The Meltdown at CNN | Hacker News Reader

The Meltdown at CNN

theatlantic.com

124 pointsjgalt212142 comments

There is no way for CNN to win. Unless it's somehow a loss leader for its parent company, there's really no reason for it to exist. You can't make the news a compelling 24/7 product without turning into toxic partisan entertainment, a lesson Fox News learned early and MSNBC has successfully followed on with. There just isn't enough interesting news! There's no opportunity for a "centrist" cable news network, because what drives the constant attention is appeals to partisan agitation.

Fox News has about 1.5MM viewers, MSNBC close behind with ~1.2MM. CNN has 500k. Two things to note about those numbers: even for Fox, they're infinitesimal (Game of Thrones, which is premium cable content, averaged almost 30x more; the NYT has almost 10x more subscribers, there are more subscribers to The Atlantic Monthly, where this article ran, than reliable CNN watchers, &c). And, if you scope it down to the demographic ("under 54"), it's even bleaker: all the cable networks have a little over 100k viewers.

This is not a good product. Steven Colbert was right to warn Chris Licht off of taking this position.

Tim Alberta is an excellent writer, by the way; it's worth seeking out things he's written.

"You can't make the news a compelling 24/7 product without turning into toxic partisan entertainment, "

True. There simply isn't enough real stuff to report to fill 24/7.

>There simply isn't enough real stuff to report to fill 24/7.

Sure there is. There is so much news for one day that it's impossible to get it all. If 8 billion people are awake for 10 hours each day. You have 80 billion hours of people's experiences to compresses into only 24 hours.

We're getting hung up on semantics. The parent comment said "real stuff". I said "interesting news". People took issue with both terms. But that's fine: substitute whichever term you'd like for content sufficiently attractive to make CNN competitive. The strategy Fox and MSNBC use to accomplish this --- and, again, bear in mind that their audiences are relatively pathetic, even when they're successful! --- is obvious: turning the news into a sporting event. The NYT uses another strategy: they're a broader entertainment platform, not solely reliant on the news, and have a significant cohort of subscribers who don't even care about the news. But CNN can't really do that, either.

There is an ungodly amount of editorial content that could be done on every single corporate/government scandal, collusion, bribery, corruption, you name it -- which happens on a 24/7 basis. You could fill a month with the food industry alone. Let alone chemical companies.

There is a mindboggling amount of shit that is completely and utterly ignored, or suppressed, or normalized as "business as usual".

But it's not profitable for a CNN to report on this, not because they wouldn't get eyeballs and viewers, but because the tightly enmeshed corporate stakeholders of the world in and around the infotainment sector wouldn't want it to happen.

I do a lot of local political stuff, and am acquainted with people doing serious local political corruption and mismanagement and scandal journalism, and I think you'd be surprised how small the audience is for that stuff. CNN isn't avoiding this stuff because they're part of a conspiracy to suppress the truth; they're avoiding it because it's ratings death. Which is what you're saying! But they're a business, not a public service, so that's the end of the story.

How about “real, interesting stuff that appeals to more than 2 people”.

With skilled enough story telling a writer can make almost anything appeal to a mass audience.

What does "skilled enough" mean? Do you have any examples that demonstrate this?

Funny. There used to be, back when CNN was a news network...

Did there used to be? Or did CNN function more like a utility, something between what it is now and the Weather Channel, which is how I remember it? Because it's not that you can't stand up The Weather Channel But For News; it's that you can't compete with Fox and MSNBC doing that.

That is a great analogy. That is how I remember it also.

More high brow and not something you would really watch for an hour straight.

The old CNN was meant to be as "entertaining" as the Weather Channel.

Even then, not really. Most of the time they had 4-6 hours of actual programming that they just repeated.

This is what I remember. They had basically an hourly rotation of segments, and every once in a while they would update them. But if you had watched for 2 hours, there was a pretty good chance that a lot of the second hour was completely repeated.

I'm skeptical. The "C" in CNN is sort of the giveaway that there was never really any legitimacy there.

Am I picking on cable as a whole, suggesting it was always a profit-driven entity that runs counter to level-headed news reporting? I guess I am.

And I'll defend the "big three" networks that existed before cable because news was only a small portion of their broadcast schedule. I don't think the networks objected to Walter Cronkite (etc.) being the loss-leading face to represent their corporate integrity.

Nah, same amount of news, way less competition for eyeballs back then. CNN had its best commercial times when the Internet was still very small.

For years, if something important happened in the middle of the day, CNN was kind of it, in terms of finding out what was going on quickly. If it was REALLY big, the networks might break into their daytime programming, but that was a very high bar.

To be fair, CNN’s heyday was mostly centered around the major international crises between the end of the Cold War (“the end of history”) and major uptake of the internet. Similar events would be treated as a “slow news day” today, because the audience only cares about international news when it suits them. Their major domestic coverage of the LA riots would set better precedent for a US audience, except everyone is either inured to the exaggeration of non-news to that proportion or acutely aware that news of that proportion like mass violence is barely reported at all.

> There simply isn't enough real stuff to report to fill 24/7.

There isn't enough CHEAP stuff to report to fill 24/7 that isn't toxic partisan garbage.

There is plenty of "real" news. But it takes real money to go dig it up and put it together.

>There just isn't enough interesting news!

There isn't enough sensationlist news, you mean. There are plenty of, arguably bordering on the infinite, interesting goings-on in the world around us.

The problem for journalism and why it was replaced with "journalism" has always been that journalism costs money, you need customers to make money (or else rely on the state, a la BBC, NHK, etc.), and the most effective way to get customers has always been to sensationalize.

Merely being interesting doesn't make enough money for journalism to pay for itself, let alone return a profit, thus we have "journalism" and its endless spewing of sensationalism.

Select whichever words best describe the challenge of getting a million people to watch cable news --- or, really, any news show for more than 30 minutes. That's how much time Walter Cronkite had, and he had roughly 30 million viewers.

Walter Cronkite only had to keep viewers interested for a 1 hour news show each day, not 24/7. The network his show ran on spent most of its time airing things that were not news. CNN is trying to run news 24/7, and of course it's failing to keep people interested given that.

Also, Walter Cronkite had only two other major networks to compete with. CNN has to compete with however many cable channels there are plus the entire Internet. I'm not sure even Cronkite could have kept 30 million viewers in today's environment.

The CBS Evening News was only 30 minutes long when Cronkite anchored it. :) We basically agree, though.

> The CBS Evening News was only 30 minutes long when Cronkite anchored it.

Hm, yes, I'd forgotten that.

> isn't enough sensationlist news, you mean. There are plenty of, arguably bordering on the infinite, interesting goings-on in the world around us

I don’t think unsensational is a fit for TV news. Maybe I’m wrong. But as someone who likes that stuff, I tend to get my news through text.

> The problem for journalism and why it was replaced with "journalism" has always been that journalism costs money, you need customers to make money

That's part of it certainly, but it's also driven by the need for neverending growth. It's not enough to just be making enough to be solidly in the black, the networks are pressured to always being pulling record profits.

It's completely unrealistic, but that's the expectation regardless.

That seems a secondary or tertiary issue. If they can't even break even then there's no point blaming profit targets.

> There's no opportunity for a "centrist" cable news network

Worth pointing out that the actual scoop in this article is that Licht deliberately put his hands on the scales to tilt coverage toward Trump, even to the extent of personally suppressing coverage of the one-day-old sexual abuse verdict.

Whether or not there's a market for "centrist" news or not, that's not centrist news.

Licht and Musk are similar in that they both hold right-of-center (Licht) or right-of-right (Musk) views, convinced themselves that they’re representative of the median American, and bet their respective media orgs on amplifying their views on the assumption that a majority of Americans would flock to them. Instead, they’ve hemorrhaged viewers/users, alienated key personnel and, in Musk’s case, terrified advertisers. If the market is the ultimate arbiter of theses, theirs have been thoroughly falsified.

Am I misreading that they reported hundreds of millions of dollars of profit in 2022?

Like I agree that cable news seems to be a declining business with bad programming incentives, but if I had to choose between something like the profits from a nice restaurant that people widely appreciated and hundreds of millions of dollars from CNN, I'd have an easy time of it.

They make money a bunch of different ways, and one big one is advertising, but don't forget that a pretty significant chunk of their revenue (and Fox's) is carriage fees: money they get mechanically from cable providers, just for existing.

Where do you read that? They are a part of the conglomerate discovery time Warner, and I do not see where CNN’s financials are separately broken out in the 10-K.

I always thought netflix would have best fit owning a news channel that just focused on reporting facts, events, without spin, as they happen. Due to sheer subscriber numbers, if the news channel had advertisements, it'd have a good chance at large viewership to bring in profit.

When half the country believes the “election was stolen”, there is no agreement in facts.

Even on HN, there was an argument about something as sensible as “kids in preschool were a major cause of the spread of Covid”, while parents have known from time immemorial that kids in preschool were walking Petri dishes for every communicable disease imaginable.

The above statement is very much common sense. Now the opinion should come in about what should have been done about that fact.

If the election really was stolen they seem pretty docile about it. It was posturing. That’s more consistent with the evidence.

>If the election really was stolen they seem pretty docile about it.

Has January 6th already slipped from your mind? Aside from that it's strange to suggest we should ignore what people said, consistently, for years.

I don’t know how they saw themselves on Jan 5, but afterward they’ve acted like a bunch of teenagers who threw a tantrum and now want to be indulged for a misunderstanding (leniency).

As serious as the charges are, I think we should honor their desires because it belittles the entire pack of idiots.

People doing serious jail time for something that was so stupid, it deflated them.

> Has January 6th already slipped from your mind

Is there a fairly neutral source on January 6? I can only find partisan ones, and the photos and video I saw seem very benign. Is there a decent writeup that draws it all together?

Assuming you don't intend to dismiss any source that doesn't paint an entirely benign image as being partisan, there is the Wikipedia page[0]. Of course, it's easy to find plenty of non-benign images and video from the event, it's odd that you've apparently never encountered them.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_6_United_States_Capito...

What’s “benign” about trespassing in a government building causing lawmakers and the VP to go into hiding?

I think with almost any other protest group, trespassing would not be being thought of this severely.

People died. It was not "very benign".

I thought that was a person who was climbing in through a window and was shot by police? Were there others?

What about that unscheduled building tour is so important?

Aside from storming the Capital, intending to beat & murder politicians they don’t like, smearing feces on the walls and parading confederate flags through it, and general white rage, you mean?

I doubt the real number believing that is half the public, or even half the voting public. Certainly a fair number, maybe not the majority, but at least a sizable chunk, of Republicans don't believe the stolen election theories.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2023/03/14/republi...

All I have is gut feel, but I agree. If half the public truly believed the election was rigged, then we’re a pathetic lot for not being out in the streets daily raising hell in protest. People just say it without believing it. The Jan 6th folks believed it, but there has been nothing since.

Isn't that more or less what happened in 2000, with little to show for it? It all coming down to a confusing ballot in a state run by one of the candidate's brother's, the recounts were ordered stopped, and later analysis showed full recounts would actually have given Gore the state & presidency.

There is no equivalence. They had recounts in multiple states before the election was decided and each case, Biden won by more votes - including my former home state GA where there was a Republican governor and a Republican Secretary of State that stood up to the foolishness. There were no mass protest and certainly no invasion of the Capital.

Gore didn’t spend years complaining. He ceded the election and moved on.

"Half the country" is what Trump supporters claim the size of their membership is. It's propaganda based on a purposeful misrepresentation of the fact that about about half of the public who voted in 2016 voted for Trump. They like to use it when making veiled neo-revolutionary threats against "the left" or "city dwellers" or whatever group they feel doesn't show them enough respect at that moment, or to overstate the legitimacy and influence of their movement within the public at large.

At some point, "half the country" simply evolved within common parlance into shorthand for Trumpists and Republicans in general. An unfortunate side effect of this is that it's also useful among the left, who should know better, when used unironically to make Trumpism into a bigger monster than it is.

Of course, nowhere near half the country even voted at all, and of those who voted, a slightly bigger half voted for Hillary Clinton. But Trumpism demonstrates that minority movements can still have influence when they grab power, even if they can't really claim a mandate. That a significant fraction of Republicans either believe the election was stolen or believe claiming such is necessary to maintain power is still troubling.

This is what the polls say about who believed the “election was stolen”.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2023/03/14/republi...

What social media has painfully exposed is the level of gullibility within all societies globally. And political opportunism has been utilizing this to bad ends.

“Classic Media” today, is busy pushing the narratives of whacky billionaires/corporations as a general undercurrent.

1) Work in the office is better than remote.

2) National healthcare can’t work in the US, only in every other industrialized nation.

3) wealthy people are geniuses & you should read the books they read and listen to them about everything.

4) progressives are evil, conservatives are evil.

5) Ignore the military industrial complex, keep feeding the military budget.

6) homelessness can’t be solved.

7) Support the Troops! But once they are veterans ignore them to the bureaucracy of the hellhole of veterans affairs.

8) Authoritarianism in government is alarming but there is nothing to be done.

Even then, it's also down to the interpretation of "stolen" ... does a "cabal" of journalists and technologists working to "defend the election" by shaping the news and opinion stories that get spread vs stopped count? Does changing election practice in violation of a state's constitution count?

It's also worth considering it isn't even just one side, in 2019-2020 Hillary was still saying the election was stolen from her.

Note: I was working for an election services company over the 2020 election cycle and saw coworkers and even myself seeing death threats. I still think there were a lot of at least suspicious things across the country. In the end, the lack of trust in media/news and the government is pretty well deserved all around.

> in 2019-2020 Hillary was still saying the election was stolen from her.

Not all has-been losers are treated equally. The so-called leftist media has not taken up her claim; the democrat base has not taken up her claim; I've heard of no serious democratic candidates running on her claim. So when you say it isn't just one side, you're comparing a mountain to a molehill.

Well, left leaning media sites her claims without any dispute. That hasn't been the same for Trump's claims. Especially considering YouTube's censorship in the mix in terms of coverage.

> It's also worth considering it isn't even just one side, in 2019-2020 Hillary was still saying the election was stolen from her.

Hilary made jokes about it for sure. Trump sounded like he wasn’t joking. Maybe libs just can’t get his joking style.

Half of the country doesn’t trust the other half, and Vice versa. That’s mostly the problem right there (they trust their media but not the othersides, they trust their election officials but not the othersides, well, except in Georgia).

> in 2019-2020 Hillary was still saying the election was stolen from her

That’s just a straight up lie. Or—being charitable—a shameless false equivalence.

She repeated the (proven) fact that there was widespread Russian involvement in promoting her opposition & a disinformation campaign.

For varying definitions of proven compared to 2020 or earlier elections.

edit: note "Twitter files" showed that the claim of large Russian influence was unsubstantiated.

The Twitter Files absolutely did not show that. They DID show how many of Elon’s sycophants are really damn gullible however.

The Twitter Files showed zero of note, they were themselves an orchestrated propaganda exercise that suckered exactly who it was aimed at, but was widely—and deservedly—mocked in every other circle as completely unserious.

Hell, they destroyed what little reputation Matt Taibbi had left. Even he had to backtrack somewhat after the fact (in the most milquetoast, admit no actual fault, fashion tho I might add).

At most they revealed that the Twitter safety team did much more than they were credited for publicly, and revealed that most people have no idea what Trust & Safety involves.

As for “various definitions of proven” in this case the definition is “actually happened in reality and we have the receipts”, as in “proven fact”. Hell, people went to jail over it.

People like you are going to repeat the lie of Russian Collusion till the end of time, no matter how much it has been thoroughly debunked.

Partisanship is really annoying.

> When half the country believes the “election was stolen”, there is no agreement in facts.

At one time or another, it's been far more than half. Trump "losing the popular vote" was daily news on left-leaning sites. From Hillary Clinton:

> Trump "knows he’s an illegitimate president," Clinton said. "I believe he understands that the many varying tactics they used, from voter suppression and voter purging to hacking to the false stories — he knows that — there were just a bunch of different reasons why the election turned out like it did … I know he knows this wasn’t on the level."

And Russian interference comments, e.g. these from Jimmy Carter:

> In June 2019, Jimmy Carter, the former Democratic president, said, "There’s no doubt that the Russians did interfere in the election, and I think the interference, although not yet quantified, if fully investigated would show that Trump didn’t actually win the election in 2016. He lost the election, and he was put into office because the Russians interfered on his behalf."

In fact last year, a whopping 72%[0] of Democrats thought Russians got Donald Trump elected, which is about the same as the number of Republicans[1] who think that the Twitter files etc contributed to Joe Biden winning.

All in all, most of the US can be convinced that a fraud happened, split equally along party lines.

[0] https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/gen... [2] https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2022/70-percent-republ...

> At one time or another, it's been far more than half. Trump "losing the popular vote" was daily news on left-leaning sites. From Hillary Clinton:

This was a fact. No one claimed that he lost the electoral vote and no one claimed that he didn’t win based on the rules.

> In fact last year, a whopping 72%[0] of Democrats thought Russians got Donald Trump elected

It is a fact that Russia interfered in the election and that they were responsible for hacking and leaking the Democrats private messages. It is also a fact that people close to Trump were convicted about lying about their communication with Russia. The opinion part comes in about whether it resulted in Trumps winning.

I’m also not clutching my pearls. I know that the US has a history of interfering with (small d) democratic elections across the world.

> no one claimed that he didn’t win based on the rules

Well, there was a huge amount of fuss about how he won on a technicality and the rules are wrong. Which looks extremely similar, even if it can be motte and baileyed away years later.

The closest you can get, I think, is to position yourself as what works as an inoffensive, neutral, background option for always-on TVs (the cable news version of USA Today, basically). You can probably be (barely) profitable with such a model, but you're really going to have settle yourself with having no growth potential.

> Game of Thrones, which is premium cable content, averaged almost 30x more

To be fair, I'm pretty sure that Game of Thrones is the most-viewed premium cable content in history.

The neutral background offerings I've encountered in the last few years are: HGTV, food channel, CNBC/fox business, and, strangely often: the Conan interview where Rob McIlhenny talks about getting buff.

In a dentist, car showroom, or airport, it's a real risk to show the news. House hunters or guy fieri are way more neutral

500k viewers is a low number even for a smaller country like Italy, let alone USA, if it wasn't for cable fees, how could they survive?

In the US, news and reporting was largely a loss leader for TV stations. It was done because they were required to do so. The likes of 60-minutes long format content changed that when it was successful for advertising. This shaped news for the worse imo. I think CNN largely started in a similar way, meant to simply be constant reporting and re-reporting of news, and think the constant display of the Gulf War is likely what changed that for them.

> There just isn't enough interesting news!

There are interesting things happening in the world every day. Back in the days when I liked and watched CNN (i.e. 25 years ago) they would actually report on things happening in local communities around the country and would have stories and footage from local news organizations and affiliates. The "Breaking News" banner was actually (for the most part) reserved for things of importance.

One of the biggest problems with CNN in its current form is that it's simply boring. You can tune in for 5 minutes and learn pretty quickly what they are going to be talking about all day. What's amazing is their ability to take a single headline and milk it on repeat for 72 hours.

Yeah but investigative journalism is expensive. A few talking heads and glorified zoom calls to comment on news someone else investigated is much cheaper.

There is plenty of news, if you consider positive or mundane happenings in the world. I remember our old local TV station would report things like park openings, local fairs, the high school football game etc. Surprisingly, they occasionally also managed to do longer segments on things completely unrelated to the local news. For example they’d get a local university professor to come on and explain the ozone hole for 60 mins or do a segment on pan handling scams that were supposedly taking over. There was always content, and there were always viewers.

Sure, but all those local, interesting stories are far better told on the web than on TV, which is the real problem - people under 50 think of TV as a place for entertainment, not information.

Does local TV journalism exist anymore? Is there a source of local news for cnn to feed from?

I remember decades ago lots of news helicopters and competing tv vans reporting something.

Nowadays local news sources of all kinds can feed into youtube independently.

Local TV news is completely corporate owned.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzYj11qWb-M

News van news isn't necessarily news. It creates the appearance of currency by having a big "LIVE REPORTING" tag, which consists of someone standing where there was a fire/homicide/car wreck four hours ago.

I'm actually surprised how aggressively local news seems to still try to fill the space. I assume it's among the more expensive ways for a local affiliate to fill airtime-- paying for talking heads and cameramen must be more expensive than Dukes of Hazard reruns. But you have local broadcasters kicking out a 2-3 hour breakfast show, then noon, 5, 6, 9, and 10pm programs.

For a while, when ATSC was new, one of the broadcasters made their own "news channel" by repeating their six hours of local news through the day on a subchannel.

There just isn't enough interesting news! There's no opportunity for a "centrist" cable news network, because what drives the constant attention is appeals to partisan agitation.

Isn't there some sort of contradiction here? There is WAY more that needs to be discussed than is being discussed.

You're conflating "needs to be discussed" with "interesting."

C-SPAN has tons of content around things that need to be discussed. Few outside policy wonks, poli sci students, and those in recovery from one of the former would consider it "interesting."

This is a good observation! A human being's "interesting" detectors aren't well optimized for the modern era.

I was wondering how Chris Licht was hired to be a CEO without any CEO experience. He was running Colbert Show, yes, it is a successful show, but being a CEO of an organization is a different ball game.

A team lead can't get a Software Engineering Manager interview at Amazon because of the lack of people management experience, here we have a guy with no experience running a company as a CEO, it is not a surprise he flopped.

There is plenty of news to report 24/7. There are actual wars taking place that the average person is totally unaware of. As far as whether or not it's interesting, you need to make it seem relevant to the life of the average person. That's a challenge but not an insurmountable one.

France 24 and Al Jazeera manage to do well with continuous non-partisan news. Yes, I understand every news publisher has their editorial discretion. The problem with CNN, MSNBC, and Fox is that they are American news. There is only so much American news at the national level to report. France 24 supplements its news content with a tremendous amount of content from Africa and other sources internationally. Al Jazeera is more focused on the Middle East than France 24 but is otherwise a more bit balanced with its content as far as geographic source but is also extremely international.

In other words the way out of partisan stupidity is to increase the diversity of material published. There is plenty of news to report on.

I like Al Jazeera a lot, but it pretty clearly has it's own slant for many topics. I even like Sky News, despite the obvious right leaning which doesn't match my personal politics...because for example, their military analysts that report on Ukraine seem knowledgeable and insightful.

Basically saying I'm fine with the non-neutral reporting, provided it's obvious enough for me to compensate mentally with. And more importantly, that there's high quality content despite any slant.

Have to agree to that second point... I'm perfectly fine with bias, as long as it's obvious, clear and the reporting is relatively complete and accurate, even if I don't agree with the conclusions or opinion in the end.

Al Jazeera (international) itself doesn't have any incentive to be biased, bias may obviously occur via journalist's opinions etc that creep in.

But as I understand, Al Jazeera is run as an means to show Qatar's importance/relevance.

I use to watch Al Jazeera America all the time but it only lasted a few years on TV here.

It was totally non-partisan from what I remember. Focused so much on the world outside America too.

I would imagine that is exactly why it closed.

> France 24 and Al Jazeera manage to do well with continuous non-partisan news.

Al Jazeera English might be somewhat non-partisan, but Al Jazeera Arabic is stupendously partisan.

France24 and Al Jazeera are both state owned and subsidized - the Govt of France owns France 24 and Al Jazeera is owned by the State of Qatar.

It's a bit easier to create international news when your capital expenses are subsidized by a nation state. Hence why Deutsche Welle also makes very compelling English language news media (Govt of Germany).

So much this: There just isn't enough interesting news!

24 hour news was "born" in the Gulf War I and the need to fill every minute with something compelling so that people won't turn it off is just to strong.

I really do think that a streaming news channel/app where current stories are just updated when they have new information could be a win here.

There just isn't enough interesting news once you have ruled out reporting on stories that threaten advertisers.

Indeed, CNN could talk non-stop about icebergs of plastic trash everywhere in the world and Coca-Cola factories that produce this plastic 24/7, but guess who buys ads banners on CNN.

Yeah, that'd prop up the ratings.

These kinds of canned green-guilting stories are not the ones I’m talking about.

It’s the stories we never imagine because the journalists are not allowed to do their jobs. Instead they are just paid a salary to sit and read talking points handed to them from unnamed sources and any idea controversial to any monied interest gets killed before it even starts.

History is a meditation on the old saying, “Truth is stranger than fiction.” If our media were functioning, then we would find news and current events to be as dazzlingly perplexing and surprising as history. There was a time when no one watched movies but every adult paid out of his own money for a newspaper subscription. But as it stands, the truly interesting stories are only told after the dust settles, and only to those who read. And the rest are lulled through silence or banality into a dream-like illusion that reality is boring or uninteresting.

Exactly.

> because what drives the constant attention is appeals to partisan agitation

What drives attention is fear.

The people I care about that watch right wing news are terrified that socialism is going to take all their things, and force them into a life of poverty.

The people I care about that watch left wing news are terrified the facists are going to come and force them to have babies go to church, and work for peasant wages.

TV is a losing value proposition in general. It's a race to the bottom. Top programs from each of these are getting less viewers than online content from e.g. Youtube or other places. Lots of youtube channels reaching millions of people with each video.

The thing is that most things worth reporting are distributed widely via internet based sources. The half life of any exclusive news is basically minutes. After that, world + dog is reporting it. So, none of these channels ever have much in terms of exclusivity and in fact they rely heavily on online as well for getting their news in the first place. Anyone who cares already knows long before CNN bother to report inbetween commercials, the weather, more commercials, and some fake toothpaste smile nobody yapping on for ten minutes about god knows what interrupted by some reporter reporting absolutely nothing whatsoever happened since the last time they reported the same 40 minutes ago. If you strip away all the filler content on CNN, you have about 2 minutes worth of content per hour. The signal to noise ratio is terrible. Unacceptably low for anyone actually interested in news.

The only hope for "boring news" is a sort of whispering ASMR rendition of C-SPAN.

I think a News App like CNN+ could have worked if it were ad supported, and otherwise "free" ... let people catch the stories they want, when they want... get 3-4 hours of good content a day and let that carry things.

I happen to like Breaking Points a lot in this regard. You are absolutely right in that 24/7 news really doesn't work and in general causes more harm than good imo.

In the end, it just gets to a point where it's a toxic bubble that too many are willing to parrot. That doesn't even get into the distorted ad spend that does happen, and what it does to reporting. Not to mention the revolving doors between state propagandists and news commentators.

What blows my mind as a Kiwi is how news channels in the US are 2 minutes of a news item, 15 minutes of talking heads discussing how you should feel about that news.

That’s about right for a 30 minute news show. The rest is commercials.

Most of which are for medications that I should ask my doctor if they're right for me. USA and New Zealand being the only two countries that allow direct to consumer pharmaceutical advertising, even the sheer amount of ads for pills was surprising. I'd change the channel during one such advert, to get another advert for a different medication on the next channel.

We tend to only advertise pills aimed at aging boomers during boomer prime-time.

It's seriously time to start thinking about shutting down CNN. What's the point of a third infotainment channel? If anything, A 24/7 news channel itself is an outdated concept and needs to die.

IMO, there's a viable business model for "background news".

CNN feels like a channel you could set the TVs in waiting rooms to and not cause a fuss. They aren't as politically loaded as MSNBC or Fox, and the programming is bland yet is unlikely to cause people to ask to change the channel. It also seems like the default stop on hotel TVs, which I assume are designed to power up on the same channel to reduce the risk the last guest left it tuned to PPV porn.

I suppose that was basically the explicit intent of the old Headline News/HLN product, "waiting room TV" in its purest form.

Wow, huge piece. I don't know how magazine writers can do that much writing in a few weeks.

Anyway, CNN is in terminal decline and there is no person or strategy that can save it. Nobody with even moderate brain activity watches cable news these days. The only success you can find in that medium is to pander to self-selected stupid people, outflanking Fox and Newsmax somehow. It seems that Licht has done a lot of damage to the organization, but it was flying into a mountainside regardless.

The Atlantic is well known for lengthy articles. Every issue is a non-stop literary marathon of information.

I once attempted to read The Atlantic's contemporary review of "On the Origin of Species" by Asa Gray, and I didn't stand a chance. I agree with you that the modern version is known for lengthy articles, but it's got nothing on its older incarnation.

from the July 1860 issue. Wow, started reading it and I was hooked. Thank you for pointing out this gem.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1860/07/darwin-...

Looking at it again, it's not that long, but yes, it's a cool look into highbrow journalism from a time long gone by, and nice of The Atlantic to expose a bit of their archives online.

This piece took months. Staff writers at The Atlantic might write shorter pieces on a monthly cadence, or they might take half a year to write something really big. As my sibling comment notes, The Atlantic is a bastion of literary/narrative journalism.

Lot of comparison to Fox and MSNBC. But what about Bloomberg or CNBC. Lot of times it seems like the financial news is resistant to BS, because people want to know what is really happening to invest real money. Why couldn't CNN follow that format, just lots of real, but more minor, news. Sure, not every interview with a CEO of a small company in Indonesia is super important, but it tends to be more realistic and can be interesting.

Doesn't generate the ratings necessary to pay for a worldwide news team (which CNN hasn't had for years).

How does Bloomberg pay for it? Is it as a loss-leader as some indicate, maybe to sell other Bloomberg products? Or is it difference in news, Bloomberg has lot more advertisers to financial markets interviewing CEO's, then a CNN would get interviewing Diplomats. Where Bloomberg interviews all levels of CEO's and analysis, why can't CNN interview Diplomats from around the world, or scientists, or there are tons of people that want to talk. And interviews don't take that much overhead. --- I think I agree with other sentiment here, there is a lot of news to report, it can be interesting.

I think it's largely about balancing the spend with the income. CNN simply spends more money on highly paid "talent" than the business model can support. They simply exist due to cable fees and probably given excess in terms of their actual contribution.

Absolutely a loss leader for Bloomberg. Whatever advertising they get is de minimis, I frequently see house ads for multiple hours when I have it on in the morning. It's subsidized by subscriptions to the terminal. I don't know CNBC financials but it has higher ratings than Bloomberg TV and has the heft and drag of NBC to pull it into cable lineups.

As for CNN…its first twenty years or so were mostly great hard core news from around the world. A real shift happened post 2000, whether that was due to the cataclysmic AOL Time Warner merger/demerger or changing attitudes or just the rise of Fox News but CNN gradually then rapidly morphed away from hard news to fluffy content and politics 7x24. It used to be that you could watch Headline News to catch up on what's going on in 5-10 minutes and then CNN for more in depth coverage. HNN stopped being useful early in the 2000s. CNNfn was ok for the few years it existed but CNN didn't have the financial news depth that CNBC had.

absolutely, I miss HNN, that used to be my morning routine. then at some point HNN turned into a dumping ground for re-runs and true-crime drama.

mad money and the SPAC shills on these financial networks is as BS as anything else.

> what began as a journalistic forum devolved into a WWE match before the first voter asked a question.

Insert astronaut "always was" meme here

Politics isn't like wrestling, it is wrestling.

The defining property of wrestling isn't that the outcomes are predetermined, the defining property is a stage show to get viewers emotionally invested in a fight.

Most people are too busy feeling superior for not believing in fake fighting so they fail to understand it's appeal, and wind up falling for the same exact tricks. "But the outcome is actually important in politics" one might say. Yeah, and those dummies are letting themselves get conned on the surface level so the politicians don't even have to try and con them on the policy level.

The reason the news is fucked is they steadfastly refuse to acknowledge to themselves that always choose spectacle over civic education.

> But the outcome is actually important in politics" one might say. Yeah, and those dummies are letting themselves get conned on the surface level so the politicians don't even have to try and con them on the policy level.

What are you talking about? What con was there when conservative judges and politicians were elected to enable the banning certain parts of women’s healthcare in certain places? Or defeat paid parental and sick leave at the federal level? Or increase the federal exempt minimum salary? Or environmental standards?

There is tons of real work happening.

This article convinced me to give CNN another chance, after being disgusted with it under Zucker.

IMO the USA does need an honest, unbiased news organization. If CNN can be it, then more power to them.

I heard that. And you don't need to overpay all the talking in heads.

In England, they are called newsreaders because that's what they do. And if you pay them as such, you'll get a lot closer to break-even.

They can't.

> IMO the USA does need an honest, unbiased news organization. If CNN can be it

They've been the exact opposite for so long, that I don't see how any sensible person could ever trust them to be "it" in the future. the brand is tarnished beyond repair.

> IMO the USA does need an honest, unbiased news organization.

No organization made up of humans can be unbiased.

You can have honesty, you can have forms of transparency, you can have adherence to various journalistic procedural norms, but you cannot have “unbiased”.

I find it interesting that we haven't seen rise of a bipartisan fact-based news media that presents both sides in a deliberate Maner.

I could follow a simple format of topic, position one, position two. And obviously could be a debate platform but it could also just be a simple summary of facts

There's that newsletter that educational youtubers advertise for.

Honestly this article convinced me there is no chance for CNN. To fix it you would need to rebuild the entire organization from scratch, it seems increasingly clear to me that the tabloid elitism they call "journalism" at CNN, was just as much a bottom up issue as it was top down under Zucker.

> Licht argued that the media’s blind spots owe to a lack of diversity—and not the lack of diversity that he sees newsrooms obsessing over. He wants to recruit reporters who are deeply religious and reporters who grew up on food stamps and reporters who own guns. Licht recalled a recent dustup with his own diversity, equity, and inclusion staff after making some spicy remarks at a conference. “I said, ‘A Black person, a brown person, and an Asian woman that all graduated the same year from Harvard is not diversity,’” he told me.

I feel this really gets to the heart of the problem at CNN. Sadly, I have doubts over whether Licht actually has the skill to pull it off.

"a mission to restore the network’s reputation for serious journalism"

LOL. CNN needs tragedies: the Challenger disaster, the Gulf War, baby falling down a well. Those are the kind of things that made CNN popular.

This is basically true. CNN invested to build a reputation for being always on, so when something newsworthy happened, people would flip to them right away. To be fair, the reporters usually tried to report soberly and factually when that happened.

Today no TV channel can beat the Internet for being always on. No one runs to their TV and flips it on to see what’s going on; they pick up their phone… a place where CNN does not stand out at all.

Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20230603191055/https://www.theat...

That one didn't work for me, here is another: https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theatlantic.com%2F...

CNN was in my opinion a leading news agency at some point in the past. Must be true around 2000. What did CNN do to themselves?

Has CNN been violating journalistic standards? Obviously yes, so which ones?

>Accuracy and Factual reporting?

Yikes no, CNN hasn't been doing anything like that recently.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/anderson-cooper-hurricane/

"Miscaptioned" is a nice way to call ACooper a liar.

https://edition.cnn.com/2018/08/22/middleeast/tehran-respons...

CNN is completely wrong and clearly pushing something.

>Slander and libel

How much did CNN give the MAGA hat kid? It was a lot wasn't it?

>Harm limitation principle

CNN is violating this rule by far more then the rule even intends.

6 people at CNN wrote this... https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/25/politics/missing-postmarks-bo...

CNN is in gross violation of about all of the journalistic standards. The cost isn't immediate bankruptcy, you burn your reputation slowly as you violate journalistic standards. If you have a strong reputation, you can burn it for years upon years.

Difficult job for Licht to fire all the political activists and keep the journalists.

Why did the interviewer in the end ask questions (on behalf of CNN personnel) a union leader should ask? What a trainwreck of a longform, I love The Atlantic.

It is interesting that most of the reliable news organizations today are state owned or state funded — Deutche Welle, France 24, BBC News etc. Perhaps this is the only way to deliver non-partisan news. Investor driven news organizations are trapped in the inflammatory news industrial complex as they chase eyeballs and clicks for very short term gain.

The golden era of CNN was in 1991 for their coverage of the gulf war. Watching live night-vision green tinted footage of the skies over Iraq lit up like a xmas tree with all the flak and tracer fire. It was just new and never seen before. CNN did an amazing job bringing that coverage. It's just been a slow decline with CNN since then.

without paywall: https://www.scribd.com/article/650143150/Inside-The-Meltdown...

funny they mention wwe- i don't think cnn (or the atlantic) even exists in the wwe universe

"one of the world’s preeminent news organizations"

Did I miss something?

Nobody watches CNN.

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