Live from Music Row Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael to the studio for another edition of Crom’s Commentary.
CARMICHAEL SAID:
Michael, the difficulty in the Crommentary today is there are so many topics from which to choose. But the one I’ve settled on is all this kerfuffle going on in the media. And that includes Whoopi Goldberg, it includes Rogan, and it includes CNN.
The contradictions between Whoopi Goldberg and Joe Rogan are completely obvious. But what’s fascinating about the CNN story is, we now know that Jeff Zucker has had a multi-year relationship with a woman who reported directly to him.
And nobody has ever said whether or not she does a good job, but she was very well paid. So what do you call somebody when you’re both married and you’re having a relationship and the man is making sure that the female is paid a lot of money? There’s a term for that, okay? And I suppose the head of CNN, not Zucker, but (unintelligible) would be called a pimp, the one that allows it to happen. Because what’s interesting is when you listen to the commentators on CNN, they say, well, certainly it was a sexual relationship between two consenting adults and one was making sure that the other got paid a whole lot of money.
And we have no idea whether or not this other person was good at their job. And so the conflict of interest is so incredibly apparent, but the people at CNN don’t care. The other thing that’s interesting about CNN is that, just listen – this is from Byron York, and this is fascinating: he’s talking about an article in Mediaite. The article reported that compared to last year, CNN is down 74 percent in total viewers and 81 percent in the demo during the day, and is down 77 percent in total viewers and 82 percent down in the demo during prime time.
Now the “demo” is the 18-to-49-year-old crowd. So not only was Zucker involved in a conflict of interest relationship that by any definition is terrible from a conflict or relationship standpoint, but he was also driving the network into the ground.
And yet all the people on the network, every single one of them, is just distressed that Jeff Zucker’s gone. So what I’m saying is that it just shows that there’s a complete disconnect at CNN with reality.
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
