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A few words on CNN's town hall debacle


As you all know, sex offender Donald Trump appeared at a "town hall" put on by CNN, an organization which purports to report the news. Its director, Chris Licht, in defending that decision bragged that the network "made news". I have a few thoughts on that.

Some will ask: Well, isn't that what Woodward and Bernstein did?

No, it wasn't. Not in the slightest.

What they did was uncover a story which the Nixon administration wanted to hide. They themselves didn't burgle the Watergate complex. They didn't hire the Plumbers. Their instincts told them that something was fishy, and they went digging.

When Deep Throat (Mark Felt) confirmed the trajectory they were taking, he wasn't pushing a narrative. The news—the break-in—had happened; it just had to be uncovered. Connections had to be made, the conspiracy had to be unearthed. But the conspiracy existed. The crime existed. It wasn't a creation of Ben Bradlee. And then when Nixon's men attempted a cover-up, that, too, was not done by the media.

But in our clickbait age, "making news" is what news organizations do now. We see this with polls they commission. They commission polling, with a predetermined outcome in mind, and then report that as "news". But it's not. It's manufactured. It didn't just happen. They made it happen. It was completely under their control. Commissioning a poll and treating its results as "news" is the equivalent of putting a frozen dinner into a microwave oven and calling it "cooking". It is effortless, and a misnomer.

Our political press is failing us because rather than do the arduous work of uncovering hidden stories, they instead take the easy way out and simply create the story, molding reality for maximum engagement. No PR is bad PR. Except, of course, we see the fallacy of that, with legacy media bleeding viewers/readers, and new right-wing media having to cater to its rabid audience, giving it a bigger and bigger hit of heroin to achieve the same effect.

A couple of tweets make it clear that this was a disaster for CNN, and, oddly enough, for Trump.

Trump did himself no favors. Democrats and prosecutors now have even more ammunition. Meanwhile, Jeff Greenfield hits Anderson Cooper's tendentious scolding right on the head: as I've been saying, CNN didn't report on Trump; it created a format where it made news. There's a vast difference between covering him and giving him a platform. Cooper knows this, and he's being too precious by half, acting as the defender of the free flow of information. And the audience was handpicked by the state party, which is fully MAGA; I doubt Nikki Haley would have received the same courtesy.

The First Amendment was designed to hold power to account, not to make billions for five corporations. The internet has upended the news biosphere, with advertising revenue plummeting, making organizations go to greater lengths to bring in revenue. And it's cratering democracy here and around the world.

Don't make news. Do what the Constitution meant for you to do. Unearth inconvenient truths. Punch up, not down. Hold those with wealth and power to account. I fear, though, that since most media is owned by powerful and rich corporations, that basic function of journalism is dead. The press is free—for those who own the press.

Postscript

Oh. This gets worse.
This wasn't a town hall. It was an in-kind contribution to a political campaign.

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