Nick Kayal is preparing to take over mornings from Rich Zeoli on 1210 WPHT next week, and joined the current morning show to discuss a variety of topics, including the shift by CNN to return to its roots as a strictly news reporting agency. Kayal and Zeoli reminisced about CNN’s former place in the cable news landscape before commenting on its current state.
“You’ve got CNN trying to go centrists and it’s kinda funny to me because CNN’s glory days, Nick Kayal, were when you had missing planes and storms. And Wolf Blitzer’s beard. Those were the glory days of CNN.”
“And the O.J. (Simpson) car chase,” Kayal responded. “Which I watched vehemently when I was 10 years old.”
“Who didn’t? The best would have been O.J. car chasing into a tornado while a plane went missing. And Wolf Blitzer reporting on it with his beard from the situation room” Zeoli joked. “CNN went too far left, were MSNBC light, and it was a disaster for them. (CNN+) lasted — I think — two weeks, and now they’re going centrists, but you’re saying (Chris) Cuomo is saying that’s a mistake.”
“You’re always going to question the strategy of the place you used to work at, but if you CNN is really going to to try to report the news and be objective, you’re foolish. I’ve got a plot of land to sell you down the street. But if they are truly going there, Cuomo looks like a stooge. But if you believe CNN is gonna try to go down the middle, I don’t buy it one bit.”
On the debut podcast of On with Kara Swisher published Monday, Cuomo said CNN was making a mistake by returning to its news reporting roots.
“I don’t like the idea that they’re saying they’re going to be more middle ground,” Cuomo said. “I think a lot of people in the media like to see CNN go down because it was so powerful. And they tried to make that happen because I believe that that’s what our business is often about, is tearing things down as a negativity as a proxy for insight, but I don’t believe in middle ground.”
