a streaming service by the end of 2025, one that would include sports and, yes, Fox News programming. Lachlan Murdoch said his company is still committed to the pay TV bundle, but added that “we do want to reach consumers wherever they are, and there’s a large population, obviously, that are now outside of the traditional cable bundle.”

While executives at the company have long maintained that they could “flip a switch” and start streaming Fox News’ full lineup, the company will now need to grapple with the same questions facing ESPN, which will make its full programming lineup available via streaming later this year: How do you take one of the most lucrative wholesale products of all time and price it for retail consumers without destroying the business? When every pay-TV consumer is paying for every channel, a company like ESPN or Fox News can make billions annually. But if you have a product that appeals only to fans of the brand, pricing and retention strategy becomes a much bigger problem to solve.

And at MSNBC, the spinoff could end up being a saving grace. Until now, MSNBC’s streaming strategy has centered on Peacock, NBCUniversal’s streaming service. But freed from that corporate structure, MSNBC can figure out its own path forward in streaming, whether that be a licensing deal, or a direct-to-consumer offering like its sister channel CNBC has developed for its (smaller, more niche) audience. The clock, however, is ticking.

“I think they’re saying, ‘yeah, we’re making money now, but in 10 years, we are not going to be making more money than we are now,’” Bogardus  says. “So how can we get ahead of the game? How can we make sure that in the next 10 years we aren’t losing 100 percent of our audience as more and more American life does move to social platforms and online and user generated content.”

And despite the agita and anxiety permeating newsrooms, there remain pockets of optimism.

Fox News has, since the election garnered some 70 percent of the cable news audience, drawing numbers more comparable to broadcast TV networks. It’s an astonishing feat in an era of cord-cutting. Fox “burnt off the cable news competition,” CFO Steve Tomsic quipped at a UBS conference Dec. 9.

Those numbers give it a runway to figure out a digital path forward that MSNBC and CNN may not have, and Fox’s strong balance sheet also lends itself to being a buyer of digital programs or platforms, with Murdoch telling Wall Street analysts last November that Fox will engage in “thoughtful M&A.”

Still, both executives and talent on the other channels are hopeful that there is still a path not only for their brands to survive, or even thrive. If they can figure out the product that appeals to an audience, the business can follow, they argue.

“If you look at Morning Joe, if you look at CNBC, because we have audiences of influence, people come to us, advertising comes to us, sub fees come to us,” MSNBC Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough says. “That should be the goal of people that want to stay relevant. Serious news sells, you’ve got to get the right audience.”

The challenge will be figuring out where those audiences of influence are in a world where pay-TV is a shadow of its former self, and who, exactly, is footing the bill.

This story first appeared in the Feb. 5 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.