DISH Network: We're Prepared to Keep CNN off DISH forever
/We're guessing that you can count Dish Network Chairman Charlie Ergen as not a fan of Turner or CNN.
Talking about satellite provider's on-going carriage dispute with Turner Broadcasting he said that he is prepared to keep the channels off the service permanently and slamming the performance of channels like CNN.
"When we do take something down, as a company, we're prepared to leave it down forever," he said.
Turner channels like CNN, HLN, Cartoon Network and TruTV went dark on Dish Network on Oct. 21 as a result of the dispute. Dish claims that the absence of the channels hasn't resulted in subscriber cancellations.
Ergen also took a big shot at CNN, saying that CNN "are not quite the product that they used to be."
"You can imagine, CNN down on election night would be a disaster 15 years or 20 years ago, but now there's plenty of other places for people to get news, in fact, a lot of people get news not from TV anymore, they get it from the devices," he said.
Turner boss John Martin shot back that CNN is number 2 in the cable news ratings, "So we honestly have no idea what Dish was talking about yesterday," he said.
H/T Ad Age