CNN Minus

I am proud, excited, and a little nervous to announce a new service coming to a screen near you: CNN Minus. We wavered back and forth whether or not to use the “-” symbol in the name, but eventually decided against it. Too small, plus, what is it anyway? An em dash? An en dash? A hyphen? A horizontal monolith floating across the desert for simians and space aliens alike to marvel at?  This was the clearest, cleanest solution.

A series of unfocused focus groups gave us the confidence to forge new ground in the media space. What do I mean? Well, for one thing, I mean that while cable news is a fearsome beast with a prodigious appetite, what the people want, consumers as it were, is less. They want less of everything we usually serve them.

So that’s just what we’re going to give them: nothing. No studio shows with nineteen yammering panelists. No creepy crawls scrolling by, the Chyron of lost dreams. CNN Minus is a groundbreaking enterprise, the most revolutionary thing to hit TV since the late night color bars. But we’re here for more than simple gradient calibration. We’re not actually here. In fact, CNN Minus is already extremely profitable since we’ve hired no one for this new venture. And yet, despite all that, the ratings and click rate for our empty newsletter are already higher than Wolf Blitzer’s Last Stand.

People yell on cable news all the time, constantly disagreeing and staking claims to the most extreme position out there. As an antidote to all that noise, we’re going to give people actual white noise. Many viewers have noted that the most peaceful time of their day is during the brief static of HBO's famous intro. The soothing hum and crackle of a television screen is far better than anything produced under the banner of "new media."

 

It’s no wonder the Internet has gotten away from us, too. We miss the salad days of a dial-up modem gently turning on. As it booted up, so too did our hopes and dreams. There’s none of that today. Everything is expected to happen instantly. Not here, not on CNN Minus. Instead of hiring the brightest lights within the media landscape, we discovered that what people really want is a meditative experience, or at least, the equivalent of a traumatic brain injury. Anything to drown out the cacophony of dissonant voices howling endlessly into the ether.

Let us be your go-to get away from it all. It’s worth a shot. We’ve certainly tried everything else. Don't watch before bed and ruin a good night of sleep. Turn it on and go to sleep. That's the Minus touch.

CNN Minus. Entertainment by subtraction.