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Trump is back on Facebook, Instagram too
Meta to restore Trump's Facebook, Instagram accounts
So this means he's back on all major platforms. I think this shows that maybe, alluding to the below about JK Rowling, that cancel culture does not work as well as on famous, rich targets: they get more chances, and also because they are such big draws and have so many fans, that it's shooting oneself in the foot to cancel them. I have observed the same on YouTube, with Rogan ,Jordan Peterson , and Fox News views being heavily promoted. I tested this by opening YouTube on an EC2 instance US IP, no browsing history. Big tech companies, like all companies, are motivated by profits in the end, more so than ideology. The big question is, will trump post? I think so eventually, come election season . At this point, I think the left has sustained a major defeat in the culture wars.
Alternatively wokeness is waning a bit, the market turned and suddenly the people who objected to trump coming back stopped looking like valuable lawsuit insurance and started looking like deadweight while you're desperately trying to surface for air. That doesn't mean it's dead in other areas but the tech platforms are definitely slowing their roll a bit.
Basically this. I get that it's practically an article of faith amongst mottezens that wokeness will prevail, and that PMC gatekeeping is inviolable, but FOX News is supposedly drawing something like 2 - 3 times the nightly viewership of MSNBC and CNN. CNN is rumored to be suffering serious financial issues, and staff are reportedly pissed that the new CEO is looking to eliminate a lot of the "opinion journalism". Likewise, at an alleged 10 million viewer a show and growing Rogan seems to be on track to attain the sort of reach that Limbaugh held at his peak where he as an individual was regularly outperforming major outlets.
Sure the woke SV types might be trying to put their fingers on the algorithmic scales to promote their favored sources but at the end orf the day the advertisers (and their money) are going to go where the eyeballs are, and if google doesn't deliver that they're dead.
I don't know if that's a "rumor". Well, I suppose the specifics of how CNN itself is doing is slightly a rumor.
But the stitched-together shambling corpse that is Warner Bros. Discovery is objectively in terrible shape.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/06/david-zaslav-warner-bros-discovery-cash-flow-debt.html
NYTimes has done some fantastic reporting on the gamma ray burst of stupid that caused all this nonsense with Warner, but, paywall.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/19/business/media/att-time-warner-deal.html
That's not even the worst merger Time Warner has been involved in, they gave 55% of the company for AOL in Jan 2000. It didn't look good by the end of the quarter.
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Lol. Warner should probably be a persons largest stock position. Up 50% this year. It was just spun out of AT and T which probably didn’t have a clue how to convert to a streaming player. And some bumps in the restructuring from that. It ran into problems with a lot of the equity being spun out to AT and T holders (dividend investors) and then a tough stock market and tax loss selling late last year.
The debt isn’t a problem. The average maturity is like 14 years at 4.5% rates. It’s locked in long term mostly so the article completely misses the point that there’s no interest rate risks with the firm. High rates might even helps them because it makes market values of existing debt cheaper to buy on the open market.
CNN was a fiasco. Wish they didn’t own it but a legacy asset. And HBO though gone a little wokey still is the preferred venue for artists.
If they figure out streaming no reason some day they can’t pay off a lot of debt and get a Netflix like valuation. Then that 30 billion market cap could be an 8-12 bagger.
Im not sure streaming firms ever get the valuations of the old days but the main issue is an industry with a few scaled players and more competition when it use to just be Netflix. Wasn’t a woke story but a too much competition story. And wbd suffers from having to pivot from an old high cash flow model to a new format which companies do struggle with. But the content library is as good as anyones so they have a fighting chance.
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