As new CNN head Chris Licht looks to revamp a network that has lost its way, he has one thing working in his favor: The "news" network at this point couldn't possibly get worse. That's what you'd think, anyway, as the once-news-heavy network turned into a den of cheap punditry that swiftly turned every breaking story into a rote-format Teatime For Assholes segment featuring a line of partisan provocateurs to insist that the story, whatever it was, was yet more proof that whoever last wrote a check for their consulting services is the one with all the answers to these problems.
Whether the shift was an attempt to copy the combative style of Fox News (that is, by promoting voices that simply flat-out lie to their audience) or was simply a product of new network cheapness (journalism is expensive; propping four contracted loudmouths to Opine about journalism costs considerably less) is irrelevant. The end result was yet another network that has been doing as much to misinform Americans as inform them. Specifically, the network responded to the horror of its established conservative pundits when faced with the candidacy of boorish, racist, sexist, ever crime-adjacent Trump by hiring new conservative pundits willing to excuse all of those things, for "balance," and indeed responded to each new in-office scandal and impeachable crime by Trump's burgeoning fascist circle with new hires either willing to excuse those new things or who were active participants themselves.
New network-runner Licht inherits a studio that worked very hard to become indifferent to scandals that any past version of American journalism would have ridden to the ground. He inherits a stable of coup apologists, propaganda crafters, cover-up artists, incompetent hacks, and those who set the stage for a million pandemic deaths. He oversees a network that has done great damage to America through a pattern of enforced indifference. There are really very few ways the programming could get much worse.
Via Axios, however, there are hints that Licht might have found the one way to make things worse. On premise, Licht says his plans are to return the network to its more newsy, less shouty roots, and a new internal memo asking showrunners to stop misusing the "breaking news" banner for the news equivalent of cat-up-tree stories is a good start. But Licht also wants the network to be "less partisan,” reports Axios, and its own report is full of very not-good sentences that suggest somebody here—is it Licht, or is it Axios and their sources?—has a definition of "partisan" that is almost custom-baked to produce the worst possible results. Shall we peek?
"For on-air talent, that includes engaging in respectful interviews that don't feel like PR stunts. For producers and bookers, that includes making programming decisions that are focused on nuance, not noise."
We can all dream of a day in which an airport television tuned to CNN does not put out a steady stream of well-dressed professional bullshitters shouting talking points at each other, so that sounds like a good step. But the phrase “engaging in respectful interviews” is raising a few flags, and when Axios blithely continues with this:
"Some on-air personalities, like Jim Acosta and Brian Stelter, have become the face of the network's liberal shift."
... it becomes evident that somebody here is f--king with the definition of common political terms, and in a way that suggests somebody here continues to equate "journalism" with "being respectful to people willing to lie to the public, to people engaged in crimes and cover-ups, and to attackers of democracy itself."
Campaign Action
If poking holes in the talking points of liars now counts as “liberal” journalism, something that needs to be avoided so that we can all get back to being "respectful" to people promoting partisan hoaxes for partisan gain, then we're not really talking about a return to actual journalism. We're just looking for ways to keep the same liars in the same positions of authority while tasking on-air reporters with the role of keeping their mouths shut and nodding along. And you know where you can find that coverage?
Everywhere. It consists of 90% of all supposed "news interviews." It's the very reason CNN and other networks decayed into anti-journalism pundit fights to begin with—by inviting known liars and regularly dishonest "newsmakers" onto the airwaves, then giving the resulting lies "respect" by insisting that hosts and issue-knowledgable journalists keep their mouths shut rather than pointing out to their viewers that, actually, this person over here just lied to you and we all should be making some value judgments about that.
The notion of making the news network less partisan by cutting down on partisan sources sounds noble indeed, if you're talking about ending the practice of hiring members of the Donald Trump administration whose explicit jobs revolved around misleading the public about scandals, screw-ups, and actual crimes. Following up with like that noted liberal Jim Acosta blows the whole thing up.
Acosta's journalism crime, for those blessedly out of the know, is a willingness to spar with Trump press room flacks whose talking points were so egregiously ridiculous as to count as lies. During briefings in which a whole lot of White House-bound journalists were rolling their eyes at the steady stream of lies being dispensed, Acosta was more aggressive in questioning the lies than most of the others, which rapidly led to conservative accusations that he wuz a liberal, with all his fact-knowing and annoying journalistic skepticism, and that take has largely blossomed among "newsmakers" and network pundits who don't like having their talking points deflated and absolutely see it as a conspiracy against them.
To put it more simply, a reporter who asks pointed questions is a reporter, and a reporter who asks a conservative pointed questions is a "liberal." That's the whole flowchart. If you feel the urge to look into the history of how this came to be conventional wisdom (not to mention a heavily monetized plank of Everything That Is Wrong With America Today), look up "Bernard Goldberg" and have fun with that.
But "the very act of questioning partisan claims is partisan" is, to repeat, Everything That Is Wrong With America Today. It is the thing that allowed a petty and ridiculous hoax to blossom into a justification for the attempted toppling of the United States government. The CNN act of hiring known partisan liars, prioritizing a liar's fame over an expert's knowledge, is why we are here. The network helped do this.
If "respectful" dialog means not booking lawmakers or partisans who are predominantly known for their willingness to mislead the public, that is one thing. If it means booking them while issuing new memos reminding interviewers that responding to falsehoods aggressively will be seen as equally "partisan," then the network will neatly slide into a niche of very polite misinformation.
The question here, then, is who's pushing this new ridiculous narrative in which CNN is both said to be wanting to re-align itself with its more journalistic past, tone down the partisan Teatime For Assholes schtick, and crack down on any host who became known as too combative when faced with the only American administration to ever attempt violent insurrection. Who, exactly, is elevating "respectful" as an adjective that needs to square off against those who have freely produced absolutely false hoaxes meant to destabilize our very democracy, on equal footing, so that nobody gets too heated about the prevalence of party-backed disinformation campaigns these days?
It's very possible that Licht is being, ahem, wrongly interpreted here; as a veteran of Stephen Colbert's late-night show, he is certainly well aware of the role of propagandist bullshit in destabilizing both the news industry and democracy, and both CNN and the Axios stable are known to be quite full of people who are indifferent on the whole does-democracy-live-or-die thing, but can get quite heated when the role of professional liars in our discourse is questioned. We shall see.
But we do stand corrected. There is, in fact, a way that CNN could turn from its current role as an enabler of propaganda and booster of anti-democracy propagandists into something of even less value. Promising to rid the network of partisanship while simultaneously singling out anyone who still attempted to do a passing job of public journalism during a time of widespread partisan falsehoods, while the rest of the network spent its days in masturbatory, self-indulgent, and grossly damaging panels with some of the most willing liars in the nation is a signal that somebody here still thinks the professional liars have just as much right to airtime as journalists tasked with sorting out their hoaxes.
Is it Licht? Or is somebody putting words in his mouth? Can't wait to find out, but one clue that Axios’ reporting has an agenda of its own may come from an earlier story in which Axios reported that new CNN management wanted to "push CNN back to hard news, and away from red-hot liberal opining."
Oh, fellas. We here in the mothership of red-hot liberal opining can assure you, fully and completely, that if anybody here saw CNN as a hive of red-hot liberal opining then we’d be watching it instead of going to great lengths to avoid it. Who are we talking about, here? National Review guy Jonah Goldberg, author of Liberal Fascism? Chris Wallace, the straight-news face that was perfectly content abiding Fox News propaganda and hoax promotion right up until it led to dead people inside the Capitol?
The only way we get to the phrase "red-hot liberal opining" over at CNN is if somebody’s been sucking on hallucinogenic toads, and inserting toad-based hallucinations into ostensibly neutral news stories while groaning that reporters who get too hung up on facts aren’t doing journalism right is Everything Wrong With America Today. Somebody want to come clean up this nonsense and explain what’s really going on?
Elie Mystal is on Daily Kos' The Brief podcast