Very long (9000 words) and very long awaited. I found it was easy to get around the Atlantic paywall be accessing it through the many links on Twitter (is it always that easy to get around paywalls?).
I am very surprised that Licht comes off so much worse than even I had previously seen him. I knew he was enthralled to his corporate overlords, but assumed he was also competent and perhaps even talented. Perhaps he is, but not in his current position, and he is lying either to everyone else or himself about what he is doing and why. He repeats the same analogy several times in the piece, trying to convey his sense of what it means to get more balance in CNN’s coverage: “His network would host people who like rain as well as people who don’t like rain. But, he said, CNN would not host people who deny that it’s raining when it is.” Licht seems clueless to the obvious contradiction here, since by putting Trump and his fluffers on, with little or no effective counter, to deny the election and justify their attempt to overthrown the Constitutional transfer of power, he is exactly hosting people who deny it is raining when it is. Licht may or may not be self deluded, but his bosses are clear eyed - they want CNN to be another conservative News voice. Period. Not more accurate or with more journalistic integrity, just more conservative. As I have been arguing for years, Licht is of course right that there were serious problems with Zucker’s CNN, but the problem was not that they were too liberal or ideological, but too personal. CNN scored through the Trump era by turning the news into a cult of personality, with so many of the anchors and reporters making the story about themselves. Cooper is not the most obnoxious, but he pioneered this approach to cable news a long time ago, reporting on war and disaster by telling us more about how it made him feel than what was actually happening. A little of this, in extremis, is gripping (the catch in Cronkite’s voice as he reports the death of a President). As a SOP, it is a disaster. The solution is not to make the staff more like Fox, but to train them to focus on the facts. Licht pays lip service to this, but in practice is only focused on questions like: “Do gun owning farmers in Kansas like our show?”. And that’s because that is the only kind of question Zaslov and Malone care about. On Fri, 2 Jun 2023 at 4:14 PM JW <[email protected]> wrote: > From The Atlantic: > > > https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2023/06/cnn-ratings-chris-licht-trump/674255/ > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "TVorNotTV" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tvornottv/CAKSNnOE-3Z03Y5t%2BR2yQ7B3gDfJ6Y6JRi0cOYmUjhi-jKbNbhA%40mail.gmail.com > <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tvornottv/CAKSNnOE-3Z03Y5t%2BR2yQ7B3gDfJ6Y6JRi0cOYmUjhi-jKbNbhA%40mail.gmail.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer> > . > -- Sent from Gmail Mobile -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TVorNotTV" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tvornottv/CAKGtkYJdYcMXNh_iFpY3ygrk1XDFsyP%2BP44j5BK4HWmtatji8g%40mail.gmail.com.
