CNN Under the Gunnar

While the handsomely paid Wiedenfels may indeed be excited for what’s ahead—no doubt envisioning a hefty payday when this is all said and done—the mood inside CNN is markedly different. According to more than half a dozen staffers I spoke with on Thursday, anxiety is rippling through the network as employees digest last week’s news that WBD will spin off CNN along with the rest of its declining cable assets.

While Warner Bros. Pictures, HBO, and Max were cleaved off as the growth assets, CNN was placed in the same bucket as the declining—though still profitable—linear channels, such as HGTV, TBS, TNT, the Food Network and others. And while there are strategic reasons WBD opted to sort CNN as it did (cable channels can negotiate higher carriage fees as a bundle), being part of the "Shit Co." wing, as it is now colloquially referred to in the industry, hasn't given way to a flurry of positive feelings.

“Everyone is wary and tired and there is so much change that we don’t understand what direction the company is going in,” one prominent network journalist told me. The “rank and file are nervous like the pre-cuts time” and have “no confidence and no trust” in leadership, said another. A third observed, “There are people who think CNN won’t exist at some point. Hard to believe that will happen, but there are people who feel that way.”

The anxiety isn’t without good reason, of course. The split from WBD will mark the third parent company change for CNN in seven years, with each reshuffle bringing a new strategy and host of executives with agendas of their own. Notably, when the network was owned by AT&T as part of its WarnerMedia division, then-bosses Jeff Zucker and Jason Kilar bet big on CNN+, only to have the streamer shuttered in its infancy when WBD boss David Zaslav took over. Now, after a few years of sitting on the streaming sidelines, WBD has reversed course, and CNN is planning on launching a new standalone streamer this fall, with Zaslav and Wiedenfels investing $100 million in its digital future and hiring many of the original CNN+ executives back to the company. It goes without saying, but this also won’t be the final stop on CNN’s endless acquisition track, and it’s unclear what new strategy a new suitor might bring with it, when that time ultimately arrives. (Normal caveat here, WBD said CNN is not for sale at present time.)

Wiedenfels is doing his best to indicate to staffers that the digital revitalization strategy he and Zaslav set into motion will continue when the linear assets spin off into the forthcoming Global Networks. Last Monday, when the spinoff news was made official, Wiedenfels jumped on a network town hall and expressed support for CNN, while referencing the investments WBD had made in it. And in his memo to CNN'ers on Thursday, Wiedenfels said those investments remain “a critical priority."

But what else would he say? As the chief financial officer who greenlit the $100 million spend, he’s hardly going to announce a U-turn now. Moreover, Wiedenfels has a vested interest in getting CNN into some type of digital shape. The asset will be worth more, and potentially more attractive to potential buyers down the road, if it can show growth potential—and right now, as a linear-centered business, it does not. On the other hand, a future buyer might not care much about a digital future for CNN and could simply be interested in squeezing every last penny out of the cable bundle.

In any case, none of that means Wiedenfels, known infamously across the industry as a ruthless cost cutter who takes hatchets to budgets, won't find plenty to chop away at as he slims down the Global Networks for possible M&A activity. Whereas Zaslav at least has had a strong emotional attachment to CNN, Wiedenfels will likely approach cost cutting at the organization in a more clinical manner.

Anchors with multimillion-dollar salaries and correspondents making several hundreds of thousands of dollars will likely see their deals get sizable haircuts, if they're renewed at all. Why pay certain "star" anchors such extravagant salaries when their ratings are matched by others earning a fraction of the cost? Why dish out for correspondents who often go many days–or weeks—without even appearing on air and whom often do not—or cannot—file digital stories? Expensive foreign bureaus that once helped CNN burnish its reputation as the outlet to turn to when news breaks could also go by the wayside.

Further, regular business-related expenses—such as travel, costs incurred for source meetings, etcetera—will certainly fall under increased scrutiny. In fact, I've learned that starting July 1, CNN'ers will need to start submitting receipts when they submit their expense reports, something that had not been previously required of them.

Thompson has tried to reassure staff. In a memo last week, he wrote: "Over the coming days you’ll hear plenty of chatter about what today’s announcement might or might not mean for CNN and the other divisions of WBD. In the case of CNN, I believe the answer is simple: we hold our destiny in our own hands. If we reinvent CNN to meet the challenge of the future–new audiences, new technologies, new consumption patterns, new competitors–we’ll succeed in all scenarios. If we don’t, we’ll suffer the same fate as any legacy company that fails to respond to a changing world. That was true before today’s announcement and it’s still true today."

He’s right, of course. CNN’s future depends on whether it can build a viable digital business—and fast. But it's also clear that the perks of working at a cash-flush television giant are vanishing. That’s what’s fueling so much unease inside CNN. Staffers have already lived through the Zaslav-era cuts and now they sense that the cold winds they've felt slapping across their faces as the linear fire dwindles are about to get even more bitter.

Loomer the Hall Monitor: The MAGA Media civil war continued apace on Thursday, with Laura Loomer entering the fray and announcing that she plans to tattle tell on “everyone” who has criticized Donald Trump on Iran. "I am screenshotting everyone’s posts and I’m going to deliver them in a package to President Trump so he sees who is truly with him and who isn’t," Loomer declared on X. "And I think by now everyone knows I mean it when I say I’m going to deliver something to Trump." Indeed, the last time Loomer slipped into the Oval Office, she succeeded in getting several National Security Council staffers fired for allegedly not being sufficiently loyal to Trump. "I am the loyalty enforcer," Loomer proudly said in her X post.

► While Loomer said she would report those who had criticized Trump, she also went off on some of Trump's recent critics, including Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Owen Shroyer. Loomer, a proud Islamophobe, blasted Carlson as "controlled by Muslims" and indirectly mocked Owens for caring about Palestinians. "Stop trying to force me to care about Palestinians," Loomer wrote. "America First! Don’t want to see or hear any more 'right wing podcasters' post videos of people with their body parts blown off begging for sympathy."

Google’s A.I. Appetite: Google is training its artificial intelligence models on videos uploaded to YouTube, the tech giant confirmed Thursday. The news came as a surprise to some of the platform’s creators, who told CNBC’s Zach Vallese that they had no idea their content was being used to develop A.I. “We’ve always used YouTube content to make our products better, and this hasn’t changed with the advent of AI,” a YouTube spokesperson said in a statement, adding it recognizes “the need for guardrails.” While Google does allow creators to opt-out of A.I. training for other developers, they can’t for Google’s own A.I. models such as Gemini and Veo3. The Sundar Pichai-led company didn’t say which videos are being used to train its A.I. or how many are part of the dataset. That lack of clarity raises fresh questions about content ownership, copyright, and intellectual property. Just last week, Disney and NBCUniversal sued Midjourney, claiming its A.I. image generator had spawned a "bottomless pit of plagiarism.”