Thompson can no longer justify the expenses. Paying prime-time anchor Anderson Cooper $20 million when viewership of his show can’t even crack a million hardly makes sense. “Anderson Cooper 360” is the most successful show CNN broadcasts, yet it only averages 717,000 viewers. Combine Cooper’s salary with Wolf Blitzer’s reported salary of $15 million, Jake Tapper’s $8.5 million, and Chris Wallace’s cool $8 million per year — that’s a ton of cash to shell out when they average just 668,000 viewers in prime time.
The network has been in a nosedive for some time now, while Fox News continues to eat up market share and ratings. If that isn’t embarrassing enough, the INSP cable network, founded by televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, sits ahead of CNN as well. When the Bakkers are leading Tapper, you know you’ve got problems.
CNN is scrambling. They were trying to make modest changes and that wasn't cutting it thus why Thompson was brought in. He's not a network guy, he's a making money type guy. I for one hope he can pull it off as I'd like to have more viable sources for information. We need another news organization not a propaganda organization as CNN has become.