Tough times for cable
According to a piece published last month in the Wrap, CNN is headed for some tough times. Mark Thompson, CNN Worldwide’s chairman and chief executive, is targeting the network’s more than $50 million talent budget as part of a cost-cutting initiative, reported the site — meaning that top earners such as Jake Tapper, Anderson Cooper and Wolf Blitzer would be in for a haircut. A CNN spokesperson told me that the report wasn’t true.
Time will sort out this discrepancy, which I have no intention of refereeing. But if the story bears out in any of its particulars, it could portend a retrenchment in pay for the stars of cable news. A source at Fox News said, “Talent costs are certainly being looked at given the entire business model is changing.”
That would be a pity — and not because I relish subsidizing Sean Hannity’s private-jet trips or Rachel Maddow’s ice-fishing excursions. It’s deeper than that.
Barbara Walters made history in 1976 when she signed a five-year contract for $5 million with ABC, making her the first news anchor in broadcast history to clear the million-dollar annual threshold. That red-letter contract preceded the founding of CNN — the world’s first 24-hour news channel — by four years, and cable-news pay took its time in catching up to the salary scales of the major networks.
Things have changed, however, in recent decades. In a 2022 arbitration demand over his firing from CNN, Chris Cuomo revealed that his base salary for 19 months of work was $14,406,250. Former host Don Lemon recently agreed to a separation agreement that paid him $24.5 million, an amount that covers the 3.5 years on his contract from the date of his gaffe-filled departure, according to the Wrap. Salaries for other notables — CNN’s Cooper and Fox News’s Hannity, for instance — have been reported in the eight-figure ballpark. Before Fox News woke up to the fact that Tucker Carlson wasn’t worth a penny, he was in their league. MSNBC’s Maddow reportedly pulls $30 million annually for one scheduled night per week, plus some enterprise projects on the side.
Outrageous, all of it. The excess carries on while adjacent industry sectors enter a free fall even more precipitous than the tough times they sustained in decades past. The Post, the Los Angeles Times, Vice, BuzzFeed, Time, National Geographic, the Messenger and many others — all of them have either reduced staff or shut down altogether in recent months, contributing to a circumstance addressed by a provocative headline in an Atlantic piece by former Post reporter Paul Farhi: “Is American Journalism Headed Toward an ‘Extinction-Level Event’?”
What’s more, it’s these dying outfits that serve as a fodder rack for the cable news airwaves. Sure, cable news outfits have their own reporting platoons who occasionally break news — yet they also have way too much airtime to fill, and so they aggregate the best offerings of the print sector. Take it from MSNBC host Katy Tur. “Allow me just to add something,” Tur said last June after handing out honors to several print outlets at the Mirror Awards, which recognize the work of journalists who shine a light on their own industry. “A big thank you from people like me who work in cable news. You guys produce a lot of the content that we get to chew over on our shows every day. And it’s remarkable reporting, and we – I – would not have a job without you,” she said.
What could struggling news organizations do with a cable news host’s salary? In the 2000s, I edited the Washington City Paper, which produced political reporting, arts coverage, investigations, features, a food column, original photography and, I must confess, a generous helping of slapdash essays and half-baked stuff just to separate one ad from the next. (Looking back, we probably should have paused each week to give thanks for all those ads.) By the late 2000s, we were putting out a weekly print edition and updated our website constantly, all on an annual editorial budget of around $1 million and staffing levels of about a dozen. Meaning Maddow’s yearly haul could have kept us rolling for decades.
Enough angry media-oriented populism. Though the Maddow vs. alt-weekly comparison speaks to an ugly class schism in the industry, its utility ends there. Cable news became rich because it fuses entertainment with its core product; it gorges on a double-barreled revenue stream — subscriber fees paid to the networks by multichannel TV providers and advertising on the news shows; and it pounces on the national obsession with politics. This is an industry that has earned its money, one redundant bout of stale analysis after another.
Though salaries so deep in zeros reflect a traditionally prosperous segment, brutal media realities don’t much respect tradition. The number of households that get the three major cable news networks has been on a steady decline over the past decade, with Nielsen data showing a drop from an average 96 million in ’14 to an average of 69 million in the first quarter of ’24.
Given the erosion of cable news viewing households, it would stand to reason that the sector’s revenue would suffer quite a blow. And yet, data from S&P Global Market Intelligence shows that revenue for the three major networks has remained relatively stable since ’19.
Put together, the data reflects an industry clawing for continuity. Those who bail on their monthly cable bundle do so for any number of reasons — to save cash and switch to streaming services, for one. The upshot for cable news executives, though, is that their pay model is stalling, if not sputtering. That’s a story that spans news industry sectors: Newspapers, for instance, can no longer rely on advertising to carry the cost of sweeping newsrooms, and efforts to replace that revenue stream with digital subscriptions are disappointing — just sample the paywall travails of The Post, the Los Angeles Times and just about any small newspaper. How desperate has the situation become? A recently published field experiment offered free subscriptions to local papers in Pennsylvania to 2,529 people. Forty-four of them — 1.7 percent — bit on the deal.
Cable news cynics — and I’m one — might cheer on the sector’s plummeting fortunes in hopes that it will just go away. But that’s not going to happen. A more likely scenario is that it will shrink, devote fewer resources to its in-house newsgathering operations and amp up the desperation across its 24/7 schedules. So just picture a CNN with fewer scoops, more hyperventilation and hourly repetition; an MSNBC that panders ever more nakedly to liberal sentiment; and a Fox News — already a proven threat to democracy — inching toward the One America News model, though it has been nurturing Fox Nation, a streaming property with about 2 million subscribers, to bridge the digital transition.
We’ll take the status quo, grotesque pay scale and all.