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The sad decline of CNN


When did you start watching cable news?

The LL household, from when I was a wee lad, was always an early adopter. I had an Atari 3600. I was a regular denizen of Radio Shack. And we had cable, if I recall, as early as the late 1970s. (I also recall that we had it somewhat illegally. Ah, New York City in the golden days, before it became Disneyfied and monochrome.)

My first cable news exposure was Satellite News Channel. Now, you're talking to someone who as a kid would trek three blocks to the bus terminal at 178th every Sunday to purchase and transport the 10-volume tome which was then the Sunday New York Times. Yes, my future path as a political blog owner was laid out even then. So, when SNC came along, I was glued to it, along with MTV.

Alas, economies of scale triumphed, and the First Cable News War came out with one victor: CNN, owned by the mercurial Ted Turner.

The CNN of the 1980s and 1990s was a far different creature than exists now. It had sports! It had arts and culture! The only "opinion" show that it had was "Crossfire", hosted by Tom Braden on the left, and the execrable Nazi Pat Buchanan. (Its final attempted resurrection was hosted by the likes of Newt Gingrich and Van Jones, and died a quick and merciful death. Also, Tucker Carlson was a one-time host; as such, he had his testicles handed to him by Jon Stewart in a now-infamous exchange. That iteration of the program was canceled soon after.) But, mostly, in keeping with the tradition of American newsrooms, it was hard news. It had experts on to share expertise, not political hacks trading opinions. It was the closest thing that this country had to BBC World News Service for a domestic audience. It hewed to and supported the Great Liberal Consensus which the three broadcast networks also embodied. It was the Establishment, and all that implied.

But, as a child of the 1980s, it was doomed. Ronald Reagan's termination of the Fairness Doctrine opened the way to right-wing talk radio. A tsunami of biased, conspiratorial, anti-liberal conservative propaganda spread across the country on AM radio. This groundswell of increasingly unhinged discourse made its way into television newsrooms. The worst thing an editor for CBS or CNN could be accused of was of being "liberal". Bothsiderism blossomed in its poisonous color during this time. Rather than sticking their heads out the window to tell you if it was raining or clear, the new journalistic ethos got on a meteorologist and a denizen of the local bait shop to give contrasting and equal viewpoints.

And then, of course, the inevitable occurred. 

As the cable airwaves were unregulated by the Federal Communications Commission, hate radio assumed a television form: Fox News. Fox News overturned everything. It tapped into an audience which didn't want to think, but wanted to be told what to think. It was an audience of Limbaugh dittoheads. Bring on ugly, scabrous, vile male pundits, pair them with hot blondes who validated every blonde joke ever told, and start printing money.

Soon after, MSNBC debuted, although it took a few years for it to find its leftist bona fides. And then there was CNN. Poor old CNN, resting on its laurels for being the network which brought the Gulf War and the nightly US bombing of Baghdad into our homes. After that epochal moment, the network kept chasing the next big crisis. It was a recipe for slow decline.

CNN has been bought and sold a few times since Turner relinquished the reins. And every purchase has made it a bit worse. Gone are the sports. Gone is the hard news. Opinion dominates its schedule, as with all other cable news offerings in the US. 

Since the most recent change of owners, new management has sought to make CNN more "neutral". What it actually has done is to go chasing after the right wing viewership—a demographic which will never watch the network. And yesterday, news broke which delineated that strategy in full, fetid glory:
We really shouldn't be surprised. CNN has seen the firing of Tucker Carlson as an opportunity to attract disaffected Fox viewers. But unless CNN develops programming as unhinged as OANN's or Newsmax's, it's a fool's errand. MAGA won't watch them. And they are, instead, alienating their core audience, that of rational, fact-based news consumers, as ratings increasingly show. We "normies" are not going to tune into Trump's verbal diarrhea. And Trump fans won't tune in, because it's CNN. Dissertations will be written about the ridiculousness of the network's lurch toward the right.

Of course, the Trump town hall isn't a one off. Oh, no.
What was the tweet which this replaced?


Forgive me if for once I believe Trump over CNN.

Our media are sleepwalking toward Megiddo. The idea that any network outside of the right-wing echo chamber should give Trump a town hall after January 6th is so ridiculous that it should be satire. But, it's not. We're seeing it with our own eyes. If lessons have been learned, they've been forgotten, or the wrong lessons were learned. Joe Biden's competence is boring. Trump's chaos is welcomed by the media. Even if that chaos leads to our downfall.

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