Why This CNN Star, 36, Doesn’t Watch TV—Except For Work
“CNN NewsNight” anchor Abby Phillip admits that she doesn’t have time to sit down and watch TV.
The Daily Beast
On this week’s episode of The Daily Beast Podcast, CNN news anchor Abby Phillip joked that even she doesn’t watch TV.
“My peers are not watching TV, and I joke when I say I don’t watch TV... I mean, I have to watch some television,” she told co-hosts Samantha Bee and Joanna Coles. “If I were not doing this, I think it would be hard to find the time to sit down in front of a TV and sit there and watch it.”
She noted how most of her peers watch her show, CNN NewsNight, through clips on social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram and X.
“I actually think those platforms need to be fed by things like our show,” she explained. “They need the raw content to fuel those algorithms.”
“Eventually, we’re gonna have to just be native on those platforms in a way that we are not right now,” Phillip said.
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“We haven’t figured it out yet, it’s easier said than done,” she continued. “I think fundamentally the kind of content that works online is a little bit different.”
Given the polarized nature of social media platforms right now, though, Phillip noted there’s often an ideological frame attached to breakout moments: “The conservative clips go viral and then the liberal clips go viral,” she noted.
She told Coles and Bee that this is part of the “beef” she has with her show ‘going viral,’ because it’s so “subjective to the ideology of the person clipping it.”
“As somebody who does the show, I don’t think it’s representative of what happens,” she said. “But I think that’s how the Internet works.”
“And we have to figure out how to make that work in a way that, I think best represents the totality of what we’re producing,” she added.
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