(PresidentialInsider.com)- With CNN+ imploding like the Hindenburg just one month after the paid subscription service launched, Chris Wallace finds himself out of a job.
The former Fox News anchor left the highly-rated cable news network over the summer to join the fledgling CNN+ in what is, in hindsight, the stupidest career move in the history of television news broadcasting.
Over the weekend, Wallace appeared during a Common Ground Committee live-stream event on “Media, Politics, and Polarization,” where the moderator, former CBS News reporter Jacqueline Adams, asked Wallace if he thought “the days of streaming” are already over.
Wallace said when he joined the doomed CNN+, “smart people” like former CNN boss Jeffrey Zucker were claiming streaming was the future of news now that people aren’t “getting these big, expensive 50-channel cable deals anymore.”
But, Wallace went on, there were “equally smart people” who have “a diametrically opposed view.” Among those Wallace claims don’t think streaming is the future are the new owners of CNN, Discovery. Wallace told Adams that Discovery decided that news streaming is a “narrow niche product” that doesn’t work.
Yes, well, not when it’s a paid subscription news streaming service from a cable news channel that can’t get a million people to watch it for free during primetime.
Wallace said he doesn’t know who is right, but since Discovery owns CNN, they’re the ones who got to make the call.
Fox Nation, Fox News Channel’s subscription streaming service doesn’t have a problem getting subscribers. So maybe it’s not that news streaming is a “narrow niche product.” Maybe it’s just that CNN makes a terrifically bad product.
Asked about what his plans might be going forward, Wallace said it was too early to say. However, he told Jacqueline Adams that he was going to be “in good shape” whether he stays at CNN or goes somewhere else. The people he is concerned about, he explained, are the 300 off-camera employees who foolishly hitched their wagon to CNN+.
