CNN’s John King used to be a pretty good reporter; CNN’s golden boy; the Anderson Cooper of his time; and someone I once added to my short exception list when it came to the corrupt media. That exception started to die sometime during the 2008 election and was killed off completely during the 2012 GOP primary season.
With King’s credibility went any chance he ever had of distinguishing himself among the other Obama shills at CNN. And so, CNN’s swirling of the drain just got a little swirlier:
The ailing cable news channel CNN on Wednesday abruptly ended “John King, USA,” its 6 p.m. political news program.
The program will be replaced at the end of the month by “The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer,” which will expand from two hours long to three hours. Mr. Blitzer’s program currently precedes Mr. King’s, beginning at 4 p.m.
Ken Jautz, the executive in charge of CNN, said in an internal memo that the schedule change was made to improve political coverage this year. Mr. King will be the network’s top campaign correspondent for the remainder of the presidential election cycle. He had a similar role during the 2008 presidential election cycle.
This isn’t exactly what you would call a vote of confidence:
Mr. King will be the network’s top campaign correspondent for the remainder of the presidential election cycle.
So, it looks as though someone’s got job security through the first week of November.
The spin that this move was made to improve political coverage falls completely apart when you realize that the “improvement” is nothing more than expanding Wolf Blitzer’s pretty awful and awfully low-rated “Situation Room” — which, on Monday, attracted about a third the viewers FNC’s “The Five” does and was beat by MSNBC’s “Hardball.”
King, on the other hand, attracted only a laughable 292,000 viewers, so I guess CNN assumes two times zero is somehow not zero.
The bottom line is that King was a ratings disaster and all CNN has to replace him with is something that’s a little less of a disaster.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC
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