By Tom Baxter
Last Thursday, hundreds of current and former employees of Cable News Network gathered around the big red sign outside CNN Center for a farewell photograph before the network moved its Atlanta operations back to its original Midtown location.
It was a tender moment, both for the network and the city from which it sprang four decades ago. The moment was also fleeting.
The following day, The Atlantic published a long and scathing account by Tim Alberta of the “meltdown” at CNN under the leadership of CEO Chris Licht, capped by the May 10 town hall with former President Donald Trump, which has been panned on both the left and right as a disaster. The story was so damning that in a Monday morning call, Licht apologized to the CNN staff for being a distraction.
“As I read that article, I found myself thinking, CNN is not about me,” Licht is reported to have said. “I should not be in the news unless it’s taking arrows for you. Your work is what should be written about.”
This all comes less than two months after CNN’s arch-rival, Fox News Network, reached a $787.5 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems and subsequently fired Tucker Carlson, its highest-paid employee. The conservative network still faces several lawsuits over its 2020 post-election coverage, including one by Georgia election worker Shane Moss and her mother Ruby Freeman.
This is, in short, a fraught time for the 24/7 cable news format that CNN pioneered when it went on the air in 1980.
The two networks’ founders, Ted Turner and Rupert Murdoch, maintained an intense rivalry. Turner even challenged Murdoch to a fistfight after his schooner was sunk by a Murdoch-sponsored boat in a 2003 yacht race. CNN and Fox have staked out different places on the political spectrum, but in many respects they have long been joined at the hip, as illustrated by Carlson, who worked for both networks. They’re like siblings who don’t get along, both scandalized by their wayward cousins, MSNBC and OAN.
The root of both networks’ current problems is a shared contempt for the intelligence of their viewers. Dominion was able to put Fox over a barrel in its lawsuit because its executives and on-air personalities spoke freely in text messages of the need to deceive Trump voters who they feared would abandon them if they told the truth about who won the 2020 presidential election.
CNN, in a clumsy attempt to win over a share of these same viewers, packed its April town hall with almost a cartoon version of the average Republican voter. The term “magadonian” didn’t exist before Trump coined it in an all-caps Truth Social screed over this past weekend, but the voters who cheered and jeered at the town hall in New Hampshire were plainly magadonians. The words Licht used to describe them, apparently with some satisfaction, was “extra Trumpy.”
This was to compensate for the perception that the network leaned too far to the left, but if the intention had been to pack the hall with liberals, the result would have been equally outlandish.
Apologists for both networks go through the charade of longing for the old days when serious journalists like Lawrence Spivak asked politicians no-nonsense but polite questions. In reality, if an on-air personality posed a question that strained the short attention span of any of their viewers, they’d be gone by the next news cycle.
“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,” said John Malone, the billionaire board member who has pushed for CNN’s new-broom approach. It would be unique and refreshing, but don’t count on that evolution to happen quickly.
According to the Atlantic article, after the Trump town hall, a shaken but still upbeat Licht attempted to put the train wreck in the best light.
“Well,” he said, “that wasn’t boring!”
As if that were the worst thing it could have been.
I really haven’t seen any evidence that CNN stocked the Trump Town Hall with a cartoonish version of Republican voters. Maybe I’m missing something, but the only statement I’ve seen from CNN is that the audience included both Trump supporters and uncommitted Republican voters. If this was indeed the case, that would suggest it would be representative of the Republicans voting in the presidential primary.