I’ve been wondering that for a while, but the question has become more acute recently. CNN keeps bringing on that lying boob, Jeffrey Lord, or the Disney villainesque Kelly Ann Conway. Wolf Blitzer has been promoted above his level of competence, I suspect because of his name — he belongs in a Joseph Heller novel. Everyone’s eyes seem to light up with dollar signs every time Trump says something belligerently stupid, and the whole network’s reputation seems to rest on the orgiastic celebration of military violence. It’s just plain awful. CNN only survives on a tabloid-like fascination with evil and the fact that it’s not as much of a propaganda organ for the Republicans as is Fox News. “Not quite as bad as Fox News” is a hell of an endorsement.
If you’ve ever felt like cutting CNN some slack, though, you need to read this profile of Jeff Zucker, the president of CNN, and the sick media culture he fosters.
We can blame our own home-grown media organizations, especially CNN, for the elevation of Trump. Forget the Russians — Jeff Zucker is the real traitor.
CNN was hardly the only news organization to provide saturation coverage of the Trump campaign. The media-measurement firm mediaQuant calculated that Trump received the equivalent of $5.8 billion in free media — known as “earned media,” as opposed to paid advertising — over the course of the election, $2.9 billion more than Hillary Clinton. Nor is CNN the only cable-news network that has benefited from Trump’s incarnation as a politician. MSNBC and Fox News each had a surge in ratings during the election that has shown no signs of slowing since then. Fox, the president’s preferred outlet, is coming off the best quarter in the history of 24-hour cable news. MSNBC, the network of the resistance, has been thriving, too, often even beating CNN during prime time.
But CNN was the first major news organization to give Trump’s campaign prolonged and sustained attention. He was a regular guest in the network’s studios from the earliest days of the Republican primaries, often at Zucker’s suggestion. (For a while, according to the MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, Trump referred to Zucker as his “personal booker.”) When Trump preferred not to appear in person, he frequently called in. Nor did CNN ever miss an opportunity to broadcast a Trump rally or speech, building the suspense with live footage of an empty lectern and breathless chyrons: “DONALD TRUMP EXPECTED TO SPEAK ANY MINUTE.” Kalev Leetaru, a data scientist, using information obtained from the TV News Archive, calculated that CNN mentioned Trump’s name nearly eight times more frequently than that of the second-place finisher, Ted Cruz, during the primaries.
He isn’t a news person at all. There’s nothing about journalistic standards in his approach. It’s not a news network, it’s a circus.
What Zucker is creating now is a new kind of must-see TV — produced almost entirely in CNN’s studios — an unending loop of dramatic moments, conflicts and confrontations. “I’ve always been interested in the news, but I’ve always been interested in what’s popular,” Zucker says. “I’ve always had a little bit of a populist take on things. Which I know is interesting when you talk about Donald Trump.”
Every circus needs its clowns, and Zucker has hired at least a dozen of them.
Lord made his CNN debut in July 2015. Two weeks later, CNN offered him a job as the network’s first pro-Trump contributor. (CNN said it was already considering Lord and that Trump’s suggestion had no effect on their decision to hire him.) Today, he is one of 12 Trump partisans on CNN’s payroll and perhaps the network’s most reliable, if mild-mannered, provocateur; he recently defended Trump’s tweet that Obama had orchestrated a “Nixon/Watergate” wiretapping plot against him, saying that the president was just speaking “Americanese.” The network sends a black town car four days a week to ferry him to Manhattan from Harrisburg and back, a three-hour drive each way.
Stop. Just stop. Turn off the entire media spectacle of 24 hour news. It’s a failure. It’s worse than a failure. It’s led us to think that entertainment (of the worst kind) is information, and has paved the road to complete corruption and ineptitude in our politics. I’d like to think that print journalism, at least, isn’t completely dead — note that I’m citing a NY Times article here — but even there the signs are on the wall. Just look at their op-ed pages, which consists largely of a parade of over-paid idiots, to see the same rot growing there.
At this point I’m more reliant on European news sources. It’s not that they’re necessarily better, but that at least they’re outside looking in at the chaos in America.
But tune out CNN. They’re tainted.
The CNN mindset:
I feel lucky. I’ve never been able to watch CNN.
(Disney villainesque?)
I started boycotting CNN around January 20, 1991, a few days after the start of Operation Dessert Storm. It was a bit like porn…too easy to get sucked into watching the lurid spectacle. Their fetish for war was too much. We cut the cable about the same time. My wife and I decided we had better things to do with the money. We haven’t had it since.
And yes, it’s disheartening how CNN and other news outlets gave Trump so much free air. Even the so-called alternative press has done it and continues to do it…my FB feed is full of HuffPuff’s and AlterNet’s daily blather of Trumpy did this, Trumpy did that. They all use his every outrage as click bait, like a sideshow barker shilling the rubes.
I don’t watch CNN. Does that count as boycotting?
That might be the CNN mindset, but it was actually said (!) by the odious Brian Williams, on MSNBC.
fok me “not-FoxNoise” is good enough for me.
I know, shist.
Sometimes feel stuck making choice between the two, CNN always takes precedence over Faux News. Usually when traveling, unfamiliar with local channels, so I’ll default to CNN, avoiding Faux Noise like the Plague.
Much prefer flooding airport terminals with CNN rather than FauxNews.
ugh
not defending CNN, more attacking FauxNoise
crup
?
As robro says, this is nothing new — it’s what CNN has always been about.
slithey — You don’t have to watch any of it. It’s ok to turn off the TV. Read. It’s available everywhere you are, even in airports. And you can get a lot of different perspectives. And if you get tired of reading the news, read the funnies.
“Well it’s just like the show before
And the news is
Just another show
With sex and violence.”
(Jane’s Addiction, “Ted, Just Admit It…” from “Nothing’s Shocking”)
robro said:
I can’t agree more. Television news has such a low information density, often skims stories, and wastes so much time with previews and non-news items. In a few minutes I can check multiple news sites, read multiple stories on the same topic, and great a far broader look at the news.
I am not sure anymore what news is supposed to be or do. All of it seems to have a very low information density and is still selected by the old criteria “if it bleeds it leads” even NPR and PBS fall victim some times.
all are so selective that any one alone gives a very distorted view of what is going on and what is really significant.
CNN is nothing more than a TV version of AM radio headline news with just a different kind of tape loop which changes about the same, as little as possible, hour to hour which turd floats to the top.
uncle frogy
CNN once was even watched by intelligence agencies, as CNN had more correspondents than the agencies had agents.
Now, as was admitted by their head drone, he cares about what is popular, not what is actually happening in the country and the world.
I’ve long ago switched to using BBC News and Al Jazeera.
Entertainment, to sell advertising.
As far as US-based media outlets is concerned, I find that The Young Turks is tolerable most days, and reasonable more often than not. Certainly not perfect, by any means, but they are far more trustworthy than other sources.
CNN, MSNBC and other broadcast news is simply unacceptable. And it’s been that way for the better part of the 21st century so far.
CNN once (the Turner days) led in coverage, now they want to lead in newsertainment.
Television has a built-in bias that way.
The more you watch, the less you know.