If you care about what’s “wrong” with CNN, well, you probably want to be on CNN. Otherwise, you wouldn’t give a shit. A couple of days ago, Tim Alberta published what is apparently considered (by people who want to appear on CNN) to be a “bombshell” article/takedown for the Atlantic, Inside the Meltdown at CNN, heaping 15,000 words of pseudo-dispassionate ridicule on the hapless head of CNN CEO Chris Licht, who took over last year after the implosion of long-time wunderkind Jeff Zucker, whose “noises” about making a return to “save” things were reported in this Sunday’s New York Times by the perhaps overly well-mannered Benjamin Mullin, who mentions some, but only some, of the “problematic” aspects of Zucker’s departure. Alberta doesn’t mention them at all.
There is one huge—“huge” as in “utterly gigantic”—strike against Licht, the absolutely obscene May 10 “Town Hall” meeting with Donald Trump, which Licht continues to defend as “journalism”, which it was not. By allowing Trump to perform before a crowd of hero-worshipping ditto-heads, Licht guaranteed that Trump would “own” the evening, however many “truths” his interrogator Kaitlan Collins came up with. The idea that Trump could be fazed by anything the lamestream media could throw at him was laughable, and the idea that CNN could convince Trumpland that the CNN folks were straight shooters no matter how hard they kissed Trump’s ass, even more so. The trouble is, before you get to the “story” of the May 10 Town Hall, you have to wade through 14,000 overly polished words of “reportage”, including some musing by Licht’s personal trainer on the failure of the New York Nets to win the NBA championship despite assembling a team of all-stars: “All that talent, but no chemistry”, sighed the dude. All that talent, but no chemistry? Hey, that almost sounds like a metaphor!
The problem is, things were more than a little bit “messy” at CNN during the reign of the now apparently beloved Zucker. Back in 2016, many people blamed Trump’s election on Zucker, for heavily featuring Trump in the network’s coverage of both the primaries and the general election (because, of course, Trump attracted a “wildly” devoted following, one who never tired of watching their hero in action, causing CNN’s ratings to soar, which is what television is all “about”). At the same time, CNN was allowing network star Chris Cuomo to interview his own brother, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo repeatedly, only easing Chris out when it became clear that, in addition to his soft-ball on-air questioning of his brother, Chris had been secretly advising him on a variety of political issues, and, in particular, helping his brother combat sexual harassment charges—and then, surprise, surprise, Chris himself was also hit with charges of sexual harassment.
Zucker’s turn came when his affair with Allison Gollust, an executive vice president at CNN, became public, when he was forced to resign on the grounds that the two had failed to report their relationship to management, as required. At the time that Gollust and Zucker “confessed”, they claimed their affair was “recent”—only two years or so—but that didn’t sit well with tattletale Katie Couric, who claimed, in her memoir Going There, that the affair had been long-running—long-running and “common knowledge”—and even, in its early days, adulterous. Thanks, Katie. Excuse me, but who had stepped on your toes?
One has to feel a little sorry for Licht—a little. He deserved a 3,000-word beatdown, not 15,000, for the woeful “Townhall with Donnie” trainwreck, as predictable as it was ugly—but it’s also obvious that he’s on a fool’s errand—that he can win the trust of “both sides” of the American political divide. He can’t. As the Fox folks recognized—and most amusingly said out loud—Trump folks want to be lied to, and in fact insist on it. They want their Trump truth not 100 proof but 200. If it doesn’t paralyze you, it isn’t the real thing.
Afterwords
If it’s not already obvious, I don’t watch CNN or any other TV news. TV news is not news; it is show business. Nine times out of ten, what people mean by “great television” is content-free “passion”, which is why Trump comes across so well on the tube. I won’t depart without taking one jab at Zucker-era CNN. A couple of years ago I was watching Anderson Cooper (not by choice), when his show featured a piece on a black female physician who was dying of COVID. On her deathbed, she bitterly charged her hospital with causing her death by supplying her with second-rate care because of her race. Anderson, of course, sighed earnestly over this brutal display of American racism and its consequences.
The ”awkward” thing was that the poor woman was at least 100 pounds overweight, scarcely able to move. Of course, I didn’t expect Cooper to grill her over her own responsibility for her condition. But it was absurd to present this as “news”, any more than it would be to show a pitiable old man blaming his demise on “the Jews”. There was no good reason to publicize the poor woman’s sad complaint, other than the search for “great”— “great” and politically correct—TV. Right-wing TV consciously lies to its audience, while the left lies with righteous innocence.
