The Malone Delusion

Earlier this week, cable kingpin John Malone sat down with Michael Smerconish on his SiriusXM podcast to discuss the octogenarian’s new memoir. Malone was seated comfortably in his home against a backdrop of sunlit trees as he reflected on his decades shaping the cable industry and modern media landscape.

As the 45-minute conversation chugged along, Smerconish took a moment to praise Malone for his infamous 2021 comments to CNBC in which the billionaire, then a major shareholder of Discovery and soon-to-be Warner Bros. Discovery, skewered CNN, saying he wished the network’s news coverage would more closely resemble Fox News.

“It sent shockwaves through the building,” Smerconish recalled of the response at CNN, where he hosts a show. “Everyone said, ‘Uh oh, he’s going to single handedly move us toward the center, maybe move us right-of-center,’” Smerconish added, confessing that he had hoped Malone would have made good on his remarks and meddled in the network’s journalism.

“Why didn’t you purse independence as a market share?” Smerconish pressed the Liberty Media chairman, stirring him to offer up a tale of a supposed private conversation he once had with former CNN president Jeff Zucker.

“Zucker told me once—I said, ‘Why are you so focused [on being] anti-Trump?’ And he says, ‘Because it gets me audience.’ Okay? And, you know, it’s like, I’ve always…” Malone trailed off as Smerconish interjected.

But there was one major problem with that anecdote. It apparently never happened. Reached for comment on Friday, Risa Heller, the high-powered spokesperson who represents Zucker, told Status: “Jeff Zucker has never spoken to John Malone.” A spokesperson for Malone did not respond to a request for comment about how the anecdote he relayed could possibly be true if the two have never spoken to each other. A CNN representative declined to comment.

It wouldn’t be the first time Malone—a self-described libertarian with a lengthy history of donating to Donald Trump and Republicans—has been wildly off-base or perhaps fantasized about a journalism world that doesn’t exist. The “cable cowboy’s” book tour has been filled with bizarre and even cringeworthy remarks about the news business. Last month, Malone once again took swipes at CNN, telling Joe Kernen he did not believe there was “actual journalism” on the network’s air after WBD’s takeover and installing of Mark Thompson as network president—a comment that provoked rare public pushback from WBD.

Days later, Malone went even further in his criticism of CNN and its journalists, telling Kara Swisher that bias was “embedded” into the network. "These are good people. These are people who believe they're not biased, okay? They really believe that,” he asserted. “It's just like how an awful lot of us white folks say we're not biased about Blacks, okay. But it's embedded. You grew up in a family that didn't see Blacks as we would like to see Blacks today."

Perhaps Malone was confessing to something deeper there. But he has repeatedly shown affection for Rupert Murdoch’s right-wing Fox News, holding it up as a model of hard-hitting journalism and clear separation of opinion. Is he really watching the same Fox, which regularly blurs those lines and has intentionally deceived its audience, as the rest of us? Malone regularly tells stories of Murdoch giving him a call in the 1990s to pitch the idea of launching Fox in the U.S., for which Malone says he told the media mogul to launch a “center-right” news channel and personally attempted to hire Rush Limbaugh as a network host. So much for straight and honest objectivity.

Since the merger that created WBD and appointment of Malone protégé David Zaslav as boss, CNN has nudged its coverage and programming to the right—softening its posture toward Trump and giving more space to conservative voices in a bid to win credibility with the right. Gone are Jim Acosta, Don Lemon, John Harwood, and other journalists known for their tough and critical lens on Trump.

As the twice impeached and felony-convicted Trump mounted another presidential run, CNN handed him a live town hall where he unleashed a torrent of falsehoods and berated moderator Kaitlan Collins—and has continued to offer him and his allies a platform to advance their views. Yet the moves have satisfied neither Malone nor the audience he seems eager to court.

Many Republicans and MAGA loyalists long ago decided that mainstream journalism is irredeemably hostile to their worldview—largely because it holds figures like Trump, who regularly lie and spin up bogus conspiracy theories, to account. When anchors and reporters fact-check Trump and his MAGA allies, it alienates those who have bought into the lies that dominate the right-wing landscape.

It seems that Malone and his ilk want journalists to go easier on Trump, fact-checking him less frequently so that his flood of lies appears no worse than the occasional missteps of Democrats. That might seem like balance to Malone, but it's really a false illusion of it. In reality, bending coverage to cater to a MAGA audience would present a warped view of the world to viewers.

It also simply will not work to win over conservative viewers. The audience Malone seeks to attract will never turn to news organizations like CNN for their information. That audience not only prefers to watch Fox News, but it also despises news outlets like CNN and wishes only to see them fail. In fact, WBD’s efforts to soften CNN’s Trump coverage have only hurt its ratings, which have slid considerably in recent years under the company’s editorial direction.

For all his talk about objectivity and truthfulness, Malone’s vision of journalism seems less rooted in principle than in fantasy. His nostalgia for a “fair and balanced” media that caters to right-wing figures says far more about his politics than about the state of the press today.