Goodbye, CNN

The wheels are coming off at CNN and the whole media industrial complex may be next.

Photo by Alain Pham on Unsplash.

Nothing lasts forever.

Take a tour of Egypt. Walk the sands near the Great Pyramids of Giza, explore the winding streets of old Cairo. The empire of the ancient Egyptians lasted so long, more time passed between the builder of those pyramids and Cleopatra than has passed between Cleopatra and you.

All gone now; ground down to dust, worn away. Only a remanent of a remanent remains, a few scraps of papyrus here, a sarcophagus there- art and architecture leftover from an age lost to time forever.

Just like the builders of those ancient pyramids, the media power-brokers who built CNN probably thought they were a part of an empire that would last forever.

For decades, CNN was a well-respected media network, considered by many on left and right to be the gold standard of American journalism. If you heard it on CNN, or from its affiliates, it was true, it was news, and you could count on it.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the forum. In retrospect, the chain of events is perfectly easy to trace, like a modern day tragedy in four acts.

Act 1: The internet was born.