Free Republic

The former CEO of CNN and the creator of its Crossfire show, Reese Schonfeld, has slammed the new CNN show that will be hosted by Kathleen Parker and Client Number Nine aka Eliot Spitzer. In his Huffington Post blog, Schonfeld not only blasts the proposed new show but provides some interesting background on the original Crossfire in its early years: As the former CEO of CNN, and the creator of Crossfire (the show, not the name -- Paul Bissonette, CNN's PR man, came up with that), I think I'm qualified to comment on the new, not to be called Crossfire,...

When last we left CNN co-founder, Reese Schonfeld, he was in a deep funk over the horrible CNN ratings. He had hoped that the election of Barack Obama as president would help that ailing network's ratings but, as reported by Schonfeld, a harsh reality quickly set in: Now, seven months after Barack Obama's victory, CNN's ratings have gone down the drain. From May of last year to May of this year, CNN lost 22% of its total primetime audience. MSNBC was down 2%, while FoxNews was up 24%. In the key advertising demographic (25-54), Fox was up 31%, CNN was...

Since the end of the Iraq war, CNN has seen a disastrous plunge in its ratings from where they were prior to the war, CNN cofounder Reese Schonfeld observed on his website Friday. Without citing sources, Schonfeld disclosed that from January 1 to February 15, CNN/Headline News combined averaged a 43.5-percent marketshare. Last week, he said, the combined total of the two news channels is 37.3 percent. On the other hand, he noted, Fox News now commands 51 percent of the share points, up 42 percent over its pre-war numbers. "This is a time for ... analysis," Schonfeld declared on...

Reese Schonfeld, CNN's liberal co-founder wrote this interesting piece in his blog: This is a day to offer thanks and congratulations to George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and Tony Blair. (Don’t ask me to thank all the fighting men who have so bravely etc., etc., etc. I leave that to the all-news networks, which seem never to get a paragraph out without including that sentence. Those significant sentiments should be saved for the likes of a Gettysburg address, and the words that express them should be neither trite nor fatuous.) My thanks and congratulations go to Bush and Rumsfeld for...

The cofounder of CNN has suggested that AOL Time Warner pulled the wool over the eyes of the public when it reported that its Turner Broadcasting unit is successfully roping in advertisers. On his website http://www.meandted.com/bits.htm, Reese Schonfeld notes that in reality the Turner cable networks' biggest advertiser may be AOL Time Warner itself. Turner Network Television (TNT) and TBS, he says, both showed sizable gains in 2001, with TNT up 189 percent and TBS up 16 percent. But, Schonfeld observes, "More than 30% of all the money spent on TNT and more than 34% of all the money spent...