There goes CNN
The ongoing struggle between "neutrality" and truth
Large chunks of U.S. news media remain stymied by the challenge of covering our radically divided politics while chasing incompatible siloed audiences. Some of their muddle is simply old habits dying hard but some of it is more calculated.
There’s a well-established media fiction that treats Democrats and Republicans as equally committed to American democracy but simply occupying different positions on a spectrum that runs from left to right. Mainstream media have been slow to acknowledge that the major parties are no longer in the same universe. When, for example, a radical election-denying extremist won the New Hampshire GOP primary for Senate this week, the AP normalized it with this headline:
“Conservative Bolduc wins New Hampshire’s GOP Senate primary.”
“Conservative” is an obstinately bland descriptor for someone who
Retweeted a claim that COVID19 is a bioweapon designed by China to destabilize the west
Asserted that Bill Gates and George Soros funded the “militant wing” of Black Lives Matter
Defended Confederate statues as not a symbol of racism but rather, “a symbol of hope. It's a symbol of inspiration. It's a symbol of moving forward”
Boasted in a debate that “I signed a letter with 120 other generals and admirals saying that Donald Trump won the election and, damn it, I stand by [it]”
After a howl went up on Twitter about that reality-defying headline, the AP revised it to read:
“Election denier Bolduc wins New Hampshire GOP Senate race”
Nevertheless, in the body of the article, the AP still identifies Bolduc simply as “a fierce conservative.”
The old habit of enforced neutrality is only one factor that shapes news coverage. There are also the economic pressures of attracting an audience and the ideological pressures of pleasing investors.
News, for all its high-minded devotion to reporting the truth, is a product—one that needs customers and revenues to survive. The customers of news media have their own preferences—often valuing reinforcement of their existing biases over discovering what’s true.
Case in point: CNN, now under new management by Chris Licht, who assumed the role of CEO in May of this year.
Licht comes to the job with three impressive executive-producer wins on his résumé: The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, CBS This Morning, and Morning Joe. It remains to be seen, however, how well he can make the leap from managing the creative and production staff of a single show (well under a hundred employees) to managing an entire 24/7 global network (over four thousand employees). To add to his level of difficulty, Licht’s options are constrained by some hard boundaries.
He needs to carve a slice of audience from a shrinking and aging pie. Advertisers prefer to reach a younger demographic, but that younger demographic isn’t looking to television for news. They prefer to find news online.
Source: Pew Research Center Report “More than eight-in-ten Americans get news from digital devices” CNN’s rivals, Fox News and MSNBC, already have a lock on the most obsessively engaged—and enraged—audiences for political coverage. It remains to be seen if there’s sufficient audience for Licht’s strictly enforced “neutrality.”
CNN’s parent company is servicing upwards of $50 billion in debt incurred in the merger of Warner Bros. and Discovery Networks to form Warner Bros. Discovery, Inc. They’re looking to cut $3 billion in expenses.
Aside: If only they had adopted the name coined by Frank Radice…
Looming over the whole shebang is WBD investor and board member, multi-billionaire John C. Malone, a Trump mega-donor and board member of the libertarian CATO Institute. Malone publicly laid out his preferences for CNN before the merger:
“I would like to see CNN evolve back to the kind of journalism that it started with, and actually have journalists, which would be unique and refreshing. Fox News, in my opinion, has followed an interesting trajectory of trying to have ‘news’ news, I mean some actual journalism, embedded in a program schedule of all opinions.”
WBD CEO David Zaslav—and Chris Licht’s boss echoed Malone’s vision in a Town Hall (interviewed by Oprah Winfrey), saying that
“CNN needs to be about truth and facts. If we get that, we can have a civilized society. And without it, if it all becomes advocacy, we don’t have a civilized society.”
Some of Licht’s early moves have observers worried that his mission is to placate Malone by undertaking the Foxification of CNN.
One of Licht’s first directives, for example, was to discourage the use of the phrase “the Big Lie” as being too close to the way Democrats framed Trump’s bullshit claims of a stolen election. Licht, instead, urged the network to avoid appearing partisan by saying, “Trump election lies” or simply “election lies.”
In the last few weeks, three prominent on-air hosts and contributors who were critical of Trump and MAGA Republicans have disappeared from the CNN roster—Brian Stelter, John Harwood, and Jeffrey Toobin. (Harwood was out immediately after agreeing on air that Biden had been correct in labeling MAGA Republicans a threat to American democracy.) A fourth Trump critic, Don Lemon, once opened his show by slamming Trump with these words: “This is CNN Tonight, I'm Don Lemon. The President of the United States is racist. A lot of us already knew that.” (That was after Trump had referred to Haiti, El Salvador and African nations as “shithole countries.”) But Lemon is probably impossible to fire without igniting a firestorm, as he is both Black and gay. Though Lemon won’t lose his job, he will, nevertheless, lose his show.
In Licht’s first major programming shift, CNN announced this morning that Lemon will be moved out of his primetime show, Don Lemon Tonight, to become one of three anchors in a revamped CNN morning show. CNN’s press release quoted Lemon as being pleased with the move:
“I was honestly floored when Chris Licht asked me to do this and I’m honored by his belief in me. It’s going to be a thrill to take on this challenge with Poppy and Kaitlan. I’ll get to work with two of my dearest friends. Set your alarms folks, because we’re going to have a lot of fun.”
Dan Froomkin viewed the move more cynically:
Despite what critics suspect, Licht maintains that he’s not moving the network toward the right, but simply pushing for less opinion and more hard news. He might do well to remember what Stephen Colbert observed at the 2006 White House Correspondent’s dinner: “Reality has a well known liberal bias.”
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I'm kind of glad CNN is moving away from using "the Big Lie" to refer to the "stolen election" BS. Yes, that's a PRETTY big lie (or pack of lies), but not THE big lie. THE big lie, I think, is TFG himself. He isn't real, there's nothing true about him. He is a self-fabricated invention conceived and promoted to deceive, conceal and defraud. It's a whopper, man.