What I Learned Before And After I Cut The Cord On CNN

 

by Richard Cameron

 


 

What I Learned Before And After I Cut The Cord On CNN

 

I should set up this essay with the background that when we got the Roku device, one of the things we wanted to achieve was to have some access to national news and also, a disabled family member needed the downstairs TV running most of the day because they have Misophonia, described generally as a chronic disorder in which the person has severe reactions to certain environmental sounds – loud car stereos, incessant dog barking in the neighborhood, people broadcasting out to the neighborhood the Karaoke evidence that they couldn’t carry a tune in a paper bag or any other sort of conveyance.  It varies with the person.  I have a hunch, that millions of people have at least one trigger, which is the sound of Donald Trump’s voice.

Anyway, there were two streaming subscriptions with cable news networks. One was Sling Blue and the other, Sling Orange.  One had Fox News and MSNBC (weird bookends) and the other had CNN, but also had ESPN.  I went with that combo. So, CNN was on most of the day and because I have frequent chores in the same room, such as keeping the kitchen tidy and because the dinner table was also in ear and eyeshot of the television, I picked up on the day’s storylines and panel discussions as well.

Things went reasonably well up until around late Summer of last year, when CNN began ramping up their coverage of the upcoming election year.  That is when it became particularly evident that the network was committed to a particular methodology that they believed, enabled them to use the political and election coverage to plant seeds of alarm in their viewers, by creating a narrative that there was a strong possibility of ex-president Trump gaining a second term in the Oval Office.

If that is your objective, there are two paths that you can go by.  One is to focus on the virtues and positives of Trump and his presidency. That, of course, is a non starter, especially given episodes like January 6th, 2021.  The other avenue is to weave a garment, thread by thread, that takes shape as the incumbent president and his administration being beset by various crises, implied failure to deliver for the American people and consequentially, a host of weaknesses and vulnerabilities waiting to be exploited by the opposition in the upcoming campaign. So that was the obvious strategy. Low hanging fruit, it was thought, would be such as perceived discontent with the economy and border security related issues and one other that presented itself later.

It’s useful to examine a couple of realities that existed, that provided an impetus for the manner of coverage that CNN viewers were ultimately subjected to.  First is the business environment. CNN became part of the Warner Bros – Discovery media conglomerate engineered by the owners of Warner Media – AT&T –  in early 2022.  It’s a matter of speculation as to what the prime objective for the CNN acquisition was, in conjunction with the other properties they acquired, particularly the Discovery Channel and all of its appendages.

The pitch to investors at the time, was substantively that by pulling Warner, Discovery and CNN together under one roof, there would be a combined marketing synergism that did not exist prior.  During an AT&T investor call in May of 2021, David Zaslav, selected to serve as the CEO of the newly minted aggregation, submitted to attendees that the diverse array of content would be a “wonderful partner to advertisers.”

Prior to being folded into Warner – Discovery, CNN had been on the skids for a few years, notably from 2019 to 2021, in terms of viewership and reach. The responsibility for that, had been charged to network head, Jeff Zucker.  After Zucker was asked to resign due to the ostensible reason of a controversy involving an improper relationship with a subordinate and the Chris Cuomo fiasco –  matters have only deteriorated further.

CNN, has gone into a swoon, in terms of ratings, notably after the disaster that was the infamous Town Hall interview with Donald Trump conducted by Kaitlan Collins, in which Trump was turned loose to prevaricate and indulge himself in all manner of distortions of reality, without the pushback and fact checking that is a requisite in dealing with him. This transpired after Zucker was replaced by Chris Licht – an individual whom both Zaslav and the Warner Discovery board members correctly assumed they could convince to implement a new path – one in which, the existing perceptions of CNN would be altered by remodeling the news analysis model, substituting journalistic objectivity with “bothsidesism.”

There are some things that are not a fit for false balancing and Trumpism is the best example of them. Tim Alberta, of The Atlantic, who spent considerable time closely observing the short Chris Licht tenure, alluded to the pitfalls of the new approach. “And, you know, specifically the question of what do you do with Republicans who systematically attempted to deconstruct our democratic institutions a couple of years ago and prevent a peaceful transition of power. I mean, what do you do with those folks?  Do you treat them as rational actors who need to be given a platform to reach the viewing masses?”

In retrospect, to some degree it appears, Chris Licht was a grand experiment that David Zaslav conducted and when it failed, which it was destined to do, given the parameters of the foolhardy architecture of the rebuilding plans, Licht was the fall guy.

Another singularly unique aspect of CNN’s programming was, and remains, the overwrought and melodramatic employment of “Breaking News” as a frame around all manner of reporting that such a device is excessive with regard to.  We would witness this on not just an hourly basis, but nearly every time the station would return from a commercial break. It was tiresome and led to speculation as to why they would persist in such a strategy, when their performance metrics were plainly not deriving any benefits from it.  At one point, early June of 2022, Chris Licht, while he was still at the helm, announced that the Breaking News gimmick (my description, not his) was going to be moderated and dialed back. Axios summarizes the following with regard to Licht’s bold promises:

Licht said he agrees with complaints from “people both inside and outside the organization” that the network overuses the “Breaking News” banner.

 

  • “It has become such a fixture on every channel and network that its impact has become lost on the audience.”

  •  To address the issue, CNN bureau chief Sam Feist has led a team in building out “Breaking News” guidelines for CNN’s stylebook, per the note.

  • “It certainly will need tweaks, so we are open to feedback, but this is a great starting point to try to make “Breaking News” mean something BIG is happening,” Licht wrote.

 

It turned out to be a largely non-existent pivot, and to the extent that it was detectible at all, it was also quite transient.  We never saw any visual evidence of it.

As the calendar moved forward into the customary timeline when the mass media begin focusing in on the national elections, it became very obvious the sort of posture CNN was going to take regarding them. The reporting noticeably shifted in the direction of a considerable amount of hand wringing about the supposed weaknesses of the Democratic party and its standard bearer, President Joe Biden.  It’s not certain where exactly, the whole narrative about Biden’s age, sprouted, but CNN lost no time making its way over to that garden and getting some cuttings to plant for themselves.

They weren’t the only ones pursuing this line of overwrought apprehension, however, they gave it an unmatched persistence. This was something that I and my family were deeply offended by. Stigmatizing good, competent people merely because they have crossed an arbitrary timeline of longevity, is indecent. Along with that, came the onset of the interminable Horse Race journalism, which I argue, as have many other election analysts, is manipulative and deliberate.

 

Election Polls, The Mass Media, “Horse Race Journalism” And You

 

A central component of the coverage was, and is, “polling data.”  Why do I put polling data in scare quotes?  Simply, because that is where it belongs. Consumers of news have broadly been conditioned by mass media. to take campaign season polling seriously. That is a mistake. Campaign polling is not in anyway categorizable as scientific, despite being presented as such. It is subject to manipulation and to being found, more often than not, wildly inaccurate after the fact.  CNN, to a greater extent than most other networks, employs polling analysis as a device to engage viewers, but in a consciously exploitative fashion in the form of “infotainment” – and that in the worst, most insidious sense.  To be fair, all of mass media engage in this, the only question being, to what degree – and on CNN and Fox News, as well as MSNBC, it’s pedal to the metal.

Who are CNNs core audience and what are their sensibilities? That’s important to establish as a basis for understanding the manner in which CNN and its parent, Warner Discovery, cynically manipulate them.  Most viewers to the network are moderates and independents – a mix of Center Left (alternately dubbed “Liberals”), Centrists and Center Right (think “Never Trumpers”).  You’d be hard pressed to find any members of the Trump cult viewing on a regular basis.

What accounts for the particular emphasis that CNN has adopted as a model for their election coverage? There is an explanation, hidden in plain sight.  It is Warner Discovery Chairman Of The Board, John Malone, a major donor to the Republican party and Donald Trump.  Prospect.org, summarizes Malone thusly, “John Malone, is both a billionaire and a right-wing ideologue. (He may also be the largest landowner in America.) He’s on the board of directors of the Cato Institute and not only donated $250,000 to Donald Trump’s inauguration, but his companies donated another $250,000. Malone told an interviewer: “Look, I think a lot of the things Trump has tried to do—identifying problems and trying to solve them—has been great.”

Malone has signaled that he wants CNN to be more like Fox News, “fair and balanced.”  The absurdity of that is, or should be, obvious, considering just one of many examples, being that Fox News was used as a megaphone to defame Dominion Software Systems and Smartmatic, by allowing various program hosts to accuse both companies of being complicit in “rigging” the election against Trump.  They had no credible information to back that up and correspondingly, had no credible defense to the tort claims of both elections systems providers and the result was hundreds of millions of dollars in payouts to both.

 

Screenshot of CNN Senior Data Reporter and Analyst, Harry Enten

 

Back to the choreography of Horse Race coverage at CNN, to inflate apprehensions about the inevitability of Trump.  Enter Harry Enten “Senior Data Reporter” –  a stooge that regurgitates polls, very selectively, as a centerpiece of their Horse Race reporting focus. Most often, he is featured on Anderson Cooper’s nightly slot, but not exclusively. When he appears on the various segments, he employs one of the magic whiteboards and teases out nonsensical scenarios about the prospects of the two main candidates, incorporating contrived talking points about “trends” that encompass, at the very least, the last two presidential elections.  No one with critical thinking faculties can take any of these contrived artifices seriously, but networks like CNN assume, perhaps correctly, that viewers, when engaged with something as emotionally triggering as a presidential contest, are not in the proper state of mind to discern the realities.

Extrapolating anything from either prior election as if it has predictive import relating to the present campaign cycle, is both preposterous and incompetent for many reasons, but two major factors of why they are not bell weathers, is that in 2016, you had FBI Director James Comey, announcing a second look at Ms. Clinton’s notorious emails just days before the election, and in 2020 – we were in the grip of a pandemic. Both of those were “Black Swan” events, and as such, defy any sort of relevant point of reference to the 2024 presidential contest.  But it is easy to get caught up in this sort of intentional crafting of misleading talking points if you are swept up in it emotionally, which CNN’s top brass understands to be the case.

 

“We are truth-tellers, focused on informing, not alarming our viewers.” 

– Warner Media CEO, David Zaslav

MSNBC also has its own animated goon who has no serious qualifications as an election analyst, Steve Kornacki, described by one journalist as having the physical mannerisms of the “Energizer Bunny”.  He has a degree in political science?  Nope – film and television. Fair enough. He’s putting his understanding of how theatrics can influence people to suspend disbelief to that of manipulative campaign coverage to advantageous use.  They are both hacks, but I can get NBC for nada and CNN, I have to pay a streaming service to have my intelligence insulted. Presented with that choice, it’s a no-brainer.

Everything we’ve described here, and more, just reached a crescendo and brought us to the point where we had to ask ourselves why were we sending $40 month out the door, simply to be exploited and played upon.

However, I must be honest. There are a lot of talented people on that network that are attempting, in the most subtle way possible, to push back against the externally imposed agenda and there was some outstanding programming in the form of documentaries on a variety of subjects. But those were largely shuttled to the sidelines in favor of the imperative to gin up political suspense where is was not justified by the facts.  And since we ditched CNN, we have seen examples that indicate that they have not moderated the behavior in the slightest.  If anything, it has gotten worse.

So, here’s the after part, and it was a revelation to me and everyone else in the household.  We bought a Roku device (not a promotional blurb here) for $25 and set it up and now have access to all of the non-cable networks, CBS, ABC, NBC and some regional outlets including PBS.  We checked them all out and were surprised to discover that the approach to news, and particularly, political and campaign coverage was refreshingly distinct from that of the cables.  More straight news, less “Breaking News” and the Horse Race aspect of election coverage is dialed back considerably.

In addition to that, there is a stark difference in terms of there being a pleasant amount of inspirational, human interest stories of people doing the right thing in their communities – volunteers, heroes and just all varieties of folks that care about important things and about people other than themselves.  CNN would only trot such reporting out at certain times of the year. I like a shot of it on a daily basis, whenever possible, because let’s admit it, a lot of us, for good reason, trust animals a great deal more than we do our fellow man.

Saying goodbye to CNN was, in my view and remains so, a good decision.  They might want to consider assembling a focus group consisting of ex viewers like myself. They’d gather some valuable insight outside of the fishbowl that would inform them of how to turn things around.  I’d be happy to participate.  I’m also not holding my breath.

 

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