Cadaverous Larry King The Ideal Mascot For CNN

Is CNN relevant anymore? Does anybody care? If CNN died, would anyone notice?

So far, CNN cannot compete. “Larry King Live” is now struggling in the ratings, as is CNN as a whole. The ratings for the new “John King, USA” political show at 7 p.m. have been disappointing, and Campbell Brown announced last week that she was quitting her 8 p.m. show after concluding that her newscast could not compete with the bombastic opinion-oriented shows on Fox News and MSNBC.

Ratings for Mr. King, 76, are about 20 percent better than those of his lead-in, Ms. Brown, but he ranks a distant third behind the conservative Sean Hannity on Fox and the liberal Ms. Maddow. His audience has been cut in half since the last presidential election, to an average of just 725,000 viewers a night.

Someday, those same answers will be asked about The New York Times. And yes, it will be missed - by Islamist terrorists.