The Politico pretends that there is a fix for CNN. There isn’t.
In an attempt to breathe life into the corpse, Michael Calderone starts with a false premise:
Jon Klein, the network president, has consistently defended the network’s down-the-middle news strategy despite the increasingly large ratings leads opened up by MSNBC and particularly Fox, with their ideological slants and big personalities.
Let’s begin with this. There is no “down-the-middle” news strategy at CNN. The fact that Jon Klein asserts this is ludicrous given his foot in mouth disease that gave birth to the name Pajamas Media during his defense of Dan Rather during Rathergate. But that liberals cannot recognize the slant of the news that is fed them (unless it leans right, which Fox does) is an indication of a larger problem. As the saying goes, if you don’t know who the sucker is at the table, you’re the sucker. Or rather, if television news were a poker tournament CNN viewers (and MSNBC’s) would be the sucker. The extraordinary element in this mini drama is that CNN could have seen their demise coming if they were paying attention.
Since the early 1980’s media critics have been complaining about the bias of mainstream media outlets. Reed Irvine at Accuracy in Media was a pioneer in this effort, taking on the likes of The New York Times, The Washington Post and Bob Woodward. Brent Bozell and the Media Research Center were also what might be described as early adaptors to ctrical analysis of the big media companies. What Irvine and Bozell began as a cottage industry that focused on media bias has transformed into a media monolith that dwarfs the audiences of the cable outlets. (It should also be noted that Irvine and Bozell did it on shoe string budgets, unlike the multi millions heaped on Media Matters and other Soros funded mouthpieces that sprout up when the Fox News’ and Rush Limbaughs gained traction) Without local programming, Jeopardy, and Wheel of Fortune the network news outlets would find themselves in the same situation as CNN and MSNBC.
CNN used to be a regular stop for me when the evening news was part of the pre internet lifestyle. One of my favorite programs was Crossfire. In its very early years Crossfire was a rare thing: a program where a liberal and a conservative went at each other with few, if any, constraints from the producer. Ironically, Crossfire veterans like Michael Kinsley and Bill Press trace the demise of CNN to Klein’s cancellation of the program:
Ask a couple of former “Crossfire” hosts for a solution to CNN’s ratings troubles, and maybe it’s not a surprise what their answer is: Resurrect their old show.
Both Michael Kinsley and Bill Press — each of whom had stints taking the liberal side of the right vs. left political slugfest — think it’s worth a shot.
By bringing back “Crossfire,” they argue, CNN could continue with its strategy of not falling squarely on the left or the right in prime time, but still offer lively opinion on both sides — something it appears that viewers want.
Five years ago, one of Klein’s first orders of business after becoming network president was killing off the long-running show, a pioneer in high-decibel political debate which had been the recipient of harsh on-air criticism from “Daily Show” host Jon Stewart just a few months before.
“When he unceremoniously dumped it, Jon Klein said he wanted straight news and not commentary or opinion,” Kinsley told POLITICO. “And now he’s got everyone expressing opinions left and right — because that’s what people like.’“‘Crossfire’ used to vie with Larry King as the network’s No. 1 show — and we beat him on many nights, even though he had us as a leadin and we had Lou Dobbs,” Kinsley said, adding that he means “the early Lou Dobbs, the boring corporate suck-up, not the new exciting xenophobic Lou Dobbs of legend.”
“We were No. 1,” said Press, a top liberal radio host who was on “Crossfire” from 1996 to 2003. He described Klein’s pulling the plug on “Crossfire” as “one of the biggest mistakes in the history of modern television journalism.”
It’s a shame that Calderon could not have shared the viewpoints of the late Robert Novak, who often represented the conservative side on Crossfire. But from the liberal hosts quoted it’s apparent that Klein made a monumental mistake by killing a popular program and replacing it with a format that would find a welcome spot at ,say, The New York Times, where opinion pieces are masqueraded as news columns daily. And therein lies the fatal flaw afflicting CNN: only the the very few that still watch the network fail to see that it long ago traded it’s journalistic soul for ideology. Everyone else left. Will CNN ever learn that in the news business if you have an ideological slant it’s much better to say so upfront than to pretend not so and assume your listener’s agreement?
How are those pajama’s fitting now Mr. Klein?
