Charlie Chester, the CNN Technical Director who admitted the Matt Gaetz sex scandal was a network contrived hit job to damage the rising star in the Republican party also boasted that COVID-19 has been “gangbusters” for the network’s ratings.
Chester said himself and others within CNN’s newsroom and executive team wished for higher death toll numbers each day in order to make for a higher rated news cycle. The 563,000 deaths of Americans to the disease has been the breadwinner for the network in the past year.
“COVID-19 has been gangbusters for CNN’s ratings,” Chester boasted. “Which is why we constantly have the death toll on the side…let’s make it higher, let’s make it higher. It would make our point better if it was higher.”
“If it bleeds, it leads,” Chester boasted. “Nobody ever says those things out loud.”
At one point, Chester said there’s a red phone in the newsroom where the head of the network personally calls to remind reporters and producers to push certain propaganda related topics to drive ratings.
Chester explained how the network used death and the pandemic to create ratings. Chester said at times during the pandemic, Jeff Zucker himself would call to the newsroom and tell them to put the numbers back up during less enticing news segments.
“There’s no such thing as unbiased news,” Chester said. “The only people we let on the air are people who have a proven track record of taking the bait [of slanted news].”