On Monday, Warner Bros. Discovery made it official that they would be splitting in two with one including their movie and TV production studios, the comic book behemoth DC Studios, HBO, and HBO Max. The other? It’s likely to be far less profitable as it’ll consist of its TV channels, such as Cartoon Network, Discovery Channel, Food Network, HGTV, TBS, TLC, TNT, and, most notably here, CNN. In essence, similar to what Comcast did in November.

Writing Wednesday night at Puck in his indispensable media newsletter, former CNN media reporter Dylan Byers that CNN could be doomed even more than it already has with “appalling” salaries, “ratings at a nadir,” robbed of “its own grandiose version of itself,” and headed toward a world of “significant layoffs, diminished resources, and persnickety indignities” that included “shittier officers” and “fewer perks.”

Byers wrote that Warner Bros. Discovery boss David Zaslav will go off with the first set of companies the former (which is more likely to make money) and leave to CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels “a debt-saddled, Versant-style cable channel spinco-shitco” (with Versant referring to the media company including MSNBC post-Comcast split).

After some in-the-weeds talk about what Zaslav had hoped when he, at the helm of Discovery, linked up with Warner Bros. three years ago, Byers said things haven’t panned out as Zaslav probably had hoped with still tens of billions in debt and cable continuing to shrivel.

Byers then promptly delivered some bad news for his one-time colleagues about CNN’s financial outlook:

[R]unning a 24/7 global news network with foreign bureaus is expensive, and the underlying unit economics only make sense to the people inside the building. With the industry in inexorable decline, CNN’s ratings at a nadir, and younger audiences turning to user-generated schlock on YouTube and TikTok for news, those costs are increasingly hard to justify. The high-seven-figure salaries (or eight-figure, in a couple of cases) once seemed only slightly ridiculous. Now they seem appalling—especially since there’s no longer a market for this talent, or many of the producers that stand them up, at comparable rates.

As much as it might pain him and other current or former liberal journalists, he said Fox News has “effectively quadruple[d] CNN’s audience—not just on any given weeknight, but increasingly during major national and international breaking news events where CNN once dominated” for far fewer costs.

He also predictably invoked salaries as part of said cost-trimming:

Why, for instance, would Gunnar pay Anderson Cooper $18 million a year when Kaitlan Collins draws the same ratings at roughly a fifth of the salary?…Does the network need more than a handful of marquee names hosting a few key hours, or can it pay younger, reasonably attractive talent mere hundreds of thousands to read the same transcripts off the teleprompter? Jake Tapper is locked into his own low-eight-figure multiyear deal…but is surely the last CNN talent who will ever come close[.]

In the end, Byers argued, “market forces will reshape the business into what consumers want it to be rather than its own grandiose vision of itself” and thus it’s doubtful the vision under current boss Mark Thompson about a digital paywall to their website “moves the needle” and whether he even sticks around.

Byers concluded by dropping the hammer: “Do CNN’s bureaus and infrastructure make economic sense in this brave new world? Increasingly less, of course. Over time, it will look more and more like HLN, which…no longer exists. There will also be significant layoffs, diminished resources, and persnickety indignities: shittier offices, fewer perks, and more scrutiny of the [travel and expenses].”

And, as he alluded to when referencing a classic, off-the-record Swamp dinner he attended last year, CNN’s big-wigs will be remain out of touch with reality and “the last to get” the picture about their ominous future.