11 ms·

The Meltdown at CNN

124 points by jgalt212 3y ago

jeffbee 3y ago
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.
- HybridCurve 3y ago
  The Atlantic is well known for lengthy articles. Every issue is a non-stop literary marathon of information.
  - hotpotamus 3y ago
    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.
    - berkeleyjunk 3y ago
      from the July 1860 issue. Wow, started reading it and I was hooked. Thank you for pointing out this gem.
      - Balgair 3y ago
        https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1860/07/darwin-on-the-origin-of-species/304152/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1860/07/darwin-...
      - hotpotamus 3y ago
        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.
- tptacek 3y ago
  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.
tptacek 3y ago
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.
- rqtwteye 3y ago
  "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.
  - charcircuit 3y ago
    >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.
    - tptacek 3y ago
      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.
smegsicle 3y ago
funny they mention wwe- i don't think cnn (or the atlantic) even exists in the wwe universe
lapcat 3y ago
"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.
- snowwrestler 3y ago
  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.
Empact 3y ago
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.
- jgalt212 3y ago
  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.
- Capricorn2481 3y ago
  They can't.
- stronglikedan 3y ago
  > 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.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > 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”.
  - s1artibartfast 3y ago
    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
    - bobsmooth 3y ago
SamvitJ 3y ago
Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20230603191055/https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2023/06/cnn-ratings-chris-licht-trump/674255/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230603191055/https://www.theat...
- TrueGeek 3y ago
  That one didn't work for me, here is another: https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theatlantic.com%2Fpolitics%2Farchive%2F2023%2F06%2Fcnn-ratings-chris-licht-trump%2F674255%2F https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theatlantic.com%2F...
nightowl_games 3y ago
[flagged]
- infamouscow 3y ago
  CNN is the CIA News Network. CBS is the CIA Broadcasting System. Edit: apparently, people lack counters to the obvious snub at Operation Mockingbird and the repeal of the Smith–Mundt Act.
sumo89 3y ago
without paywall: https://www.scribd.com/article/650143150/Inside-The-Meltdown-At-Cnn https://www.scribd.com/article/650143150/Inside-The-Meltdown...
foul 3y ago
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.
FrustratedMonky 3y ago
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.
- epc 3y ago
  Doesn't generate the ratings necessary to pay for a worldwide news team (which CNN hasn't had for years).
  - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
    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.
    - tracker1 3y ago
      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.
    - epc 3y ago
      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.
PM_me_your_math 3y ago
"one of the world’s preeminent news organizations" Did I miss something? Nobody watches CNN.
incomingpain 3y ago
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/ 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-response-sanctions-intl/index.html 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-bombs-mail/index.html 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.
- Proven 3y ago
  [dead]
dogleash 3y ago
> 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.
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  > 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.
gmerc 3y ago
[flagged]
nirav72 3y ago
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.
dkobia 3y ago
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.

124 points by jgalt212 3y ago

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.

HybridCurve 3y ago
The Atlantic is well known for lengthy articles. Every issue is a non-stop literary marathon of information.
- hotpotamus 3y ago
  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.
  - berkeleyjunk 3y ago
    from the July 1860 issue. Wow, started reading it and I was hooked. Thank you for pointing out this gem.
    - Balgair 3y ago
      https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1860/07/darwin-on-the-origin-of-species/304152/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1860/07/darwin-...
    - hotpotamus 3y ago
      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.
tptacek 3y ago
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.

tptacek 3y ago

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.

rqtwteye 3y ago
"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.
- charcircuit 3y ago
  >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.
  - tptacek 3y ago
    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.

smegsicle 3y ago

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

lapcat 3y ago

"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.

snowwrestler 3y ago
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.

Empact 3y ago

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.

jgalt212 3y ago
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.
Capricorn2481 3y ago
They can't.
stronglikedan 3y ago
> 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.
dragonwriter 3y ago
> 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”.
- s1artibartfast 3y ago
  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
  - bobsmooth 3y ago

SamvitJ 3y ago

Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20230603191055/https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2023/06/cnn-ratings-chris-licht-trump/674255/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230603191055/https://www.theat...

TrueGeek 3y ago
That one didn't work for me, here is another: https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theatlantic.com%2Fpolitics%2Farchive%2F2023%2F06%2Fcnn-ratings-chris-licht-trump%2F674255%2F https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theatlantic.com%2F...

nightowl_games 3y ago

[flagged]

infamouscow 3y ago
CNN is the CIA News Network. CBS is the CIA Broadcasting System. Edit: apparently, people lack counters to the obvious snub at Operation Mockingbird and the repeal of the Smith–Mundt Act.

sumo89 3y ago

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

foul 3y ago

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.

FrustratedMonky 3y ago

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.

epc 3y ago
Doesn't generate the ratings necessary to pay for a worldwide news team (which CNN hasn't had for years).
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  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.
  - tracker1 3y ago
    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.
  - epc 3y ago
    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.

PM_me_your_math 3y ago

"one of the world’s preeminent news organizations" Did I miss something? Nobody watches CNN.

incomingpain 3y ago

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/ 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-response-sanctions-intl/index.html 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-bombs-mail/index.html 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.

Proven 3y ago
[dead]

dogleash 3y ago

> 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.

lotsofpulp 3y ago
> 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.

gmerc 3y ago

[flagged]

nirav72 3y ago

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.

dkobia 3y ago

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.